\n<\/p>\n
Did it feel different filming this episode at all, given the reversal in your dynamic and the connection you have over the loss of your mothers?<\/strong><\/p>\n Quinta knows that I have readily available emotions. In any scene where crying is easy for me, I can access it. When they wrote this, they knew that if we had to play that we had both lost our mothers, that it would be battle of the network tears. I don\u2019t need to play that every time. [Laughs<\/em>] So they gave it to Sheryl, and of course I could feel what her emotions were, but my character wasn\u2019t feeling it. Melissa was intent on noticing what was happening and saying, \u201cI see what\u2019s going on, and you need to take a little step back. You\u2019re hurting.\u201d<\/p>\n Do you feel more comfortable making suggestions for your character now that you\u2019re in season three and have more of a dynamic with Quinta and the writers? How has that evolved?<\/strong><\/p>\n Always, from the beginning, it\u2019s like working with a great repertory company. When I was coming up as an actor, doing the Greeks and Shakespeare, I thought I was going to be a stage actress. I thought I was going to go work at Arena Stage or go to New York and do off-Broadway. That\u2019s what I thought I would do my whole life. I never saw TV in it. This [is] like the best repertory company I\u2019ll ever get to be a part of, and playing with them, every episode is just beyond my wildest dreams. With Tyler<\/strong> [James Williams]<\/strong>, who plays Gregory, he and I have done a couple of things together where we just feel it\u2014we know what each other is doing, and we\u2019ll just look at each other like, Yeah, let\u2019s do that again. It\u2019s the finding of it in the work. Sometimes it\u2019s just that, or sometimes you say to the writer on set, or Quinta, \u201cHey, can I do this?\u201d Sometimes she\u2019ll say yes. Sometimes she\u2019ll say, \u201cWell, no, because you don\u2019t know, but in two episodes, X is going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n But you know the character; you\u2019re living inside of the skin of that person. I do come from a Sicilian family. I do know how they behave. And the more I\u2019m living in that world too, the more the writers understand that\u2014that we\u2019re an incredibly pessimistic people. [Laughs<\/em>] We believe that the worst is going to happen because we were invaded by every country in Europe and Africa for 1,000 years.<\/p>\n Watching the \u201cMother\u2019s Day\u201d episode, I was thinking about you rattling off Melissa\u2019s many siblings\u2019 very specific names. The audience gets information about Melissa in the best, most chaotic way.<\/strong><\/p>\n That was actually a good example. They had names\u2014and I knew what they were going for with the joke\u2014but I said to someone, \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t name two people in our family Anthony. In the same family, you would have 18 Anthonys, but it would be Anthony, Tony, Big Red. Everybody would have their own name.\u201d [Laughs<\/em>] So I adjusted the names just a little bit to make it make sense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n