If it’s Oscar season, you’ve likely already come across a story or two that centers on the thoughts of anonymous Oscar voters and who they are voting for and why. One of the unfortunate results of such pieces is it often makes it look like members of the Academy don’t take their responsibility as voters seriously. The truth, however, is many of them do. They watch as many films as they can and truly consider the worthiness of each nominee. Speaking to Academy Award winner and AMPAS member Catherine Zeta-Jones last week, it was clear the opportunity to welcome someone into the winner’s circle never gets old.
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“I love to see people rewarded for a body of work or a particular role in a year. And I think, especially now. Look, everything is different. Everything is unprecedented,” Zeta-Jones says. “In our industry, like so many industries around the world, virtually everyone’s been hit by a three by four, but the show must go on. I came from that school of Doctor Footlight. And I’m never over that stuff, I’m just not, and it’s not because I’m an Oscar winner. And it means a lot to me. Some so many actors don’t need any accolades or kudos. I mean, we do it because anybody, we love what we do, but it’s just always a bonus when you get recognized by your peers for a piece of work; it just is, in my world. And so, yes, I will be voting.”
The “Chicago” star sees the past year as a reminder of how important the entertainment industry is on so many levels. It’s not just about the monetary implications, but the “joy and escapism and comfort that what we put on screen, film, television, screen, streaming services, whatever it is right now.”
She adds, “Our industry has been a solace for so many people who are not watching stuff, to be able to vote, or genuinely helping them through a difficult time and revisiting good work that was being done in the past. It’s just the norm, and I’m so into getting back to normality, I can’t even tell you.”
It goes without saying that Zeta-Jones has had a strange decade. Working or reuniting with directors such as Steven Soderbergh and Stephen Frears didn’t impact her seminal work in the ’00s. She eventually segued to television with a small role in “Feud: Bette and Joan” and a leading one in “Cocaine Godmother,” part of Facebook’s ill-fated narrative content push (Elizabeth Olsen probably regrets that decision too). Now, in something of a surprise, she’s jumped into a multi-episode arc of the second season of “Prodigal Son.” What made her say yes to the offer? Why Michael Sheen, of course.
“I’ve been wondering why the hell I’ve never worked with Michael Sheen,” Zeta-Jones says. “We come from the same hometown, which is a tiny little gorgeous ripe pimple on a spot on the world called Swansea, South Wales. And we were in different drama theater groups. We weren’t in the same school together, but our parents know each other socially, and we have never met or worked together. So that was always on my bucket list.”
Then, she got a call from her agents about FOX’s hit procedural.
“[They] said, ‘Have you ever seen ‘Prodigal Son?” I knew it, of course, because of Michael, and I’d seen his show, and I liked it,” Zeta-Jones recalls. “And they said, ‘Well, there’s an interesting character they’re going to introduce it in the second season. There’s only one episode, and a lot of it’s not really in it, but are you interested in speaking to anybody about it?’ And I went, ‘Huh? Michael Sheen, ‘Prodigal Son.’ O.K. Yeah. I want to speak to somebody about it.’ So I did.”
The producer pitched her the character of Dr. Vivian Capshaw; a physician sequestered in the bowels of the Claremont facility, where Michael Sheen’s character, Martin Whitly, is incarcerated. What connection Capshaw may have with Whitly is part of the mystery.
“I must say, it’s a bit of a leap of faith because I’m the kind of person that’s not … I haven’t done a lot of episodic television,” Zeta-Jones says. “I’ve always done television that I’ve read the first script and the last script and embarked in it like a long movie. So not really knowing if it would turn out the way they pitched it to me was a leap of faith, but working with Michael Sheen was certainly not bad. It was everything that I hoped it to be. And we basically are like a two-hander in this, in many ways, like a two-handed play. I get to do a lot of my work with him. It was an interesting lesson for me to come in as an actor and to have the idea of where I’m going with this character, but not seeing it on the page, but the keeping all my options open as I work with Michael in the scenes. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun to work like that for me.”
As Zeta-Jones puts it, the “COVID of it all,” understandably takes away from what she enjoys most about acting.
“You have the COVID of it all, in that we’re not sitting around, waiting to shoot, running lines, doing multiple rehearsals,” Zeta-Jones says. “We literally come down from our dressing rooms, take our masks off, block it, put them back on, take them off, shoot it and put our masks back on. So we don’t have that actor camaraderie, like sitting around the water cooler moment of, ‘Let’s run this. What about this?’ And so it was really like jumping right into the deep end.”
The camaraderie of being around actors is a big part of why Zeta-Jones continues to act.
“I started in the business in the theater when I was nine years old,” Zeta-Jones says. “So actors brought me up and have been with me at very specific, important moments in my life. It’s like actors are my family. And so, the camaraderie around hanging on a set, I love. My favorite thing is to be on location because then we get to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. So I love that. And so, during this time, I’m so thrilled to be in a production that’s putting crews to work and trying to have some normality in a very unprecedented time. But I do miss that, just hanging, just together.”
“Prodigal Son” airs on FOX on Tuesdays at 9 PM.