E-mail a friendEdie Falco
airdate June 3, 2009
Edie Falco is one of America's most respected actresses. She's appeared on the Broadway and London stages and in indie and mainstream films. After recurring roles in HBO's Oz and NBC's L&O and Homicide, her star-making role came in The Sopranos. For her performance in the acclaimed HBO series, she was the first actress to win the Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG Awards in the same year. A Brooklyn native, Falco successfully battled breast cancer in '03. She next stars in the new Showtime series Nurse Jackie.
Former Sopranos star recalls her anger at being outed as having cancer. (3:05)
Full interview. (13:26)
Edie Falco
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Edie Falco back to this program. During her time on the iconic series "The Sopranos" she took home the Emmy for best actress three times in what many consider one of the best dramatic performances by an actress in television history.
Starting next week she's back in prime time with a new series, "Nurse Jackie." The show premieres June 8th at 10:30 p.m. on Showtime. Here now, a scene from "Nurse Jackie."
[Clip]
Tavis: All right, so fair to say this is a dark comedy?
Edie Falco: Yes, I think that's a good way to characterize it, yes. (Laughter)
Tavis: How do you go about mixing - well, you see, I was about to ask, how do you mix comedy with medicine, and there you have it.
Falco: I just say the words. It's the writers that do it.
Tavis: When you saw this on paper, speaking of the writers, what attracted you to it?
Falco: Let's see - because I think Jackie's funny and she's smart, she's strong, she's scary and complicated and unpredictable, all those things.
Tavis: Any attraction to it in part because it just seems that all these, whether serious or funny, anything related to the field of medicine right now seems to work on television.
Falco: That wasn't it, actually, no. I think I would have liked to play her no matter what she did. It was more about what she's about. I think she would have brought her personality into whatever she did. It just so happens that I happen to be sort of obsessed with medical shows, having nothing to do -
Tavis: In real life?
Falco: In real life. But documentary medical shows, like -
Tavis: The real stuff.
Falco: The real deal. I don't know anything about these other hospital-type shows, "ER" and "Gray's Anatomy" and stuff like that. So I can't say how we compare to those other shows, but I liked her and I also happen to like this medical stuff.
Tavis: So back to the character, Nurse Jackie. Tell me about the character. We go a little glimpse of her in the scene, but tell me about the character.
Falco: I think she's a good person. I think her heart is in the right place and she wants to do the right thing, and she also decides how to make that happen, and I don't think she's real interested in the roadblocks. She's going to make it happen, regardless of the rules, and I think she doesn't care a whole lot about how people feel about her.
That's a lot of fun, to play that. But for the average person who does give a - hoot - (laughter) wow.
Tavis: That was close.
Falco: Whew.
Tavis: Ooh, that was close.
Falco: Bleep.
Tavis: You had a "Sopranos" flashback.
Falco: Hello. Sorry. Jeez. (Laughter) It's fun to be that person for a little while, who just goes about her business, regardless.
Tavis: But you're not supposed to be that way as a nurse. You're supposed to care about the people.
Falco: She cares terrifically about the people. I think she cares maybe too much, and she knows that there are rules she's supposed to follow, but if it gets in the way of what she's got to do -
Tavis: So she cares about the people but not about the power structure?
Falco: Yeah, absolutely. It's her job to heal these people who come in for help. And doctors' orders or hospital administrative rules be damned, she's got a job to do and that's what's going to happen.
Tavis: We referenced, jokingly, "The Sopranos" a moment ago. Seriously, though, how important was it for you to do something dramatically different than that?
Falco: Career-wise, not so important. I don't know; I've never been able to plan my life from an intellectual place. I chose to do "The Sopranos" back in the day because it was interesting to me at the time, and you go by the same criteria all these years later. What's going to move me? Me? What character haven't I played, what personality traits haven't I explored? And that's how Nurse Jackie came along.
I have no idea when anybody's ever going to think about anything. Nobody does. There's no control. If it so happens, if a great script came along about a mob wife and that was interesting to me, that's what I'd be doing now.
Tavis: You'd do it again.
Falco: Yeah. It just so happens that that was not what appealed to me.
