I say “got a chance” because the day Stephen found out he was nominated he was also told that the show would be closing later that week.

If that were me, I’d want to jump out a window but Stephen is taking it all in stride.

And why shouldn’t he?  The critics universally praised his work, he and his wife just adopted a baby and he’s such a fantastic actor, the phone is probably already ringing in his agents office.

I got a chance to talk to him while he was sitting in his car about to take a well deserved break.

Congratulations on your nomination.

Thank you so much.

How did you find out about it?

I was watching, because I knew it was important to find out about the longevity of our show – Enron. With how expensive the show was, if it didn’t get nominated, I knew it would probably be a rough road for us. I was curious and watching for a couple of minutes. Then, they let it go and I watched it online. I sort of saw it all happening in rapid succession. They did the 5 big categories first on TV and then they ended it. So I thought that I had missed my category. I was like, “Damn, I can’t believe it!” But then they actually went back to it.

What’s that feeling like, to be one of the top five actors nominated?

It’s crazy. I don’t know that it’s sunk in yet. I was just talking to my wife about it. It’s such an incredible honor and its a thing that you always dream about as an actor, I think. Especially as a New York theatre actor who grew up on the Tony’s and grew up coming to see Broadway shows. I went to Julliard in the city, which is an institution for theatre.

I remember my first Broadway show, right before I went on, saying “Wow, as soon as the first word comes out of my mouth, I’m going to have done a Broadway show.” It was an incredible, huge threshold to walk across. It hasn’t even really sunk in yet to be considered a part of the community in a performance that was noteworthy in this season of incredible actors and performances. It’s kind of mind-boggling. It’s thrilling. It’s such a huge honor. I know these are all the things that everyone always says, but it’s so true. You actually really do feel awed by the attention and awed by people actually caring. There’s nothing that I just said that’s new or exciting, but it’s totally true. It puts all of that work into perspective for a moment. It’s a milestone in your career that you can look back and you can say, ‘Oh, my God, I actually put together a little body of work.’ It’s quite cool.

Is it true that now you can get better seats in a restaurant?

I don’t know. If I won the award, I could walk in with the statue and I still think I would lose instantly to anyone who’s been on a TV show or in a film. Maybe at Angus McIndoe across the street they might say “Hey!” but I think other than that, that’s the beauty of the theatre that unless you saw it, you don’t really know it.

And then, a couple of hours later, how did you hear about the show closing? That’s got to be a sucker punch.

Well, I saw that the show hadn’t been nominated and the producers were pretty frank with us earlier on. The day after we opened, we had a day off and we came back and talked about it. New York is tough. The New York Times is a such an important paper for a big Broadway show. Because it’s a table setter and a tone setter for the way people think about a show. Ben Brantley from The New York Times really didn’t like the show. He had very nice things to say about me, which was very nice but he didn’t like the show. And already you could feel as we came back that we were battling that perception. We had amazing reviews from all other places, but theater people have very strong opinions about the play. So, I knew from the producers who said the Tony’s would be very important to us. So I knew we were in a bit of a race, and when that didn’t come through, I knew that our time might be short. But I didn’t think it would be that short. We found out that night. They sent us all an email basically saying “Please come to the theatre a half an hour before.” Then they told us that there wasn’t an advance being built and that the Tony’s were really important to help build that advance, and that the show was very expensive, and the timing was wrong, possibly, for a show all about finance. There were a million reasons. You could Monday morning quarterback what happened with it a million different ways but we found out that night that that was going to be our last week, which was crazy.

It was heartbreaking also, because you hit that moment when you’re like, ‘I can get to live in this thing and I can show people my work,’ and then it was gone just as quick. But it’s a great metaphor for the theatre. The theatre is a living organism that is of the here and the now, and it’s going to disappear and that’s the beauty of it.

It’s gotta suck that you put in all this time and energy, and you got nominated for a Tony, and people can’t see your work.

