Ellen Gray: One tough character: Glenn Close describes her 'Damages' lawyer as more complex than evil

DAMAGES. 10 tonight, FX.

PASADENA, Calif. - Her own mother probably never loved "Damages' " Patty Hewes the way Glenn Close does, but even she's had moments, playing one of TV's toughest lawyers, when she's wondered.

"The hardest thing for me to come to terms with was when the guys told me I would put out a hit on Ellen [Rose Byrne's character]," Close said in an interview here last week, just a few hours before heading off to Beverly Hills for the Golden Globes, where she was a nominee for the 10th time. (She won in 2008 for FX's "Damages" and in 2005 for "The Lion in Winter.")

"I said, 'Oh, no, don't do that,' " she said, laughing, about having Patty order the hit.

"That was a surprise to me. The way I rationalized it was she was so traumatized by Fiske [Zeljko Ivanek] killing himself in front of her . . . and it was some kind of elemental, knee-jerk thing. But that was hard for me. That was a surprise."

There's hardly an actor alive who couldn't summon up sympathy for Satan if he or she were offered the chance to play the role, but Close, whose third season as Patty gets under way tonight, sees her character as more complex than evil.

"I was very clear with them" from the beginning that "I didn't want to be a psychopath. I don't find that interesting. I've played people - well, ["Fatal Attraction's"] Alex Forrest was actually probably bipolar or a borderline personality," she said.

"The only evil person I've played, really, truly evil, is Cruella" De Vil in "101 Dalmatians," Close added, laughing. "Everyone else is a little bit more complex."

Complexity's in the water in "Damages," which this season adds to its record of putting comedic actors like Ted Danson and "Saturday Night Live's" Darrell Hammond in some pretty dark places by bringing in Lily Tomlin and Martin Short to play key figures in a story line more than a little reminiscent of the Bernard Madoff scandal.

"One of the things that we try to strive for on 'Damages' is that nothing is as it seems," executive producer Todd A. Kessler told reporters when asked about the casting.

Nothing, perhaps, except for Tomlin's passion for the show Kessler co-created with his brother, Glenn, and Daniel Zelman.

"It's the only show I've ever run home to see, no matter what. If I were working on another show even, I'd say, 'I have to get out of here,' " Tomlin, speaking via satellite, told reporters last week.

"That first season, it was on Tuesday nights, and I'd say, 'I have to get home. I have to see' - and I wanted to see the 7 o'clock. I didn't want to see the 10 o'clock feed. I wanted to see it from the get-go. And when I'd see Glenn anyplace at an event or anything, I would just jump all over her, and I'd say, 'You've got to tell us. What's going to happen? Why can't you be on every night? Why can't you be on all year? Why do I have to wait now?' When the first season was over, I just about went nuts."

She's not exaggerating, insisted Close. "She's always been really vocal" about how she felt about the show.

"I just love her. I just think she's a treasure. She's so fiercely intelligent, as is Marty [Short]."

Tomlin's also the kind of viewer who helps pay the bills.

The passion many of "Damages" fans feel for the show leads them to save episodes for a time when they can focus on it fully, making it one of TV's most time-shifted shows. It's something FX president John Landgraf sees as a mixed blessing.

"That's good because it means people really like your show enough to make an appointment to DVR it, to record it, to ultimately get back and watch it," he told reporters at the Television Critics Association's winter meetings last week.

On the other hand, "anybody that watches it after three days, we get no credit for from an advertising standpoint. And, by the way, Nielsen doesn't even report ratings after seven days," Landgraf said.

Close, though, thinks the way people watch her show - later on the DVR, even waiting, some of them, for the DVDs - is "great."

"I think that's what the art form is. I really do - I think it's an art form that's being developed on these long-form drama series. It used to be the BBC that had all the great stuff, and it was hugely influential. And then HBO started," she said.

"When people wait so they can kind of assimilate and digest what's going on, there's this kind of respect for what we're doing, I think," she said. "Because our writers are challenging the audience. You know, it's not like 'Law & Order," which has that thing of every week, it's solved . . .and it's very cathartic for people, to see somebody do something bad and then it's figured out and they're ultimately punished for it."

Still, she recognizes that "it's frustrating for the studios because of the paid advertising and everything like that, but I think it's something that will have to be figured out."

Close, meanwhile, is figuring out series television, having never worked in it regularly until she spent an Emmy-nominated season on FX's "The Shield" (she's since won two Emmys for "Damages").

Actors on "Damages" joke about getting scripts and script changes at the last minute, but Close said they aren't complaining.

"We find it fun. Because it's like you're living out a novel. You don't know from one chapter to the next where the story's going to go," she said.

"And every now and then, like just two days ago, I asked to meet with one of the writers, and Dan [Zelman] came down. And I said, 'I just want to connect with you and you know if you have anything to tell me about where we're going' . . . But it was kind of wonderful because he'd say, 'Well, we're thinking about this, but then it could be this. And this - but then it could be this.' "

Is she a quick study?

"I am. I've gotten to be. I think it's a great brain exercise," she said of the process by which she learns lines.

"I was talking to Mary Kay Place, who's a great friend of mine [one of Close's co-stars in 'The Big Chill,' Place currently appears in HBO's 'Big Love'] . . . She and I do the same thing. You get a page of dialogue and I score out all the stage directions, because my brain now almost takes a picture of the page and if I don't do that, it will register that there's a pause. And so when I'm trying to say the line, I will automatically pause when there's not really supposed to be a pause," she said.

"But what I [also] find I'm better at is that it's not just about learning lines, you have to assimilate them so the audience doesn't see that you're trying to remember what your next line is," she said, pointing to her eyes and demonstrating the movement that might betray that. "You know, it has to be something that comes out naturally, and I think that process has been sped up for me as well."

And if it's often hard to detect in the actress' eyes what Patty's thinking, that's probably deliberate, too.

"I don't think Patty is a deeply reflective person," Close said. "I know people like that. And these are things that, if, you know, she reflected on them, would be very upsetting."

Nevertheless, "I'm very proud of Patty Hewes. For all her manipulation and the problematic aspects of her behavior, I think she actually is becoming for other women a very positive" model. "She's a women who's taking control and she says, 'That's b-------, and she tells it like it is, and she gets the job done." *

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