Wisteria Lane winds round a hill on the Universal Studios lot. The plastic flowers and glimpses of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard between the houses add a David Lynch feel to the perfect slice of ersatz American suburbia. When it becomes clear that the home of Felicity Huffman’s character, Lynette Scavo, was originally built for Ronald Reagan’s fabled chimp flick, Bedtime for Bonzo, the unreality levels are almost too high to handle.
When I meet Huffman, it’s clear that her reality counter is off the scale as well. It’s the day after the Oscar nominations, and she is shortlisted for best actress for her role in Transamerica, in which she plays a transsexual man on the verge of becoming a woman. Of course, I write this knowing the gong went to Reese Witherspoon. When we speak, however, that’s in the future, and as we sit and chat, she simply can’t contain herself. She looks so happy, she almost glows.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m going to the Academy Awards,” she says every few minutes, tossing her hair like an excited schoolgirl. “I’m not in catering. I’m not a seat-filler. I’m not on somebody’s arm. I’m going to the Oscars.” She pauses and says slightly wistfully: “I wish the awards weren’t for another year, so I could just be a nominee for a year. It means I’m a card-carrying actor now.”
The nomination is sweet vindication for Huffman, 43, who served time as a desperate actress before she made it as a Desperate Housewife. Roles in Law & Order and Frasier failed to deliver breakthroughs; she starred in Sports Night, Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed take on sports television, which was cancelled after two seasons; she was even fired from Neil Simon’s Broadway production of Jake’s Women (though she earned an Obie award for taking over Madonna’s role in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow). She was also sacked from the pilot for the TV comedy Thunder Alley, in a particularly harsh way. When told the show was going to be reshot, Huffman said she didn’t fancy travelling back for the extra work. No, they explained, it was being redone without her. “So I thought I was the cursed one,” she says.
It was in this fatalistic mood that she went for two parts at pretty much the same time: the preop transsexual Bree Osbourne in Transamerica, and working supermum Lynette in Desperate Housewives. She got Bree based on her extensive theatre work — the writer-director, Duncan Tucker, had seen her off-Broadway — while Lynette was another in a seemingly endless series of failed pilots. “You just assume, when you do a pilot, that it’s not gonna go,” she nods philosophically. “So you think, ‘I get to work for three weeks, then I won’t work again for a year.’ And who knew it would turn into this? Plus, I was attracted to a lot of the roles, although I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be able to play the Hispanic supermodel.”
Desperate Housewives, of course, exploded, and her part in the most successful TV show for decades helped propel her tiny indie flick to mainstream and, ultimately, Academy attention. “It opened in two theatres,” she explains, “but one of those was in LA. All my pals from Desperate Housewives came, so the photographers showed up and suddenly people are going, ‘Transamerica, I’d like to go see it.’”
Although her character shares a name with a Housewife, the projects couldn’t be more different. Bree Osbourne is a conservative preop transsexual. On the eve of her final reorientation surgery, her therapist finds out that she has a son from a fleeting heterosexual encounter long ago — and that he is a junkie and street hustler with atrocious grammar. She flies from California to New York to meet Toby, posing as a church missionary to hide her identity. Once there, she agrees to drive him back to Los Angeles, where he dreams of starring in porno. She, meanwhile, hopes to drop him off with a relative along the way. The film has all the road-trip conventions: a beat-up station wagon, run-down gas stations and folksy diners. They encounter unscrupulous strangers and unexpected kindness — and, of course, they get to know each other.
Huffman researched the role heavily, spending a lot of time with transgendered people at conventions, making notes about how they would move and speak. “Several of the women would pull up in a cab and walk to the front door of the hotel,” she says. “And I saw how, for some of them, it was excruciatingly painful, because they are so new at this, and they feel there is a big bull’s-eye painted on them.”
It is a tension she understands. Indeed, in a way, her grounding for the part comes from her lengthy battle with bulimia. “I understand the pain of waking up in agony in your own skin,” she says simply, describing a struggle that lasted through her teens and twenties. “I had that ‘Just can’t be thin enough’ thing. ‘Hate my body, hate my body, hate my body.’ There is a small band of normality, and you have to fit inside that band or it causes great pain and struggling. Whether you’re trying to be a size six or whether you are gay or whether you are transgender, all you experience is ‘I don’t fit in’ and ‘What I’m doing isn’t working’ and ‘I am below par’.”
