It鈥檚 been five years since Kyra Sedgwick bade farewell to Brenda Leigh Johnson, the junk-food loving Southerner with a knack for wrangling confessions out of criminals on TNT鈥檚 long-running crime drama The Closer. The role earned Sedgwick an Emmy, a total of five consecutive nominations and a wide following, but she said recently by telephone: 鈥淚t was definitely time to be done.鈥�
In her first regular series role since The Closer, Sedgwick returns to television tonight in Ten Days in the Valley, an ABC drama in which she plays Jane Sadler, a successful documentarian and TV producer. Late one night while Jane, a divorced mother, is toiling away on last-minute script changes, her daughter is abducted from their home.
Created by Tassie Cameron, the 10-episode series is a serialized portrait of a complicated woman that also vividly evokes a working mother鈥檚 worst nightmare.
Sedgwick, also an executive producer on Ten Days in the Valley, has remained busy during her time away from the small screen. This summer, she made her directorial debut with Story of a Girl.
Adapted from a novel by Sara Zarr, it follows a teenage girl whose reputation is tarnished by a sex tape.
The film, which aired on Lifetime, was a family affair, starring her daughter, Sosie Bacon, and her husband of 29 years, Kevin Bacon. It also kicked off what Sedgwick hopes will be the next chapter in her career.
Q: Was it difficult to say goodbye to The Closer?
A: Brenda Leigh was the greatest thing ever, and I just love her to pieces. And I鈥檓 glad that she lives on in reruns. And I love the love that I get from people about her, because I loved her. I gave her my heart and soul and my body. I mean, I gave her everything. So I鈥檓 glad people appreciate it.
Q: What excited you about Ten Days in the Valley? Were you drawn to doing something more serialized after starring in a procedural for so long?
A: Yeah, definitely. I don鈥檛 think I鈥檇 do a procedural again. I鈥檝e been there, done that. I thought [Ten Days in the Valley] was a really excellent, taut, well-done script, and I was really interested in the character, in the idea of having this container of a mystery 鈥� a very familiar thing that people can grasp 鈥� but it鈥檚 really a deep dive into who this person is. We go back into her past even as a child.
And I was really interested in working with women. I think that鈥檚 an incredibly important thing to do. We can鈥檛 speak about how much we want women to succeed in Hollywood and not make decisions based on that. I wanted to make sure I was putting my money where my mouth is.
Q: The series paints a pretty harrowing picture of being a mom in showbiz. Could you relate?
A: It鈥檚 really all-consuming, the kind of work that we do, especially when you鈥檙e doing a show like The Closer where out of a 46-page script, you have 42 pages of dialogue and are in 98 per cent of the scenes. Not to quote the Army, but it鈥檚 the hardest job you鈥檒l ever love and your personal life suffers. I know it was really hard on my kids when I was working so hard.
One of the things that the show explores, which I really love, was this inherent guilt. If you鈥檙e going to be a mother, you鈥檙e going to feel guilty a lot of the time. It just comes with the territory.
The thing I tell young actors now, women who have children, is that I wish I had felt less guilty and had understood that work for me was as important as anything.
It鈥檚 a really big part of the show, this guilt thing, this mother-work shaming. It鈥檚 interesting, because even in the press, people say to me: 鈥淚s [Jane] a good mother?鈥� I鈥檓 like, first of all, you鈥檇 never say: 鈥淚s he a good father?鈥� You didn鈥檛 look at Walter White and say: 鈥淲as he a bad father?鈥�
