Tuesday, Jun. 16, 2009

Q&A: Michael Vartan of HawthoRNe

Dreamboat Michael Vartan is back and operating on all cylinders in TNT's medical drama HawthoRNe.

By DAVID MARTINDALE

Special to dfw.com

There are some things that Michael Vartan would rather leave to his imagination. “I don’t need to see inside someone’s chest cavity during a surgical procedure to play a doctor on TV,” he says. “I’m happy to pretend.” That’s what actors do, after all: They pretend for a living. But when Vartan, the former Alias costar, was cast as Dr. Tom Wakefield in TNT’s HawthoRNe, he was advised to spend a full day observing what goes on in a real operating room. Vartan said thanks, but no thanks. “I did spend a day in the ER, which was intense enough,” he says. “There were a lot fewer open bodies to look at, though.” It’s not that Vartan is squeamish. It just didn’t feel necessary to him. Besides, Vartan says, wouldn’t it be awful if he were the unlucky actor whose presence in the OR jeopardized someone’s surgery? “What if I knocked over the anesthesiologist’s machine?” he says. “Wouldn’t that be horrible?” But is there any concern that he might feel like a fraud when acting out a surgery that he could have observed but didn’t? “Look, I feel like a fraud anyway,” Vartan admits. “It often seems that the jobs with the most pressure and stress are also the most underpaid. Nurses and emergency workers are saving lives but not getting paid what they should be. Meanwhile, people like me are getting paid stupid amounts of money to pretend to be those people. None of it makes sense.” HawthoRNe, a medical drama starring Jada Pinkett Smith in the title role, premieres at 8 p.m. CT Tuesday.

Can you tell us why America needs yet another medical drama on TV? “Actually, that was my first reaction, too. On the surface, when I first heard about the show, I thought, ‘Oh, really? Do we really need another medical drama?’ I mean, come on! But after reading the script, which I thought was awesome and beautifully written, and then finding out that Jada was attached, I thought, ‘Well, this seems to be an interesting project after all.’”

And what was it specifically that turned your thinking around? “What I like about the show and what I think makes it different is that it’s told from the nurses’ perspective. From my few experiences in hospitals over the years and from having a few friends who work in hospitals, I always knew that nurses worked incredibly hard. But I had no idea that they were basically the glue to the whole operation. Yet they rarely get any recognition. This show is about the struggles of these nurses, who are the heroes of the hospital. It isn’t about office romance and stuff. None of that ‘Oh, doctor-and-nurse-making-out-in-the-closet, ha-ha’ kind of thing. It’s more realistic.”

And that is ultimately what made you decide to do this? “Yeah, but let’s be honest: I’m not Matt Damon. I’m not the one who gets to do the deciding most of the time. I go where I’m wanted in this business.”

If we dressed you up with a white coat and a stethoscope and turned you loose in a real hospital, how long could you probably fool people? “I would say maybe 4 1/2 minutes. Just long enough for someone to ask me a question that I’ve got no answer for.”

Speaking of having no answers, were you just as mystified as most of the viewers were by those crazy plots on Alias? “Oh, constantly. I remember times when Victor Garber and I would huddle in the corner and say, ‘Dude, what is this scene about? Who is this character we’re talking about? What is this weird thing that we have to steal from the Romanian consulate? What the hell is going on? I have no idea.’ But the funny thing is that there was always one person who knew exactly what was going on and that was J.J. Abrams. So as wacky as the show could get and as complicated and convoluted as the storylines and the character relationships became, we always knew that if he was there and we asked him, he would tell us exactly how it all worked. The thing was, we didn’t know if that was reassuring or scary that he had the ability to process all this stuff in his head!”

You don’t seem to take yourself too seriously as an actor. How did you get into this crazy business? “It was a complete accident. I never wanted to be in showbiz of any kind. I wanted to be an athlete as a kid. To this day, sports is my true passion. I’m still waiting for that show where I get to play a hockey player. But we better hurry up because I’m getting old. Anyway, I was living in France and I moved back to the States and I was kind of floundering around for a while. I went to art school because my mom’s an artist. And I was working at a restaurant. I was probably the only waiter in L.A. who didn’t want to be an actor! And then one day, a friend of my mother’s, this English director, said, ‘Hey, I’m doing this documentary. I need this awkward-looking teenage kid. There are no lines. All you have to do is stand there and look awkward.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it.’ He said, ‘I’ll give you 600 bucks.’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ So the truth of the matter is got into the business for the money and to a certain extent I’m still in it for the money. After all, I’ve got to keep my Labrador retriever in good standing. She needs that diamond collar!”

It’s refreshing to hear an actor who’s willing to admit these things. “Well, it’s a strange business. And the satisfaction you get out of the 99 rejections you’ll be subjected to, balanced against that one acceptance, is not all that great. So there has got to be a counterbalance that keeps you in it. You do get to travel if you’re making movies. And I’ve met some amazing, amazing friends through the years. But as a business itself, it truly remains a job to me. I still approach it with a very workmanlike mentality.”

So Hollywood mega-stardom is not a career goal for you? “I feel fortunate and blessed, but I’m very happy that I can go to Starbuck’s and nobody recognizes me. Look at someone like Tom Cruise: The simple joys of going to a barbecue with your family on the Fourth of July or going to a hockey game, all that’s out the window for him. He can’t do it. He’d have to buy Disneyland if he wanted to go to Disneyland. Nobody’s interested in me. No paparazzi snapping shots of me taking out the trash. And I love it that way. Keep it that way and everything will be fine.”

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