Yeah, it’s definitely a drag. All my out-of-town friends will have missed it. And people I know who bought tickets for later in the summer won’t get to see it. But, in terms of my community of people, a lot of them were great. They rushed to go see it or they had seen it in the preview period. I know that the producers made a valiant attempt to try and get as many of the Tony voters in before the show closed. They got a good bit of those people in.

As far as the joy of doing a play, and getting good notices, and having some kind of acknowledgement that you than get to live in that because it happens so infrequently. That was a drag, definitely.

Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you get your start? When did you realized you wanted to be an actor?

I did it in high school. I did all the school shows. I had a great high school drama professor who really made us cut our teeth in high school, not on Bye Bye Birdie, and stuff like that but on Bertolt Brecht. That really pushed our imaginations. So, I sort of knew when I was in high school that I really loved it. When I went to college, I went as a political science major, actually, and took a couple of classes. I realized in political science, it’s really a science of figuring out people, and how to manipulate people and how to manipulate perception and understand it. It was all these things that I was doing and loving in the arts, but it seemed for more nefarious purposes. So, I decided that I’d rather do it for entertainment and to help people see the world in a different way that to build a political career.

And then you went to Juilliard?

Then I went to Juilliard in the city, which was very lucky.

I talked to Carrie Preston who also went there. She said it was like an acting boot camp. It was like her Vietnam she said.

Totally. I love Carrie Preston, she’s a buddy of mine. She’s awesome. The thing about Juilliard that’s so great, in terms of the hardest part about Juilliard, is that they look at you when you come in, and they say “You do these amazing things naturally. And let’s be honest, you don’t need us to continually tell you over the course of these four years what that is that you do great. So let’s give you as many skills and tricks and craft as we can do over four years with things you’re not good at.” So, you can spend four years thinking you’re not good at all, which I think is the danger if you go there too young or too green. You can start to lose your confidence. But if you can maintain your sense of the world, you can come out of that program with an incredible set of skills, and having worked with some really great people.

You pretty much work non-stop; do you credit your education with that?

Yes, in large part. I think a huge part of why people want to work with you or hire you—it’s 50% what you’re doing in the auditions and how prepared you are and what kind of take you have on a role, but the other 50% is, are you somebody who’s reliable and that people want to work with.  That starts to snowball. I pride myself on being somebody whose prepared and who isn’t causing problems when they’re in rehearsal and is just really there to make the play better, to make the project better. I think that’s an important part of why you continually work or don’t work. Your reputation precedes you into a room. Hopefully, it’s working for you as opposed to against you.

You’ve played two real people; Jim Reston in Frost/Nixon and Andy Fastow in Enron. They’re completely different shows, but was the research on the people the same for you?

Yes, in a way. It’s interesting, when you play a non-fictional character; you’re playing somebody who you can pull lots of source material for. It’s exciting because a big part of your job is done. You can see pictures of that person, you can hear that person, and you can do a lot of the external work that will get you close to that person. But then there’s a point when that stops being helpful, and you have to do the same work you would do as an actor on any fictional character. Which is go to the script and figure out exactly what the author or playwright is asking you to do. Because, even if I did the greatest Jim Reston ever, but it was running counter-intuitive to Peter Morgan’s script, then we’re in conflict with each other. So, it’s more important that I know what David Frost is saying about Jim Reston in the play and then somehow interpret that either to embody that or do the opposite of it. To take all the given circumstances that I know from the world of the play and try to marry them with some of the things I know. It is a kind of hybrid thing when you work on a non-fictional character, but it’s not a far afield from just working on Chekhov. Where you’re completely creating a character from scratch. You have to do all that same beat to beat, moment to moment work, or else we would just be doing documentaries, essentially.

So when you get a new script—and I know you’ve done a lot of new plays— what are the very first things you look for and you do?

