Will & Grace & Love & Sex
By Simon Dumenco
When they said “Must-See-TV,” did they mean Sean P. Hayes habit of dropping his pants? US WEEKLY gets tight with the cast of the riskiest sitcom yet. It started small, two season ago, in an entirely-out-of-the-way time slot (Monday nights at 9:30) and with what seemed like a high-risk premise: Gay lawyer Will Truman lives with his best friend, Grace Adler, a straight interior decorator. Add in Grace's caustic assistant, Karen, and Will's gay friend Jack, and you had a show in which half of the lead characters were, well, queer.
Coming as it did on the heels of ABC's cancellation of Ellen DeGeneres's Ellen after her TV-history-making coming out, NBC's putting Will & Grace on the air didn't seem like a brilliant idea. But the show had some powerhouse support-and talent-behind it. Perhaps as important, it was a show whose time had come.
Early promo materials plugged the comedy as being about "The kind of friendship that's possible between a man and a woman when sex doesn't get in the way." The gay theme, of course, immediately caused a ruckus. The Forest, Virginia-based Christian Action Network, for instance, started lobbying for an "HC" (homosexual content) label on the show. Gay activists were up in arms, too, because while Grace was sexually active, Will-supposedly nursing his wounds after the breakup of a long-term relationship-wasn't. Director Jim Burrows says he didn't particularly care one way or the other: "My goal in the beginning was always to make it accessible,” he says. " and to get America to like these people for who there are, not for their sexuality. This show was always about a group of nice people-and the fact that four out of four of them want to kiss men makes no difference if you like the people."
Because of the gay theme, says Debra Messing, the actress who plays Grace, "from the very beginning, we were aware that this show perhaps would be less likely to be given a chance and that there was a very high likelihood of it going away before anyone really sat back to get to know the comic voices of the show." Two years and three Emmys later, it's clear they needn't have worried.
"And change!" yelps Megan Mullally in a shrill squeak of a voice that cuts through a cavernous soundstage in Studio City, California. "And change! And change and change!" Mullally's in character as Karen, who's ostensibly helping Jack (Sean P. Hayes) rehearse a dance scene for his cabaret act. One of the running jokes on Will & Grace is that Karen is sexually attracted to Jack-and Mullally and Hayes are enthusiastically working this subtext even in the rehearsal. Mullally is standing behind Hayes now, wrapping her arms around his waist as he repeatedly squats and rises with increasing-and increasingly passionate-tempo. It's funny because it's funny-but it's also good old-fashioned slapstick-but it's also funny because Hayes and Mullally (and the show itself) just won Emmys, meaning that the newly designated Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress on the Best Comedy on TV are, at the moment, getting paid to hump each, and they're going to have to keep humping each other until they get it right.
Which is pretty much how it goes on the set of Will & Grace day in and day out. Aside from its excellence as TV, the real reason Will & Grace works so well may be the palpable love and exuberance on the set. The characters are so much fun to watch because the actors are so delighted to be playing them. The characters click because the actors click.
"It's almost cloying, really," Mullally will confess, talking about how much she adores her coworkers. Of her particular chemistry with Hayes, she says, laughing "Sean and I bat our eyelashes at each other all day." In fact, out of earshot of one another, each of the four principals will say how much they love this set and love working with one another. (And, yes, it is almost cloying.)
The chemistry is obvious even when the show's cast isn't gushing about it. The four leads are perpetually fooling around with each other between takes, mostly trying to make one another laugh-but exhibiting a real emotional bond, too. Mullally is truly girfriend-ly with Messing, for instance. At the table read one morning, Messing responds to something Mullally whispers in her ear by grinning wildly, and plating a big kiss on her cheek, the succumbing (languidly, luxuriously, slumping forward) as Mullally rubs her back.
"Now," says Eric McCormack, "Will & Grace is ripe for the pickin'. It's ripe for the critics to start turning on us and the audience to get sick of us, and we'll probably start showing up on coffee mugs."
These are the kinds of things you worry about when you're a star of a hit show that has just taken over the former Frasier-Seinfeld-Cheers comedy sweet spot, Thursdays at nine.
"We've been lucky," he says, " to have slow growth, relatively."
