Edie Falco speaks out about the “celebrity” aspect of Hollywood: “Most [celebrities] haven’t really done anything to earn where they are”

Four time Emmy winner Edie Falco is starring on Broadway in House of Blue Leaves where she plays Bananas, a schizophrenic from 1960′s Queens.

Falco, who received a Tony nomination for her role,  says not much has changed since that era and now in the way people chase after the fame and fortune they associate with Hollywood success.

“I don’t really know if the hunger for it has changed, but our obsession for it seems to have changed. I’m not so good at commenting in any meaningful way about these things, but celebrities are now like our royalty, you know what I mean? Most of them haven’t really done anything to earn where they are, which is what’s so troubling. There’s an obsession with famous people who, oftentimes, are not worthy of a million people knowing who they are and what they think,” the actress says.

The irony of her success as an actor is not lost on Falco, as fame was never her ultimate goal, unlike some of her fellow SUNY students.  “There were other women I went to school with who really were aiming for this; this was kind of what they wanted. And the fact that I am the one who ended up here is actually a big, you know, the universe is getting a good laugh at it. Like every actor says, I just want to do good work. It sounds disgusting, but I think it really is true.”

via nymag.com

Oliver Platt on his career: “There’s a sense of gratitude that I’m able to support my family doing this”

In Showtime’s, The Big C, Oliver Platt plays a husband who has no idea his wife is dying of cancer.

Platt says it wasn’t easy filming those scenes “in the dark. You had to really focus and forget that you knew,” he said. How did he pull it off? “Well, you just do it. It’s your job. You pretend.”

He believes his non movie star attributes have worked to his benefit as an actor. “What I was told early on was that, as an actor, I had a uniqueness: There wasn’t anybody who looked like me, for better or worse, and we don’t need to get into THAT any further, thank you.”

Platt discovered at an early age acting provided a way for him to fit in.”I was always a new kid in school and I figured out this was a way to plug in: I’d try out for a play and then I would have a group of friends, and I also loved doing it.”

Having worked on both stage and screen, Platt has enjoyed a varied career spanning many genres. “I’m drawn to stuff that I haven’t done before,” he says. “But at the same time, when you take a job, especially a high-profile job, you want to have a sense that you’re not going to completely wipe out. So you try and balance things.”
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“True Blood” star Alexander Skarsgard on Season 4: It’s “quite different from what we’ve seen before”

HBO’s “True Blood” returned last night and Alexander Skarsgard‘s role as vampire sheriff Eric Northman will be directly involved in the story arc this season.

Thanks to a coven of witches, Northman has lost his memory and is forced to rely on Sookie (Anna Paquin), and the actor couldn’t be happier with the turn of events.

“I was excited. It was quite different from what we’ve seen before. It’s been difficult because he doesn’t …  it was difficult finding the right tone. He doesn’t know who he is, so all that baggage is gone, 1,000 years of resentment and bitterness, the whole, like, loathing humanity kind of stuff is gone. But there has to be an element of danger there still. I didn’t want him to become too much of a little puppy. It was about finding that balance, because he has to be extremely vulnerable now,” Skarsgard says.

He also enjoyed trying out his comedic skills throughout the first few episodes.  ”I had fun with it. It was just important to make it real. The humor had to come out of the situations more than him trying to be funny.”
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Parenthood’s Lauren Graham: “We start talking about the scripts the minute they come out”

The Hollywood Reporter recently got behind the scenes with Parenthood actress Lauren Graham, who chatted about executive producer Jason Katims, the preparation time necessitated by the hour-long NBC comedy-drama and the difference between offscreen personal connections and onscreen chemistry.

Graham credited Parenthood’s “unusually confident showrunner” as one of the reasons things run so smoothly during production. He “knows when he can trust us to have some input and then knows when he wants things his way. He came to me at one point in the season and — he’d never said this to me before — ‘I really like this one speech as it is, and I would love it if it was just that way.’ It was really nice.”

