Actress Annabeth Gish has always been good at turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse. And while the pandemic quarantine left her stranded alone in a Canadian apartment for 14 days, it also proved a treasured experience. “It was a great gift, a positive in the wake of the coronavirus,” she says.
That solitary confinement gave Gish the chance to work on her next character, Jennifer Dulos, the real-life mother of five who was murdered, her body never found. The film about Dulos, in which Gish stars, is titled “Gone Mom” and is part of Lifetime’s “ripped from the headlines” series premiering Saturday.
“It was 14 days of immersive preparation for me and to really get into the spirit of Jennifer and hopefully tenderly honoring her,” says Gish.
The year from hell proved beneficial in other ways too, she says. “This pandemic has absolutely reframed my sense of time, and I’m not rushing as much. I'm valuing staying still and staying home. It was just a beautiful reset with a ton of worry and fear and stress and anxiety, but I think it really reset my awareness of the fragility of our life and how quickly things can change,” she says.
Gish (who’s not related to silent actress Lillian Gish) has been acting since she was a child. She landed her first professional gig when she was 13.
“Getting my very first role in ‘Desert Bloom,’ it changed the direction of my life because it was out of nowhere,” she says. “And I was one of 800 girls to audition. It was a singular experience that opened up a whole new world of creativity and collaboration and industry and broadened my view in a way that wouldn’t have happened had I just stayed in Cedar Falls, Iowa,” she laughs.
Her parents were not acquainted with the quixotic nature of showbiz. For them it was always a battle determining if performing was the best choice for their daughter, she says. “If I think about it for my children, I would hope that they can choose a career path with a little more structure and reliability. But at the same time, there is a beauty in this wild, gypsy adventure. There is much beauty to be found.”
Married for 20 years to stunt coordinator Wade Allen, Gish is the mother of two sons, 12 and 14. “My husband’s here in town working in LA, which is great,” she says. “We try to do that balancing thing: when he’s working, I'm not, and when I'm working, he isn’t. So we can still maintain – it’s imperfect – but we try to maintain that presence with our kids. I can’t go longer than three weeks away from my family, it makes me apoplectic. We’re such a tight unit and we have a limited time with these boys.”
The klieg lights first illuminated Gish when she co-starred in the cult-favorite “Mystic Pizza.” Since then she’s co-starred in scores of shows like “The X-Files,” “Pretty Little Liars,” “Sons of Anarchy” and “Nixon.” But there have been work gaps, too, she admits.
“There have been lean times but in a remarkable way, very early on my parents were very grounded. They’re professors. They’re not entrepreneurs, they’re not business people, but my dad was absolutely insistent about saving my money from the get-go, saving and investing. That set me up to being protected. But when the lean times have come, it’s really about being resourceful. Pivoting,” she says. “I'm writing a bit now and just optioned a novel and adapted it as a screenplay and want to direct. I'm moving in that direction which I'm excited about. Something happens in your 50s, you just want to take ownership of your voice.”
Owning her voice is one thing, but occasionally, Gish says, she is intimidated by the challenge. “Sometimes if we’re not up to something it’s OK to say, ‘No I'm not up to doing this.’ But if it’s resistance from a creative edge, that’s when we need to pay attention,” she says.
“I have this method: I have to back up into something. I'm not one of those goal-setters and calendar-people where I sit down and plan something 20 minutes a day. I don’t do that. I'm very amorphous. I have to trick my brain and say, ‘You know, I'm just going to sit down and DO this thing – maybe.’ And in a less rigorous way, I try to get it done,” she says.
Pausing, she adds, “I'm at that age where I feel the fear and do it anyway, because why not? The clock is ticking. I just mean mortality. I want to be brave as I go into this next decade.”
Crime in the kitchen
Television has taken the crime trend to lots of exotic places, but the kitchen? This is a first. Fox is introducing a new crime-scene-mystery-comedy-competition series with “Crime Scene Kitchen.”
Joel McHale (“Community”) is serving as host for the contest with chef Curtis Stone and cake artist Yolanda Gampp as judges. Contestants are presented with an odd assortment of ingredients and clues, and they have to determine what the original dessert was and how to recreate it.
