Photo by Timothy White/NBC
Each week we take a look around our pop
culture world and try to find one moment that stood out as the most inspiring.
It might be a celebrity who is doing charitable things; a TV shows that
inspires us to be better. Here is this week's most inspiring pop culture
moment.
If you had asked people back in 1967, if they could have learned a
lesson from a small-minded bigot like Archie Bunker, they most likely would
have said, ‘No way.” That’s the reaction a lot of people are having to what
they assume is a very similar role being portrayed by Ellen Barkin on the
freshman sitcom The New Normal.
In a recent conference call interview, Ellen was quick to point out that there’s a lot more to her character than meets the eye. True, Joan Forrest is a very vocal, uber-conservative just like Archie was. But “Glee’s” Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Allison Adler have shaped a much more intelligent and educated supporter of all things right wing.
Being a non-apologetic liberal, Ellen wasn’t sure how to approach the
job. She recalled, “This character was unlike me in her politics. And so I
thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to have an enormous amount of work to do.’ But quite
frankly, I just flipped me and I found it all inside me — her passion, her
commitment, her incredible outspokenness and sometimes inappropriate
outspokenness.”
Ellen soon realized that this might be one undeniable similarity she
shared with Joan. She admitted, “I can be in appropriate. I’m overly
opinionated. I, on occasion, talk first and think later and I realize, ‘Oh God,
should I have really said that? And so, I have a very strong connection to this
character on a human level, and politically I just flip her?”
Still Ellen is rooting for Joan to learn a very important lesson on the
show about a woman who becomes a surrogate for a gay couple. She conceded,
“What she will hopefully learn is that her idea of normal no more applies to
her family than it does to a same sex family. She is a 58-year old
great-grandmother, which means that for three generations women have had babies
between the ages of 15 and 16. And there
are a lot of people in the world that do not consider that normal either.”
Ellen and Joan may speak out of school from time to time, and both
might have their lessons to learn. But Ellen is clearly someone who cares
deeply about the topics that matter to her and thirsts for new experiences.
As she revealed, “I’m passionate about everything, for better or for
worse. I’m passionate about my family. I’m passionate about what books I read
and what movies I see. And if I love them, I love them passionately. And if I
don’t, I don’t love them passionately. And I’m passionately passionate about
the work I do. The older I get the more passionate I get about my work, oddly
enough. And it is a great gift that I did not expect.”
The New Normal airs on Tuesdays
at 9:30 p.m. EST/8:30 p.m. Central on NBC.
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