It is almost impossible to visualise this beaming, healthy woman as anything but happy with her body. Even so, it wasn’t until the end of her thirties that she finally had it beat. Although she used therapy, her victory was more about coming to terms with herself. “First of all, I feel like I was born with a 40-year-old body, and when I turned 40, I looked and said, ‘Not bad’.” She shrugs. “But then, what really turned it around for me was when I had my children. And I’m not talking about ‘Look what my body can do’ — although that is amazing. I mean, you grow an extra skeleton. You try it. But I had my kids, and I was 20lb heavier than I am now, and for some reason I just went, ‘I look fantastic.’ It was the grace of God, and it just kind of switched. And, yes, I went through a lot of therapy, but the critical mass shifted after I had children.”
Even though motherhood saved her, Huffman caused a stir on CBS’s 60 Minutes last year when Lesley Stahl asked her if it was the best thing that had ever happened to her. With her daughters, Sofia and Georgia, now five and three, it was a stock question, and Stahl clearly expected the stock answer — oh my gosh, Lesley, yes it is. But Huffman didn’t play the game. No, she said, it’s more complicated than that. There was something close to a media feeding frenzy immediately afterward, with her quotes making it into the papers, the women’s mags and the talk shows. Dismissing the kerfuffle, Huffman remains unrepentant.
“I resented the question,” she explains. “If you answer yes, you’re okay. You’re a good mother. And if you answer no, you’re a bad mother. I don’t like being put up against the wall like that, and I am glad I answered that way — not because I want to make a political statement, but it happens to be my truth. It’s not everyone’s experience of motherhood, but it’s mine, and there’s nothing more painful than trying to keep a secret. Better to go, ‘This is incredibly hard and I’m losing my mind. Does anyone else feel like this?’ The only thing you are supposed to say is, ‘My life has meaning now, and I love it.’ You can say your husband is driving you crazy, your job is driving you crazy, your best friend, anything, but not your kids. You can say, ‘I would like to hit my husband with a car’ — but not your kids. I feel like I just struggle through it, and I don’t know the answers, and I’m unbalanced, and I just move from one failure to the next.”
Despite her battle with weight and motherhood, she maintains that she had a happy childhood. She grew up in Woody Creek, Colorado, the youngest of eight children. Her father left when she was one and her mother raised the brood alone. “I was the loud and obnoxious one, which is probably why my mother was like, ‘I’m gonna send you to acting camp,’” she laughs. Her mother could be fun or she could fly into rages, something Huffman is keen to avoid as she raises her own kids, but fears she may inherit. Even so, it was her mother who walked her down the aisle on her wedding day.
Her husband, to the delight of independent-movie fans, is William H Macy, the lugubrious star of Fargo, Welcome to Collinwood and Pleasantville. They met 20 years ago, when she joined Mamet’s Atlantic Theater Company and Macy helped with her training. Although she thought he was cute from day one, he refused to ask her out until he was no longer her teacher. They married eight years ago, and he is clearly essential to her life. She still faxes pages from her scripts to him for advice before performing difficult scenes.
“I remember when we first did the upfronts in New York, before Housewives was on the air,” she says, her face lighting up at his name. “Everyone came and took pictures of beautiful Teri and Nicollette and Eva. The first hour, I was like, ‘This is so funny — nobody wants to take a picture of me.’ The second hour, my nose was a little out of joint. By the third hour, I hated it. I called my husband from the limo, crying, ‘I am the oldest and the ugliest one here.’ And he said, ‘Aweh, baby, I’m always the oldest and the ugliest one on the set. And it is only going to get worse.’ I just loved him for that.”
These days, Macy likes to joke that nobody sees him on her arm as they head up the red carpet. It is certainly true that movie offers are starting to roll in; before, she couldn’t even get an audition. Even so, she has spent enough desolate, empty days waiting by the phone to take all this with a pinch of salt.
When Huffman looks out from Wisteria Lane, she sees the smog before she sees the Hollywood sign. She can’t help it. Lynette’s house is just across from Bree’s, a clapboard shell that incorporates lavatories for the cast and crew. Whenever Huffman plays a scene, she is reminded that behind every dream Hollywood home, there’s someone on the loo.
Desperate Housewives is on Channel 4 on Wednesdays; Transamerica opens on March 24