McCormack could be talking as much about himself and his castmates as about the show itself. With the exception of Hayes, who turned 30 in June, the rest of the principals are all grown up (McCormack's 37). None of them has an entourage or personal assistants on the set, and none is even seen sulking in a corner or barking complaints to his or her agent. The soundstage catering each day is a standard-issue craft-services spread-the centerpiece is a giant tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!
" I was always a sitcom guy in my brain," says McCormack, "but it's just not what I got the short at initially." He didn't exactly languish, though, while waiting for his big comedy break. A native of Toronto (his father was a Shell Oil financial analyst), McCormack attended the Ryerson Theatre School and spent five years doing Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Married since 1997 (to Janet Holden, a TV director), he jokes that life on the serious stage helped him in at least one way: "I certainly had lots and lots of gay friends and colleagues-I was in the theater."
"But for me, also, when I was a kid I was picked on as early as second grade-you know, called a fag because I did theater instead of playing soccer. It's like I always had a connection. I always understood more than the average straight guy." Still his roles up until Will were relentlessly hetero, particularly his two years as Colonel Mosby in Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years.
Then, when McCormack got his hands on the Will & Grace script through his agent, something clicked. " I just knew that this was going to be the one-I thought, This is my shot at something Friends-like, something Seinfeld-ian."
Suddenly the former Shakespearean actor had the comedic role of his dreams-which is why McCormack now sounds so nervous about the potentially corrosive effects of the glaring spotlight."
"We have to be careful that we protect our families and really just set aside time to do other things," he says. Including, as it turns out, the occasional dinner parties with the Will & Grace cast, which has become a sort of extended family. "The best was last year," McCormack says. "After dinner, Sean sat down at my little piano and he started plinking around, and we started composing some ridiculous show: Sean and Megan and Debra and I were singing songs, acting like idiots. That was probably the last time Will & Grace didn't have a weight to it. There's a weight now-this Emmy weight, this weight of expectation, this Thursday-night weight. Back then, we didn't have that weight." He sounds wistful all of a sudden. "So we'll see."
Debra Messing was born a nice Jewish girl in Brooklyn, New York, in 1968, to a jewelry sales executive father and a mother who working, variously, as a singer, a banker, and a travel agent. The family then moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where Messing grew up. Like McCormack, she has a background in the theater. She spent a semester in London studying with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts before getting her BA in theater arts at Brandeis University, then went on to get a master's in acting from New York University.
With the exception of a two-year role as Stacey on the NBC comedy Ned & Stacey and costarring role in Woody Allen's Celebrity, Messing spent most of her pre-Grace career playing noncomedic roles. Still, she always had a jones for comedy.
"I grew up watching reruns," she says. "All these performers shaped my comic sensibility: Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Tracey Ullman, Madeline Kahn. And Dick Van Dyke-genius. I mean, as a physical comedian, he's mind blowing to me."
She just got married, to actor and screenwriter Daniel Zelman, on September 3. (They met while they were students at NYU and have been together since 1992.) The entire cast, of course, attended the wedding; at the reception, Messing and Hayes engaged in a fully choreographed dance-in wedding gown and tux-to Britney Spears's "Oops!...I Did It Again." They had learned the steps for an upcoming episode of Will & Grace, but most of the stunned wedding guests, says Messing, didn't know that, and the impromptu performance brought down the house.
"My one thing I did in high school," says Sean P. Hayes, digging into a food-service salad, "was trip. I'd leave my backpack open a little but and I'd have tons of books in there, and I'd trip at the top of the stairs, and the books would go everywhere and everybody would just die laughing. It was, like, the easiest laugh."
A son of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Hayes, the youngest of five children, had a working mother (she was the director of a local nonprofit food bank) and a mostly absentee father. The family got by with "a lot of sarcasm-that's where I got my sarcasm from." And like Messing, Hayes was raised worshiping sitcom greats: Dick Van Dyke, Lucille Ball-even John Ritter. " I loved Three's Company. And I used to each Abbott & Costello and the Marx Brothers a lot too."