That’s a great question. I think I probably start off reading the script a number of times. I had a professor once who said that your first impression is so important, and that when you read a play the first time, don’t read it piecemeal, don’t read it on the subway, 10 pages here, another 15 pages there. You’re first impression of it should be in some ways the same as if you were to sit in a darkened theatre and watched 2 hours of a play. So that impression is really important. The first time through, I’m really just responding emotionally or intellectually to the experience. And then I go back and read it a few more times, because it’s actually really interesting to read a play before you know who you’re playing in it. Sometimes, if you get the breakdowns and there’s equal parts that you might be right for, it’s really interesting to read a play not tracking it for your character. You sometimes learn a lot in that respect. Once you’ve read it the first time or you know who you’re playing, I start pulling out all the things I know, trying to develop the skeleton of a character from all the bread crumbs that the playwright has left you. Very simple things, like how old the person is, where the person grew up, to all the emotional things about that person; what are their triggers? What are the things that set that person off? All of the things we work on in acting school, like what does this person want? What does this person out of life? And then you start to go back and filter all of that together and I find there comes a point where you’re never even learning the lines, because you’re doing so much work on figuring out why the lines are there that it sort of figures itself out.

I know that you just adopted a baby, are you going to take some time off and hang out with the family or are you calling your agent and saying “Let’s get back to work”?

It’s funny you say that, because my wife and I have a little house up in Connecticut. I’m literally sitting right now in a car in the driveway. We just got here, battling traffic. I was doing this play David Cromer’s Our Town, I was playing the stage manager right before we started rehearsals for [Enron]. Literally, I left Our Town on a Thursday night, did my last performance. On Friday, we flew off to Ethiopia, to get our daughter. We spent two weeks in Ethiopia, flew back and landed on a Saturday night and started rehearsal on a Monday. So it’s been brutal. But she’s absolutely the greatest kid in the world. She is the easiest, sweetest, most grounded kid who’s kept all this in perspective, all the things like the show closing. I have this little face to come home to who doesn’t care about any of that, it’s amazing. Part of closing is going to be lovely. I’ll get to spend a chunk of time with her. Certainly I love working, I love what I do, and if opportunities come up, I’m sure I will be on the horn with the agents saying “What’s next?” But I don’t suddenly feel the time clock going “T-minus 2 weeks till I need a job before I go crazy.” I’m very content to have a little bit of vacation time.

Two more questions: What is the best piece of advice someone gave you regarding acting? And what is your advice to actors?

For the business I think—and my current situation is a perfect example—it’s a long, long game. I remember coming out ofJuilliard thinking that it was a series of sprints, that you would look to your left and your right, and you’d see people in your class and you’d see people with the agents that you want, or you’d see them get job you thought you should have, or you weren’t booking and you tended to make an assessment of how you were doing by the people around you. And you judge that on very short sprints.

But the business is a marathon. Your career is a marathon, and you have to figure out how to pace yourself, and you have to figure out how to have a sense of inner worth and inner measure, rather than constantly looking around you. I look at the people in my class, certain people sprinted ahead and then fell back and haven’t worked in a while. And we’re all going through the same thing. There’s enough work for all of us. We’re not in competition with each other really. I know that’s sort of “self-helpy” speak, but it’s kind of true in this profession. There’s going to be a job that opens up for you because you didn’t get the other job. There’s enough work if you stay in it. There’s a huge attrition rate in this business because people can’t figure out how to go the whole way. It’s such a hard business and people fall off, and if you can figure out how to support yourself and feel good about yourself, your time will come. Your chance to get those things will come. Somebody told me that and in the beginning right when I came out of school I totally didn’t believe it. I was miserable for a lot of time, because I thought “If I hear another person tell me that I’m going to really start working in my mid-thirties, I’m going to just kill myself.” [LAUGHTER] I was twenty-something, and I thought “I want to do that!” and they’re like “Yeah, you know what? You’re going to have a great career in your mid-thirties and your forties and fifties.” That’s not what you want to hear that. You want to hear that you’re going to get it now. But looking back, I’m like, “Wow, that’s great advice.” It’s hard advice to take when you’re in the middle of it, but—if you’d have told me in my twenties that I’d be sitting with a Tony nomination for a new play, I would‘ve have believed it.

In terms of craft, I’d have to think about that. Tell the truth.