McHale boasts that he has some culinary chops himself – but not when it comes to confectionary concoctions.
“I do cook a lot. I cook a lot of meat and a lot of fish, but the world of baking is so complicated and incredible. It's, like magic; it's like science. And to watch and listen to Yolanda and Curtis talk about this stuff, the precision is out of this world. And so I was so thrilled to see it all happening before my eyes,” he says. “And, you know, a lot of why I'm there is to tell jokes, and to comment, and, kind of, be an everyman, as I try these cakes and desserts that are, for the most part, wonderful. But there's a couple of disasters ...”
If he were plotting a similar contest, McHale says he would add a few components. “I'd like to incorporate some live sharks, and maybe mixed martial-art fighting, but, other than that, I am enthralled by this format because I know there's a lot of baking shows, and, obviously, the ‘Bake Off’ has done very well. And I think this show captures some of those elements. But I also watch ‘Forensic Files’ on HLN ... I want to figure things out. And so, this becomes, also, an unboxing video, but instead of taking off a mask, at the end, we get to eat delicious desserts. Yeah, I don't know how I got so lucky.”
Stephen King's brush with death becomes TV series
Writer Stephen King’s work has been transposed to the screen many times. But “Lisey’s Story” is one of his favorites yet to make the leap, he says. The eight-episode adaptation of “Lisey’s Story” premieres on Apple TV+ Wednesday and was written entirely by King based on his novel. It’s a very personal tale, he says, prompted by his own near-death experience.
“I had double pneumonia and I came very close to stepping out. And during the convalescence, I was in the hospital for about three weeks, and when it was clear I was going to get better, my wife decided that she was going to totally clean out my office and change it around and make everything new again for me,” he recalls.
“And when I came back home Tabby (his wife) said to me, ‘Don't go in your office, you won't like it.’ And that's because it wasn't done yet. And I said, ‘Well, OK, I'm not going to go in my office.’
“And then the first thing I did was to go into my office. And it was totally empty. And I was still feeling very rocky, and I was on a lot of different medications, and I thought, ‘This is what this room would look like after I die.’ And ‘Lisey's Story’ came from that.”
HBO launches ad-supported streamer
HBO will launch it’s ad-supported sibling of HBO Max this week, which means that viewers will get to see lots of tasty shows, but WITH tedious advertising, just like network television. They promise the ads will be shorter and there will be less repetition. It will sport “the lightest ad-load in the streaming industry,” says JP Colaco, head of advertising for WarnerMedia, HBO’s parent company.
Still subscribers are not about to get away scot-free. The HBO Max ad-version will cost $9.99 a month, about five bucks cheaper than the ad-free edition.
New shows on the screen will include an updated “Gossip Girl” with a whole new parade of great-looking people seeking happiness in the Big Apple. Speaking of the Big Apple, the aging ladies from “Sex and the City” will be back teetering in their Blahniks in a new version called “And Just Like That ....” “It’s been 10 years, and we called HBO Max to see where they are and who they are now,” says Sarah Jessica Parker, who stars in the series.
Two other players of the original quartet, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon, will be back with Parker, but Kim Cattrall is still missing in action. Hunky Chris Noth returns as the irresistible Mr. Big.
Parker says she originally got the part of Carrie Bradshow because she’d read Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” column, and was sent a script for the show. “And the creator (of the series) said he had written the script with me in mind. I was afraid to do television and HBO kept making it basically impossible for me to say ‘no,’” she recalls.
“ I shot the pilot and had bad feelings, and thought, ‘I have to get out of this!’ I went to the head of HBO and said, ‘I’ll work for you for free for a year. I’ll do three movies for you in a row, but I have to get OUT of this contract. I’ll never be able to work in the movies again, and I’d have to say ‘Hi’ to the same people every day.’
“And then they brought on this producer that I loved, and he sat me down and said, ‘What are your fears?’ ‘My fear is that it’s going to be a success.’ And there were questions I had about the pilot that I wasn’t comfortable with. And he said, “’Let’s do it.’ And he hired Pat Fields (the show’s costume designer), and I showed up on the set the first day and never looked back. It was my happiest seven years.”
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