Tavis: So there's no career plotting and planning here for -
Falco: I don't know how to do that. Don't know how to do that. Never did. I just read scripts and I read scripts and nothing was appealing to me, and I thought well, I guess maybe I'm just not ready to work yet. Maybe I don't want to do this anymore. I didn't know what it was. It was a bit of a conundrum.
But I read this and I thought, no, wait a second, it's sort of being activated again, the excitement about maybe inhabiting somebody else, potentially for a period of time, and that's how this whole thing got born.
Tavis: To your point a moment ago, when you said to yourself, "Maybe I don't want to do this anymore," have you seriously had those kind of thoughts in your career, that maybe I want out of this?
Falco: Sure. Well, it's such when you're young and you just moved to New York and you have this dream of being an actress, and I know there are a grazillion people who can relate to this. And you're waitressing and it's so hard and all that stuff. That is a lifestyle unto itself.
And when that changes and you actually have a career and things are going smoothly, you wonder was it all just about the challenge? Now that I'm living in this place, is it still interesting to me for other reasons? You do spend some time thinking about that.
And now also I have kids, when I didn't back then. I have kids that are really the important thing to me now. And you wonder, is there still anything that's pulling my insides about this stuff? It turns out there is, but I sure - I certainly wondered about it.
Tavis: When you get to the place that you are at where you are comfortable, where you don't necessarily have to work, when you choose to work, you've been blessed and you've done well enough to not have to do this again, what does give you the edge? What does make you want to come back out, do this?
Falco: I don't know. The same thing that kept my father doing sculpture and painting because that's what he loves to do, or anyone who is just driven by some internal art thing, for lack of a better term. If you've got a need to create something, I don't really ever know what that is. Is that a - not to get cosmic, but is it a God-given thing? I don't know. It's a need to do something, to create something that hasn't existed before and all that stuff. And that has not gone away. And I was sort of pleased to find, because it really brings me such great joy.
Tavis: Speaking of great joy, I want to go back to something you said a moment ago about your kids, and to the extent you want to talk about this I'm happy to engage you, because I'm curious about it and your real fans know about this. You ended up adopting a child.
Falco: Two.
Tavis: Two children, exactly. The first, though, was adopted after you survived cancer.
Falco: Right.
Tavis: You didn't talk about that while you were going through it.
Falco: Right.
Tavis: Tell me why you didn't talk about it while you were enduring it, and why you decided then to talk about it, which, of course, led you to adopt a kid later on.
Falco: Right. Well, truth be told, I never decided to talk about it. I was outed by a newspaper who found out about it and said, "We're going to say this about Edie, so you better give us some details or we're just going to print it."
Tavis: Did that anger you?
Falco: I was furious, yeah, and it's a long story that I won't get into right now. But yes, I was furious about it. People go through things in different ways, and I go through things privately. That's the way I go about it.
Nobody knew about it when I was going through it, except a few of the people at "Sopranos" who had to know, so that they could schedule around my chemo sessions. But the cast and crew didn't know. It was important to me that I be treated like myself. I didn't want anybody's sympathy, I didn't want people to say, "Oh, how you doing?" That kind of thing makes me nuts.
I don't know, it works for some people, it doesn't work for me. We were towards the end of a season, shooting long hours, months and months of work behind us, hard work. The crew looked far worse than I did when I was going through this, (laughter) so they knew nothing about it.
So I just kind of fit right in, and that's the way it needed to be for me. And of course my friends and my family knew all about it, and if I felt down and I needed some support I would go to them, but I needed to work, I needed to keep my life as close to normal as possible, and that absolutely got me through it.
I thought, well, maybe if I need to I'll talk about it when I'm ready. I wasn't ready, and nonetheless I had to.
Tavis: When you got outed, then, and to your point about being angry, how did you process that? What was your approach for dealing with it when they called you and gave you this ultimatum, as it were?
Falco: Yeah, you have no choice; you're kind of thrown into it.
Tavis: So you spoke about it then?
Falco: No, I didn't, but what happened is it came out in the papers and I got flooded with emails and phone calls and I was in Upstate New York at a flea market and a woman came up, "Oh my God, I just heard, I'm so sorry." It kind of made my skin crawl. This sort of celebrity thing is not for everybody. I wasn't built for it, and nonetheless I am doing the best I can to function within it.
