Brothers & Sisters

There’s a nice interview in this weekend’s Los Angeles Times with the reclusive Calista Flockhart, who plays Kitty on Brothers & Sisters. It’s a sympathetic portrayal of an actress either unwilling or unable to put on a dynamic public persona, and therefore vulnerable to everyone else’s suppositions of what she’s really like. And appropriately, some of the best quotes in the article are from other people — Brothers & Sisters executive producers Ken Olin and Greg Berlanti, show creator Jon Robin Baitz, and co-star Sally Field — trying to put their own spin on her character and conduct. A few testimonials:

Ken Olin: “Wherever she shows up, for whatever reason, she’s such a lightning rod for media and scrutiny and a certain kind of resentment, and I don’t think that’s always easy for her but she’s doing it. She’s had to be tough. That hurts her feelings. When you’re held up being iconic and you represent things — and for her these are things that [ticked] off a lot of people: the neurotic, man-hungry female that is a setback for intelligent, liberated women — people take shots at you. But it’s this character of Ally McBeal that is held up to represent something that she’s not.”

Sally Field: “She and I talked about it because I’ve had more years in the saddle, so to speak, dealing with the press. I think she doesn’t feel she does it well. So she comes in feeling like, ‘Ugh, I’m going to get beat up by this.’ And so it makes her shy. A lot of actors, when they’re put up on a stage like that, they become the class clown and will entertain the troops, as I say. But because her personality is such, the press does what it does. And then the more things hurt her, the more she’s reluctant to come out and be there. It builds with her.”

Jon Robin Baitz: “Calista has a quality of reserve about her under which is a great, great sense of humor, but she’s terribly shy on the surface and doesn’t have something that so many actors have. She doesn’t have a performing quality. Acting for her is more intrinsic. It feels more like the place where she goes to be free and find out more about herself rather than the place where she goes to exhibit herself. I think she saves herself for acting in a way.”

Greg Berlanti: “It would have been very easy, with the kind of scrutiny this show was under early on, for an actor to freak out and ask for more control creatively because so much of their name is on the line and attached to that thing. Not a single call about that. Her one request is the most humane of all: How can I have more time with my son?”

The actress does speak for herself a bit in the article, too, which is worth reading if you love Flockhart and maybe even more, if you hate her.