I’ll think of something good at some point. [LAUGHTER] I’ll give you a call at 2:00 in the morning when I can actually come up with something [LAUGHTER]

Carrie has the remarkable ability to transform herself – her looks and mannerisms – in each role she does. She’s been in Duplicity and My Best Friends Wedding with Julia Roberts. Doubt, Vicky Christina Barcelona and even an episode of Sex and the City that I totally remem

ber her in. She even played Ben Linus’ (her husband, the great Michael Emerson) mother on an episode of Lost! I could go on but my fingers will get tired from all the typing.

She’s currently filming season 3 of True Blood and she took some time out to talk to me about Broadway, how she prepares for a role and yes, True Blood.

So, you’re from Georgia and you got started doing plays as a kid?
Yeah, I’m one of those, like I like to say I’m a “lifer.”  I’m in it for life.  My brothers also an actor, and we started doing plays in Macon, Georgia community theater when we were pretty young.  My brother, John, his name’s John Preston, he got the first play.  He’s older than me by two years, so I watched him, and I was like, “I want to do what John’s doing.”  And then before we knew it, we were completely ensconced in doing plays growing up.

And then I even started my own street theater company when I was in the 7^th grade with all the neighborhood kids, and I would charge 25 cents.  We would make up skits and sing songs and do it in the front yard.  I mean, that was pretty much… it was very clear that that was what I wanted to do with my life.  I just didn’t know that you could make a living at it.

Was there any one show or one specific moment that you were like, this is it?
I definitely got bitten by the bug, immediately, you know, when I was in the 4^th grade. Just doing the school, the community theater production of some play, it was called, The Lion Who Wouldn’t.  You know how they write those plays for kids and stuff?

The director who was running the community theater, he pulled my mom aside and he said, “Your child’s an actor”, and my mom said, “Oh thank you, she’s having a good time.”  And he said, “No, no, no, no. You’re not hearing me.  Your children are actors.  That’s what they are.”  So he encouraged us at a young age and sort of brought it up to my parents in a way that they had to kind of sit up and listen.  And thankfully my parents were very supportive and never tried to talk us into becoming accountants or anything like that.

Yeah, my mom said that to me more than once.  And I said, mom I can’t even count.
Exactly!  There’s no back up here.  This is it.  This is what we’re doing.

You went to Julliard.  How was that?  I heard it can be tough.
Yeah, you know what, it’s funny.  Whenever I run into people that I was in school with, and I’m still very close to, like James Vasques, who is in my production company with me, we were at Julliard together.  And it’s just like we went through Vietnam.  We say, “Yeah were in ‘Nam together and we were in acting boot camp.”  But you know what, it was a great program.  I went there after I’d already gone to undergrad.  So, I was very, very focused there and if you are, you can get a lot out of that place.

I mean, I probably could’ve left after a year or two and been fine, but if I hadn’t had those four years in New York City to acclimatize myself to that town and the business, I think it would’ve taken me that long to get a Broadway show anyway.  You know what I mean?  And so I may as well be there learning and being around some of the best teachers in the country.  I kind of felt a little bit lucky, like I was in a little bit of a cocoon and was able to hatch out of that and into the industry in a less painful way than if I just moved to New York from Macon, Georgia.

After leaving Julliard, you were on Broadway with Patrick Stewart doing the Tempest.  That has to be thrilling and nerve-wracking.
It was a pretty exciting way to make my Broadway debut.  Luckily, we had done the play at Shakespeare in the Park first, and it was a big hit in Central Park.  And they hadn’t had a hit like that in a long time, so it was very exciting.  We would finish a show and there would be people camping out for the next day to get the tickets for the next night, so it was like that.  It was kind of magical, you know?  To be doing that play in the open sky.  A play about a tempest.  Sometimes it would rain and then we would be talking about a storm and it would be there and the audiences were just loving it.

It was really cool to be able to take the show that was so big and transfer it indoors and make it work in there.  And of course we had George Wolf, who is a genius director.  And we had a limited run, so the houses were always full, and I made a great friend in Patrick Stewart.