Hayes majored in music and minored in theater at Illinois State University, then worked the local stages. He was the musical director at the Pheasant Run Theater and worked at the Steppenwolf Theater and with the Second City improv troupe (among his lesser credits: He was a $500-a week-elf in the Kenny Rogers Christmas show one year). Oddly, it took a little 1998 indie drama for Hayes to get his bog comedy break. After moving to Los Angeles in 1995, Hayes was subsisting mostly on commercials for Geico insurance and Doritos. Then Will & Grace creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan saw his performance in the Sundance favorite Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss-Hayes played a gay photographer in love with Brad Rowe-and decided they had found their Jack.
Hayes, who lives alone in an apartment in L.A., is single and declines to discuss his sexual orientation. He insists that so far the Emmy hasn't changed his life. "The day after I won, I sat on my couch watching TV," he says, laughing. "And it was like, 'Oh, is this what it feels like?'"
For series creators Mutchnick and Kohan, the free and frisky air about their show is what makes it so real and so universal. "There's a lot of sexual innuendo that goes on in every office and with everybody's friends," Mutchnick says. "It's like, 'Why pretend like this isn't part of every since hour of the workday?'" Of course, one need only look around at the cast of Will & Grace for confirmation of that.
"Sean likes to pull his pants down around run around the parking lot," Mullally says matter-of-factly. "And the first time he came to my house, I opened the door"- she starts chuckling-"and he had pulled his pants, including his underwear, down to around his ankles. And he was just like, 'Hey, am I late? You ready?'" She's laughing now at the memory.
"So normal. His penis fully swinging...in...the wind."
Clearly, the entire cast is trying hard to keep the success of the show-and the seriously high-stakes game of being the most-praised, highest-profile comedy on TV-from spoiling their fun.
"I don't let myself feel any pressure because of the Emmy," Mullally says in a voice, incidentally, that sounds nothing like Karen's high-pitched drone. " I guess because for the whole time since the start of the first season, I've been working on other little personal projects of my own, just little side things-like this stage show called Sweetheart and a couple of independent films-so I've been keeping really busy with all these other things."
For most of her life, in fact, the Oklahoma City native-her father was Carter Mullally, Jr., a Paramount Pictures contract player in the 1950's-has kept it small. After attending Northwestern University, she worked Chicago stages before moving to L.A. She had supporting roles on a number of exceedingly short-lived sitcoms-The Ellen Burstyn Show and Rachel Gunn, RN among them-before heading to Broadway, where she appeared opposite Rosie O'Donnell in Grease and Matthew Broderick in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Mullally was flat broke when, back in L.A., she read for Mutchnick and Kohan's new sitcom. "I couldn't pay the rent," she says. But she read for the role of Grace, and obviously, she didn't get it. Later, when she read for Karen, everything finally clicked.
Now, she says, she's amused to find herself not only able to pay the rent but immersed in a brand-new relationship (with someone whose name she doesn't care to disclose, after four years of "really wanting to be single") and starring in tabloid exposes-the surest sign that, at 41, she has arrived.
"One tabloid had a whole article about how I was an irresistible sex- and man-magnet and how men flock to me," she says, laughing. Then she turns mock-sober: "Of course, they were absolutely correct...."
"The four of us," says Eric McCormack, "we talk about this a lot: This show is just kind of one of those little magical things that we have to protect. A lot of people say to me, 'Do you guys have as much fun as it looks like you're having?' And I always say 'More that that.' It's so gross to read that-you're reading it and it's like, 'Ah, shut up!' But it's true," he says, laughing.
It doesn't hurt, either, that once in a while the entire cast is shocked out of complacency by the viewer mail. In the end, after all, Will & Grace isn't just a funny factory-it's a landmark show, the sitcom that each week charmingly presents gay characters for the masses in an era in which people are still harassed, assaulted, and sometimes killed for being gay.
"I just got a letter for this 14-year-old boy," says Messing, "and he had said he's come out and that his mother is slowly but surely coming to terms with it but that his best friend has not spoken to him since, and that this has been a very difficult time for him. He said that every week he and his mother watch Will & Grace, and that every week they laugh together, and every week that goes by it brings them closer together. It silently broaches and heals something that couldn't really be addressed directly between them. And he ended the letter by saying, 'I only wish I had a Grace in my life.'"
