Erika Christensen is in new territory playing a working mom on Parenthood, a new dramedy based on the 1989 film that debuts Tuesday night on NBC. It’s a definite departure from the roles moviegoers saw her in during the early 2000s, such as the obsessive teenage stalker of Swimfan and the cocaine-addicted honors student of Traffic. But so far, so good wading into TV waters with small-screen vets Craig T. Nelson, Lauren Graham (who replaces Maura Tierney from the original pilot) and Peter Krause has been a familial bonding experience. “A side effect of the amount of time that it’s taken us to really get up and running is that we’ve known each other for at the very least 10 months or so, and some of us knew each other previously. We’ve had a chance to develop these relationships, and it’s clicking,” says Christensen, who plays Julia, an ambitious corporate lawyer torn between being a legal eagle and a loyal mother.

What do you like most about Julia so far and what they’ve done with her?
I find her personally funny. She’s trying so hard and she’s extremely competent at work, and that doesn’t necessarily translate to the home life. The writers have been having a blast embarrassing her – I mean, major foot-in-mouth moments, which is really fun. She’s clearly neurotic and high strung, and that’s a character I don’t feel like I’ve played. I certainly haven’t played a corporate lawyer/wife and mother before.

You don’t have any kids. Is it odd for you to play a working mother when you can’t relate in that sense?
I don’t think odd is the word but it’s definitely something very specific that, as with an actor playing any specific thing that they are not a part of in real life, it warrants a lot of respect and attention paid to it. I’m beginning to experience the relationship with my “daughter” growing. Her name’s Savannah Rae and she is 6, and our relationship now is a lot different than it was when we first started shooting the pilot. A lot of my friends have kids of various ages, and 6 years old is a lovely age. There’s still a huge amount of openness, and the “cool factor” hasn’t really entered into the equation yet, and I like that. I wish everyone was like that.

NUP_138202_1001Did you talk to your own parents about how they did it to get into more of a mindset, or other parents around you?
I didn’t speak to my parents about it because I feel I have a sense of how they did it from being on the set of it. [Laughs] The actor who plays my husband, Sam Jaeger, does have kids, and he and his wife are awesome parents, which I’ve been privy to a little bit and is super cool. Just looking into the amount of love and the kind of fierceness of the love that a parent feels for their child – and especially a mother feels for their child – is what I’ve gotten from my friends. And just the amount of humor that comes out of it, too, the way kids are so open and unrestrained and uncensored in the way that they talk and express themselves. They’re also completely learning things newly for the first time and, oh my gosh, my friends’ kids are hysterical. That’s the kind of thing that we’re mining on the show.

You’ve had a decently long career for someone who’s 27, but you haven’t done a lot of comedy.
That’s true. I’d say the film that I’ve done that’s “the one” — the closest to being a comedy but it’s also half comedy, half tragedy — is The Upside of Anger, one of my favorite films. Other than that, I did a bunch of sitcom work starting out here and there, and I did a pilot, but it hasn’t been the overall focus of the work that I’ve done. I’m really interested in going further in that direction. I have a lot of respect for funny, because funny means smart. My co-star Dax Shepard does standup as well as act, and that’s unbelievable to me. If you’re not in it, as he and everyone who’s in that crowd are, that must have to be the most terrifying experience ever! I can’t even fathom it! But again, I respect it immensely and everything that’s ever been said about laughter is trite and so true. It’s a part of life that you really don’t want to miss out on, so I have to get involved in it more.

Was going to television a calculated movie after doing movies for a good six years straight?
Part of it was ambition, and part of it was just the simple fact that the more I work, the happier I am. If I do three movies in a year, that could total working six months out of the year. I’m just happier being engaged in something and being productive.

Has being a series regular changed your off-screen lifestyle?
It’s mainly a viewpoint that has changed. On a film, it’s an intensive experience, it’s finite, you commit all the way and then it’s over. I’ve settled into the idea of this as a lifestyle. This is my life, an ongoing thing: Some days I work, some days I don’t. It’s a mindset where I’m pacing myself. I feel like I’m in it for the long run, and that’s a very different feeling. It allows me to interact socially more and be open to doing an interview in the morning, whereas a lot of the time if I’m doing a film and it’s a sprint, I completely shut off from the outside world and anyone I’m not working with I don’t talk to. A lot of actors do that. That’s one of the big differences as well: “OK, I can’t do that forever. I have to engage in the rest of life as well as working.”

Do you want to go back to film, maybe on your next hiatus, or are you content just doing TV?
I’m not totally sure. Dax is one of my best friends, and we were just talking about this the other day. He was going, “I don’t care! I don’t need to do another movie! I am happy as a clam to be on this show!” This first hiatus, I’ll probably lean in that direction. This is my focus, I want to make this as great as possible, and will likely have quite a short hiatus this year because we started so late. Assuming we get picked up for the second year, it would be two months or something. That said, I love, love, love to work. And despite all the complaining we do about not enough great material, there’s great material out there! And if given the opportunity, I likely will take it.

From USA Weekend

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Articles, Parenthood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.