BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Actress Michelle Forbes suffers from the seven-year itch. In roughly seven-year cycles she ruminates about whether she did the right thing when, at 16, she hauled off to New York to try her luck at acting.
"Everything is cyclical and you spend your time pretending," she says, sitting sideways in a white vinyl couch amid the chatter in a meeting room here.
"And you think, 'Maybe it's time to grow up and go out there and do something that is perhaps for the betterment. I'm very involved in animal rights and animal welfare. At one point I started working with the street dogs of Tijuana.
"And I called my agent and said, 'I was thinking I could stop acting and put my hands and my heart elsewhere and work for a non-profit.' I'd been doing (acting) long enough. I said, 'Don't send me any scripts. I want to know what it feels like to NOT be an actor for three months.' And then I took another month. And I was like, 'Wait, wait! I'm coming back. Don't shut the door.'"
She was 16 when she left home, but didn't snatch a real acting job till she was 22. "In between 16 and 22 I was doing a lot of play readings, what have you. But mostly just sort of surviving and racking up that life-experience so I could use it in my work."
That "life experience" included waitressing, bartending, and what she calls "couch surfing." She was also making grave financial decisions. "When I had $5 to get through a weekend, the choice was, 'Hmmmm, do I have two slices of pizza a day? Or do I go to H & H Bagels and get a bag of bagels and a thing of cream cheese, and that's going to last me?' Of course, the bagels," she laughs.
"Not that I miss those days, but I'm nostalgic for those days," she says. "I'm proud of that girl who really persevered and survived at all costs. They were pretty darn great days, exciting. And there was all that hope in front of you, and there was no end to what could be achieved."
She's been achieving ever since, earning an Emmy nomination for her role as the mother of a murdered girl in "The Killing." She seduced an entire town in "True Blood," fought crime in "Homicide: Life on the Streets," and is commanding as the formidable chief of the internal branch of Berlin's CIA in "Berlin Station," the 10-part spy thriller airing on EPIX.
"I feel there are two kinds of actors," she volunteers, "there are the shy actors where there's a lot of stress behind being the center of attention. And then there's the exhibitionist actors who feel quite comfortable in that role. I think they have it a lot easier."
It's clear she's the former. "I was so shy as a kid that I was almost mute and was starting to have a stutter because I couldn't talk to people," says Forbes, who's wearing a black pencil skirt, white blouse with fringe along the neck, and tiny hoop earrings.
"The shyness is debilitating actually, and my mother took me to see someone because she was worried about me. And he suggested she enroll me in acting class to draw me out of myself.
"That's where I learned that if I pretended to be somebody else, I could pretend to be somebody who had no fear, who wasn't self-conscious, who wasn't shy _ and the liberation that came from that _ to a young girl who was literally closing in on herself, it was 'Narnia.'"
A new world opened up for her. "I was 10 ... To actually stand in front of people and have to speak was horrifying. To me, to do that today, it's still horrifying. If you give me words between 'action' and 'cut,' it has nothing to do with me; so all of my neuroses I get to throw out the window for a minute. And, wow, isn't that a relief," she laughs.
Divorced and the proud mother of two "furry, four-legged" children, Forbes is coming to terms with her life of pretense and doesn't mind playing mothers or even grandmothers at 51. "My action career didn't start until I was in my 40s," she says.
"All of a sudden I'm hanging off a cliff in Thailand with these stunt guys around me, (in "The Hunters") ... They keep telling you your career is going to be over at a certain point. And I was like, 'No.' It wasn't even a conscious thing. I think it's up to you whether you let that happen or not. You have to be willing to morph into new places."
One of those new places turns out to be Berlin where they filmed "Berlin Station." "The peace I felt living there was such a shock to me," she says, tucking her dark hair behind her ear.
"There was a seismic shift in me, to live somewhere where children are able to walk home in the dark, alone, safe, where people aren't full of rage, where they understand how the world can change, and ebb and flow in disastrous ways.
"They have that understanding, so there's tolerance and patience in the way they live. I didn't understand that it was going to make me cry every day. Coming back has been very hard, especially in this time that we're in. I came back this time and thought it'll pass, but it's growing, this need to go back there because I can't ignore the sense of peace I felt there. I felt on some level that I'd gone home."
NBC'S NEW SHOW CHALLENGES THE NORM
If you haven't caught NBC's "This is Us," try to catch up before it's too late. One of the best new shows of the season, it's about families that are somehow interconnected, and sometimes transported in time.
It's tough to describe, and its creator, Dan Fogelman, says it was difficult to explain to the network suits. So the script did the selling. "The only way I can describe it is I sometimes think about the fact that I have a great-great-grandfather out there somewhere who I never met nor do I know his name. But in his own way, he's kind of affected my life because he raised my grandparents who raised my parents who have raised me," says Fogelman.
"I think that's what that show is. It's still going to operate the same way. There's these four interconnected storylines that will all get equal time. And one of the stories is really going to be informing the others, and you're going to be seeing a growth of these people as we jump around in time. It's really kind of ambitious, and I think, for network TV, kind of a really bold, hopefully somewhat groundbreaking attempt to kind of explore the condition of the human family."
HUGH LAURIE IS BACK IN SCRUBS
Hugh Laurie can't seem to escape the medical world. The former star of "House, M.D." is playing a forensic psychiatrist on "Chance," premiering on Hulu Wednesday. "My father was a doctor, was a general practitioner, and I remember very clearly, I remember Christmas (and) at various times of the year, there would be gifts from grateful patients," he says.
"Someone would knit him a pair of socks, or there would be a bottle of wine, 'Dear Doctor: Thank you for lancing my boil,' or whatever it was. He did things, and he made people's lives better, and people expressed gratitude for that. In preparation for 'Chance,' I spent some time with a neuropsychiatrist in London, and I asked him this question, whether he kept in touch with patients, whether he got Christmas cards.
"And he said, 'Absolutely not, because the truth is, I don't heal anybody. The best I can do is manage incredibly damaged people. My job is about trying to find the least bad option, and that's the best I can hope for. And nobody leaves my office turning cartwheels, saying, "Thank God I'm cured." It doesn't happen.'"
NEWCOMER PLAYS HIS DEAM ROLE
Tenderfoot Ryan McCartan plays Brad in Fox's new version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," airing Thursday. "I had never seen it in a movie theater," he says of the show. "However, my introduction to it was the play. My sister was in it when I was 11, and my parents, who probably don't want me to admit this, but brought me along to go see my sister kind of slut around in 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' at the St. Paul Ordway Performance Center. And so that's where I was first introduced to it. Brad immediately became a huge character bucket-list goal of mine, and to realize that, is something that I'm still absolutely speechless about."