And then ended up many years later doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf with him at the Guthrie playing Honey.  So I got to do two plays with him, which was great.  And we already had built this relationship.  But that’s what you do, you build relationships with people, and if you’re lucky you get to work with them again.

What do you like better, Broadway or film and television?
You know, I really am very happy taking a break from the theater right now.  I mean, I love it, and I certainly have been doing it my whole life.  But it’s fun to be in the television and film mediums now and learning the ropes there, you know?  Because, it was something that I started doing later, after all the theater training.  So I’m really happy doing that right now.  Really, really happy with that, yeah.  And then of course the directing and producing of films, too, is very exciting for me.

Looking at your resume and your work, you’ve been in a ton of TV shows and films that I’ve seen, and you are almost completely unrecognizable in each role.  You look totally different from part to part.  That’s just amazing.
I appreciate you noticing that.  A lot of times I kind of feel like I’m starting over for each part because people don’t realize that I was also the one that was in 10 other things that they’ve seen. So a couple years ago, I finally hired a publicist and that has been great because they’ve been able to sort of connect the dots for people and say she’s the redhead on True Blood, but you watch Duplicity and she’s the blond worker, kind of conservative and then on True Blood she’s the crazy buxom, sassy waitress.  And its definitely been interesting for me especially since I’m pretty much incognito when I’m out in the world.  But that can be fun because people get… they’re always they’re always a little bit surprised.

You’ve worked with some fantastic actors.  Do you ever sit back and watch the work and find out later that you’re stealing some little bit of technique from them?
Sure, I think everybody sort of rubs off on you if you’re smart enough to let it happen.  I mean, I think that’s how we grow is you know watching other people.  If you’re really present in the scene, you’re gonna start doing things that you didn’t even plan.  If you’re really there and reacting to what they’re doing and before it you’re like wow I’ve never done anything like that before because of the other person that I was working with.  If you make it about the other person, I think you’re kind of better off.

What actor do you think has most influenced you?
Um… gosh, well certainly my husband, Michael Emerson. Just watching him and watching his work.  He’s sort of similar in that he really does transform from role to role.  And he happens to be playing one role right now that he’s most recognizable for.  But he played Oscar Wilde off Broadway in one of the biggest New York hits in the 90s and couldn’t be more different than Benjamin Linus.

I guess it’s more people that I’ve actually worked with than watching people I don’t know.  Of course I admire many actors on screen, Meryl Streep has always been a hero of mine.  Holly Hunter, she’s from Georgia.  I got to work with her and being on set and working with her on this little movie called Woman Wanted was more than thrilling because I kind of had her as a role model because she came from where I came from.  Even Julia Roberts, I’ve worked with her twice and she’s from Georgia.  I feel this connection with people I feel like come from a similar background.  Even in the most recent film that’s out that I’m in called That Evening Sun, Ray McKinnon and Walton Goggins who are actors in the movie, but they’re also producers and directors, I just learned a lot being around them and being on set with them.  And again they’re both from Georgia.  And I do like to find the common ground.

Now you said that you’re married to Michael Emerson, do you guys ever consult each other on roles you’re considering or help each other work on scenes?
We try to keep it separate.  We sort of task each other in the roles of being supportive and so we really don’t do that.  I mean, every once in a while if I have an audition and I feel like I need another eye, I’ll work on it with him.  And he’ll give me a few suggestions and vice versa, but for the most part we kind of stay out of each other’s way.  Because, so much of this business is about having to overcome obstacles and so we don’t even want to bring that into the house.

But a lot of times, because I’m traveling a lot I will put myself on tape for auditions and he reads with me off camera.  And that’s always helpful because he’s much more relaxed than if you go into a casting director’s office and you’re reading with a casting director.

How do you prepare for a role?
I guess it’s different for each part depending on the demands of the part.  I mean, True Blood…  now I really know Arlene and it’s very fun to have a character that you know and you know how to embody that you actually get to have different scenes every day as opposed to a play where you learn the entire play and then you do it over and over again.  You get on the same train every night.  It’s kind of fun doing a TV show where it’s a little – you have to bring different tools to the table.