But I'm a very private person; it was very odd to be talking to a woman about cancer who I'd never met. It's just not - it doesn't work for me. And I was getting flowers, and also it's a very complicated philosophy but I think the quicker you move out of the cancer realm, the quicker you're back to your real life. I didn't want to spend more time - I had gone through the process, I had recovered, I went through my treatment, and I moved on.
And here I was being thrust back into it again because everyone wanted to talk to me about it. It's not the way I do things. So meanwhile, Melissa Etheridge came out with her bald head and sang her heart out, and I was like, God bless her. God bless her. That's how she's going through this, and I'm glad there are people like that, but it's not me.
Tavis: How did this lead to your decision to adopt?
Falco: I guess they were related, not intellectually, really. Because I'd wanted kids - I wanted kids for a while and I sort of thought about adoption, and I think it was one of those sort of moments where you just kind of have a moment of clarity, like oh, now, this is when you do it, this is the time, now.
Tavis: Does having survived cancer, though, give you a greater clarity on that?
Falco: I think so. I think it must have, yeah. But it wasn't quite as cut-and-dried as that. A lot of things kind of came to fruition at the same time. But yeah, having survived it and realized that there's never going to be a time when you're completely ready. If you ask anybody who has kids, they're like no, you just do it, and that's what I did. Next thing I know, I was filling out the paperwork and sending the checks and doing the thing.
And of course if anybody thought about having kids for too long you'd never do it. It's the craziest thing to ever do with your life. It is the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life. But it was just time. It was just time to do it.
Tavis: Aside from people walking up to you in your business who you don't want in your business, what's the most difficult thing for you to navigate about the celebrity life that you have to lead?
Falco: There's a lot of things. That's a big one, though.
Tavis: Yeah, privacy.
Falco: And also, I grew up in New York. I've been in Manhattan for 20-some-odd years, and you create a personality around that city a little bit. You're quiet, you wear black, you walk looking down, and you walk your dog and you do your thing.
And I wake up in the morning, I put my hat on, and somebody comes up to you, "Oh my God," which - and I don't mean to sound ungrateful; it is ultimately a compliment that people are coming up to me, recognize me from my work, but I'm not working at that hour in the morning with my dog and my baseball cap, and I feel some obligation to kind of be on and to be polite and to be at least kind to these people.
But I'm not awake yet and I live in Manhattan, (laughter) and I don't want to even make eye contact with anybody - that includes the people in my household. So when I'm outside and I walk across, it's just hard to be interrupted out of my own, personal New York City space.
So people say, "So just be yourself." But myself is rude, basically, and I just don't (laughter) want to be that person in public." It's important to me to be nice.
Tavis: So when I run into you on the street in New York a few weeks from now -
Falco: Don't talk to me, man. Don't talk to me.
Tavis: Just don't speak to you? Okay, fine. (Laughter)
Falco: I'm doing - I'm holding a bag of my dog poop and I just want to go about my business.
Tavis: Well fine, Edie.
Falco: I'm just - no.
Tavis: I just won't speak to you, then.
Falco: You're the one person (unintelligible).
Tavis: Yeah, whatever.
Falco: Right. Yeah, exactly.
Tavis: You ain't going to cuss me out.
Falco: Mm-hmm. Not anymore.
Tavis: On Fifth Avenue.
Falco: That's right. Edie, yeah - hey, how are you?
Tavis: Yeah, I got cussed out by Edie today, yeah, yeah.
Falco: Thank you so much, I'm so glad you like the show. (Laughter) Whatever, it's all good, but it's a real adjustment to my personality - it's a real life-changer.
Tavis: Well, thank you for indulging this conversation.
Falco: Oh, it's a pleasure. (Laughter) I knew I was going to have to work while I was here, so.
Tavis: Yeah, okay. Well, you're free to go now.
Falco: Oh, thank God.
Tavis: After I say goodbye to the audience.
Falco: I need my baseball cap. (Laughter)
Tavis: After I say goodbye and remind them that "Nurse Jackie" is her new show on Showtime, and she'd appreciate you checking it out and not speaking to her when you see her on the sidewalk. (Laughter) Edie, nice to have you on the program.
Falco: Thank you, it's a pleasure.
Back to June 3, 2009