Smart and Finally

Jean Smart may be a beloved character actor with two Emmy Awards and a Tony nomination to her credit, but it took joining the cast of the hit FOX series 24 to earn her raves from her most important critic: her 16-year-old son. "He said I was finally doing something cool," Smart recalls with a laugh. "He wanted to know if I got to shoot anybody." If she does, she's not telling; Smart knows better than to reveal any plot twists behind the notoriously secretive real-time series, which spends a season chronicling a day in the life of the world's most beleaguered government agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland. Smart joined the series in its fifth season as first lady Martha Logan, the paranoid, scheming, and quite possibly brilliant wife of the president. It's a wonderfully juicy role, and Smart jumped at the opportunity when she first read the script.

Still, performing on 24 can be a tricky proposition. After all, this show doesn't think twice about killing off popular characters, and actors who sign on don't know where their character will end up by the end of the season. Smart admits it can be hard to play a role under such circumstances. "You want to come up with a complete history and figure out very specifically what relationships are with each person," she notes. "You think, 'Gee, I hope this doesn't come across as bad acting that I'm being a little ambiguous here.' But it's also very freeing because you just have to learn to trust [the producers] and say, 'Look, they've been very successful at this for four years, and if I just play the truth of each scene, they'll piece it together as brilliantly as they always do.'"

Smart is already a familiar face to television audiences, thanks to her five years on the sitcom Designing Women and a recurring role on Frasier, which brought her the aforementioned Emmy wins. She is also a lauded stage performer, having recently wrapped a run as Mrs. Erlynne in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan in Williamstown--"I won't get into a corset anytime soon," she vows. After graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in fine arts, she spent three summers at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which she considers a fantastic training ground, before heading to New York and landing a Drama Desk nomination in 1980 for Last Summer at Bluefish Cove. She was soon balancing theatre and camera work, though she insists she never had a game plan for her career. "When you're a theatre actor, you're very much a purist and kind of a snob about the other stuff," she says. "You say, 'Oh, I'm not going to do commercials or soap operas.' Some of us from school even went to New York with our nose in the air about musicals, which breaks my heart now because I would have loved to have pursued musicals. But I just always assumed things would work out and didn't really plan for the future that much."

Things certainly worked out well; Smart might be the only actor who can say she has never been let go from a role. Indeed the only time she was fired was from a restaurant job as a teenager for wearing hot pants and go-go boots and "distracting the kitchen staff." She also confesses to having the rare ability to be picky about choosing her parts. "I never want to choose a role based on money," she says. "For most of my career I've had the luxury to do that. I've been very lucky." And when it comes to auditioning--which she still occasionally does for film roles--she manages to find a bright side. "I'm actually glad because I don't want them to go by just a couple of things they've seen me in," she says. "It's funny, because I played a certain kind of role for a while and a director would say, 'I love her, but she's too refined and classy.' And I'm thinking, 'Oh, my God, you've missed about 17 parts of mine.' I don't want anybody to ever assume they know what I can do."

Having seen the business change over the years, Smart offers the following to other actors: "I wish I had learned this sooner: Stop trying to figure out what 'they' want and [trying to] fit into that. Find what it is about yourself that is unique and interesting and powerful that you feel is your strength. Don't necessarily get your nose fixed and your teeth fixed and your breasts done or whatever else you think you should do because you think they're looking for that. Because if you really look at the people who are successful, most of them just have a quality where they're being true to themselves, and we find that interesting and want to watch them. Whatever the quality is that makes you uniquely you, that's what you should foster and groom and take care of and protect. Don't try to mess it up, because you're just going to dilute everything."

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