“We start talking about the scripts the minute they come out, actually,” explained the 44-year-old actress, who plays a financially-troubled mother on the family-centered show. “And often we’re shooting two shows at a time, so they story-board it for us that way. This is even more important on this show because you’re shooting what’s going to happen in the next episode while you still haven’t finished what happens in this episode.”
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L.A. Home to Only Half of 2010-11 TV Pilots

With 169 pilots produced during the 2010-11 development period, television had its most prolific pilot season yet, thanks to a recent increase in cable-bound comedy series. Unfortunately, Los Angeles can’t report such great numbers, as its share of pilots shrunk again in the latest reporting period.

According to the Los Angeles Times, L.A. was home to only 51 percent of pilot shoots. Although its 87 pilots outnumbered the 2009-10 season’s total of 76, they only made up a little more than half of total shows produced, compared to the previous year’s 58 percent. As recently as the 2004-05 season, 82 percent of all pilots were made in the City of Angels.

Because of its rich entertainment history, L.A. is still recognized by most of the country as the place where their favorite TV shows are filmed. However, the Times reports that eastern locales like New York, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana have asserted themselves as television-friendly states in recent years.
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Laurence Fishburne is leaving CSI

Emmy award winning actor Laurence Fishburne announced he will be leaving CSI after two and a half seasons. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fishburne decided not to renew his deal to act in the drama.

Fishburne was the replacement for the much loved William Peterson, who left the show in 2008. The Once top rated show has seen a drop in ratings since Peterson’s departure. This last month, the show hit its lowest rated season finale ever at a mere 11.4 million viewers.

CBS has recently announced that it will move CSI’s time slot from Thursday 9pm to Wednesday at 10pm where it will now compete against Law And Order: SVU. CSI’s 9pm slot will be replaced with J.J Abrams’ new drama called Person of Interest.

Note to CSI fans:  with Abrams’ taking over the slot let’s hope CSI doesn’t get LOST in the shuffle,  J.J. Abrams’ certainly has had luck with numbers!

Watch the First 6 Minutes of “True Blood” Season 4!

You know summer is almost here because True Blood is about to premiere. I had no intention of making that rhyme, by the way.

Catch the first 6 minutes of the season below where Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) is in the land of fairies, meets her grandpa and gets into a bit of trouble.

Watch till the end. It looks like the season is going to start off with a bang!

Anybody know where I can get a light-fruit?

True Blood premieres June 26 on HBO.

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10 Clips from the “Modern Family” episode of “Inside the Actors Studio”

On tonight’s Inside the Actors Studio, the cast of Modern Family sits down and talks with host James Lipton.

Ok, the whole cast minus the kids. What? No Manny?

The clips are all great but my favorite is Ed O’Neill telling the story of how he got the part of Al Bundy.

Check them out after the jump!

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Matthew Morrison Talks “Glee,” Friends and Broadway

In a recent promotional spot for Microsoft search engine Bing, Glee star Matthew Morrison talked about the road to television stardom and his real-life supporting cast of friends and family.

While Morrison was attending high school at the Orange County High School of the Arts, school president Dr. Ralph Opacic “made it real clear to me that I had something special and I should continue on with the arts,” says the 32-year-old actor, who was undecided between theater and soccer at the time.

A few years back, Morrison went to an early Glee try-out on a whim. “I had done about 10 years of Broadway shows and I was kind of looking for the next thing,” he recalls in the video. “I went to this random audition, sang a couple songs and they liked me.”
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Josh Duhamel Returning to Roots on “All My Children”

Transformers: Dark of the Moon star Josh Duhamel will be returning to his roots, albeit briefly, on an upcoming episode of ABC soap opera All My Children. The 39-year-old will reprise his role as con artist Leo du Pres on the show, which gave him his first shot high-profile acting gig in 1999.

In a controversial move, ABC cancelled AMC in April, announcing that the daytime TV mainstay will air its last episode in September. Although it’s been on the network’s lineup since premiering in 1970, both AMC and fellow soap One Life to Live are being removed from ABC’s schedule to accommodate new shows directed at younger audiences.

Duhamel’s episode of AMC will likely air in August, as the series begins to wrap up its final storylines. Since his last appearance in 2002, Duhamel has gone onto fame and fortune, marrying pop princess Fergie and starring in films like the Transformers series, Life as We Know It and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton.

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