I play a lead in a film called Lovely by Surprise and it was a very…. not such a linear way of telling a story, and so the character had a lot of psychological things that was going on so I prepared for that role in a different way than I would have for say Duplicity.  I actually learned the entire role. I was completely off book before I got to set just because I felt like I needed to understand the entire arc of it before I even went into it so that I would have the freedom to play with whatever was being thrown my way.  I’m glad I did it that way because it was an indie and they had a short shooting schedule.  So, I felt prepared but not you know set.

Let’s talk about True Blood for a second.  When you first read the part, did the character immediately jump out at you?  Because you’re perfect at it.
Well, I appreciate that, but you’ve seen what I look like.  You don’t immediately read True Blood and think, oh Carrie Preston for Arlene, the 40-something, red-headed, buxom – it just doesn’t happen.

The only reason that I got that part was because I had worked with Alan Ball already on a film that he directed call Towelhead, and so I met him on that film and I was playing a completely different character, albeit a Southern one.  Completely different than Arlene, but Alan is one of those people that is perfectly okay with casting an actor that he likes and letting the actor find the role.  You know, instead of casting somebody who is perfect.  I mean, he cast Anna Paquin as Sookie and she’s not the first person you would think of for that part either.

And actually he kind of did that with everybody on that show.  He just picks actors that he likes and he lets us find the role.  So when I was doing Towelhead with him, I asked him what he was doing next, and he told me he was doing a vampire show, and I was like “what?”  And he said, “Yeah, I think I might have something for you in there,” and when I read the script I didn’t know what he was talking about.  I called my agent, I was like “I don’t know which part he’s talking about.  There’s nothing for me in here.”  And he was like oh it’s Arlene.  And I was like okay.  Alright, I can try that.  So, I went in and I know that woman.  I grew up with that woman.  And I brought an audition in that and he was very interested in how I interpreted it and he told HBO that’s who I want and they said great, and we’ll get her a wig.  So that’s what they did.  It was nice.  Once again, you know, work that gets work.

Does Alan Ball or does somebody call you and tell you your storyline before the season starts?
Well, our show is based on these books, so we do have a blueprint of the series but they’ve really departed from that quite a bit.  And so I did read the books and just kind of got a general idea of it.  But I trust our writers.  Our writers are pretty great.

And we’re lucky in that we get scripts pretty far in advance whereas some shows like Lost they get them a couple of days before they start shooting.  Like for example, we just started shooting the 5^th episode of season 3, but we’ve gotten scripts through the 6^th already.  So it is nice to have sort of the sense of where your character is going.  But you know we’ve got some great writers that we can trust are gonna take someplace.  And Alan has told me a little bit about what is gonna happen with my character for the rest of the season so I kind of know a little bit about where we’re going.

So you said earlier you started your own production company.  Is that more to take control of your career, create roles you might not ultimately be considered for?
You know, we started it back in 2004 when James and I were both not working a lot and I had been taking some classes, some filmmaking classes and was starting to mess around with it a little bit.  And rather naively, we just said well let’s make a movie.  And we kind of self-taught ourselves how to do that.  And before we knew it we’re shooting on weekends and we’re getting this footage and before we knew it we had enough to cut the film together.  And then it ended up doing well.  We learned a lot and we were able to kind of take what we learned on the first one and improve it on the next one.  And sort of the goal is to kind of keep building and these are no-budget movies, you know.  Now I’m hopefully directing in the fall a movie that a friend of mine wrote and we’re hoping we’ll be able to take it to the next level and we have investors that are interested in actually giving us a budget.  Whereas before we were pretty much self-budgeted.  It’s been exciting to kind of keep taking these little baby steps.

What’s your advice to actors?
My advice to actors is don’t wait around for somebody to tell you what you can do because there are so many ways now to be creative and to create your own work whether it be doing a showcase of a play or getting a camera and shooting a short or shooting a feature or whatever.  We’re much more empowered now that technology has advanced so much.  Where people can create their own work.  Because as soon as you start putting your power in somebody else’s hands, then your creativity, I think, is gonna be stifled.