Today’s Guest: Actress Melissa Leo, star of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “Treme,” Frozen River.
(Editor’s Note: Melissa Leo was a guest on the show back in March 2010. She was a great guest, so why not re-run the interview now? Tomorrow night, we’ll find out whether she won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Fighter with Christian Bale. Hopefully, this will put her over the top!)
I think it was the hair.
A Niagara Falls of cascading, curly, dirty red tresses framing a face that could alarm the viewer with its world-weary concern or lighten up any scene with a rare outburst of laughter.
That was how most of us came to know Melissa Leo, a.k.a., female Det. Sgt. Kay Howard, on NBC’s long-running series, Homicide: Life on the Street. She was a hardened veteran investigating murder among a crew of tough guys who treated with respect and a smidgen of trepidation.
Homicide was one of TV’s all-time great shows, continuing the careers of Yaphet Kotto and Ned Beatty and introducing us to new talent such as Leo, Andre Braugher, Kyle Secor, Callie Thorne, Clark Johnson, Michelle Forbes. And it caused the transformation of legendary standup comic Richard Belzer into what must be one of TV’s longest running character, Detective John Munch, who started on Homicide in 1993 and lives on today in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, having wise-cracked his way through more than 260 episodes all told.
But I digress.
MELISSA LEO podcast excerpt: “Kristen Stewart will grow as an actress as she works. She’s interested in learning and expanding. She doesn’t think she knows it all. She is not going to be caught in the persona she played in those Twilight films. She is going to make a choice to step out of those parameters. This is an actor, not a movie star.”
Having survived her Homicide partner, Daniel Baldwin, Melissa Leo’s career was low-key for a few years as she became a frequent guest star in TV dramas from The L Word and CSI to Shark and Law & Order.
So how she then went from appearing in Mr. Woodcock with Billy Bob Thornton to being Oscar-nominated for Best Actress for 2008’s Frozen River has got to be a good story.
Melissa Leo is about to join us to talk about a raft of new movies she’s in-—including: Welcome to the Rileys with Kristen Stewart and James Gandolfini; The Fighter with Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg; Betty Anne Waters, starring Hilary Swank; and the just announced Mildred Pierce remake in which she stars opposite Kate Winslet, who beat her for the 2009 Oscar—as well as the April 11 premiere of the HBO series Treme, in which she co-stars with John Goodman.
Melissa Leo Twitter • IMDB • Wikipedia • Order Frozen River on DVD from Amazon.com
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