'Sex and the City' actor Chris Noth

Although in the above heading I refer to Chris Noth as "Sex and the City actor", I don't think we discuss the show once. Obsessed though the world may still be with Carrie Bradshaw, the former Mr. Big has other things going on in his life, both stagewise and screenwise, plenty of which makes for great conversation. He and I spoke back in September, so there are some discrepancies with regards to time, mostly concerning the then-somewhat-distant election and his then-still-upcoming return to the stage in the off-Broadway play Farragut North; however, our conversation holds up... and then some. Enjoy this interview.

Hi, Chris. How are you?
Hi. [laughs] Okay. Let’s get started.

So, your manager tells me you’re on your way to London. What for?
It’s for a film award ceremony. I’m presenting, I think, the best actress award. It’s a new award program. That’s all I know.

First let’s talk about the couple of movies you have coming up. One of them is called Frame of Mind, right?
You know what, I’m pretty sure it’s straight to video. I think that movie kind of got destroyed by the director, who’s also the lead actor, so I’ve kind of separated myself from that film. The writer and I are very good friends, but I don’t have much love for that film.

Well, you’re also in My One and Only.
Yeah. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. That was great fun.

So what exactly is that film about?
Actually, it’s loosely based on George Hamilton’s childhood with his mother and their travels in the early fifties. I guess Renee Zellweger is playing a fictional version of his mom, and I’m playing one of her many suitors. She travels all across the country—I guess it’s sort of a comedy/dramedy sort of thing. But it was fun to do. I enjoyed working with her a lot.

How did it come about?
You know, like anything else. My agent. [laughs]

Yeah. Well, most of your recent projects have been based in the here and now and this was set in the 1950s so I imagine it was a fun change of pace.
Yeah. Well, I’ve done some period stuff at different times. Caesar, I did that a few years back. But, yeah, I enjoy periods that are different from the times that we live in, although the fifties weren’t my favorite time. I played the military guy in it, so it was a lot of fun. I really liked the director, Richard Loncraine. He was terrific. Yeah, it was a really nice cameo role. And soon my next project is going back to theatre.

Oh, really!
I’m going to be doing a play with a theatre company this fall called Farragut North. So I’ll be doing that in November. It’s a political play; it’s about the insider sort of shenanigans that go on during a race between the people that run the races, and the sort of dirty tricks and all the things that go along with that to get their candidate elected. It’s sort of like the Karl Roves and those people before they get their position in the White House, and what’s entailed today in getting someone elected. It’s the second political play I’ve done during a presidential election, so that’s kind of an interesting thing, that I’ll have done two political plays during two political elections. So that’s kind of fun.

Well, it’s certainly timely—especially with the magnitude of this election!
Yeah, it’s getting scary. I hear this woman Sarah Palin, actually, people were commenting about how well she did [in the vice presidential debates], unfortunately.

[laughs] Well, it seems like the Republican convention has not been nearly as successful as the Democratic convention—about which I personally am glad.
We’ll see.

We’ll see, we’ll see! So, with this play, you’re also returning to the theatre after several years, so I imagine that’s exciting as well.
Yeah. I mean, I’ve been in this game for a long time so those terms don’t—I just look at the work ahead and what I have to do. You know what I mean? It’s not that I’m not excited; it’s just not that big of a deal, just going with the work that I have in front of me. But I’ve only been away from the stage for three years.

Well, all the same, I imagine preparing for a stage role is different from preparing for a screen role.
Yeah, there’s technical challenges, but that’s why you have four weeks of rehearsal. So you’re dealing with those during the rehearsal, in terms of projection and where your voice is and all that. It’s kind of an unconscious adjustment to make, if you’ve been in it long as I have, you know? I started in theatre and I spent a lot of time in it in my twenties, so it’s a suit I feel comfortable putting on.

Over the years, and not just with your theatre work but with your TV work as well, you’ve done a lot of your work in New York, and an unusual amount of screenwork, between Law and Order and Sex and the City.
Yeah, I would pretty much say that my whole career happened in New York and not in Los Angeles, for better or worse. [laughs] I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Suits me.

I personally would not be able to—I mean, I’m young yet. [laughs] But personally I wouldn’t be able to imagine living anywhere else for an extended period of time.
Yeah. That said, I don’t know. The New York I knew and loved has all been sort of destroyed. It’s gone. It’s not the city that I struggled in as an actor any more; it’s become a big mall. So it’s a place to work for me, and I have some close friends, but the city has lost all the charm for me. You know, I travel from it a lot more now. In fact, I’m in California at least half the year. And it’s been homogenized to such an extent that it’s just painful to see it sometimes. It’s a shopping mall, you know? It’s just really terrible what’s happened.

Yeah, it’s unfortunate. I mean, the whole world is changing, but New York is large enough and important enough that it’s among the cities that change the most.
It was always a city that allowed its character to shine through and was always oblivious to the sort of, you know, fads, architecturally and everything else. But now it’s totally given into it, because it was sort of bought off by Wall Street money, and so a lot of it just has been demolished, the neighborhoods and everything else—I’m talking about Manhattan. People call it progress, because they breed really—I mean, it’s impossible for artists to live in this city. It’s too expensive. So, basically, it’s just a bunch of tourists and shoppers.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous.
That doesn’t make for an interesting city. I would say that the city government has totally failed to protect us against the sort of greed that’s taken our city from us. People are just sort of waking up to it now and going, “Wait, wait a minute, what happened? I don’t understand! This is not why I came to New York!” [laughs] “I came to New York to go to Bed Bath and Beyond—” Whatever. You know? So New York’s basically over as a cultural reference, as far as I’m concerned. I still love to do theatre there and everything, but it’s pretty much finished beyond the dollar. It’s a place to make money and where people come in and shop.

Yeah. I mean, I’m saying this as a teenager so of course I’m paying more attention to what goes on for people my age, but it seems like the most interesting things I can find going on in the city are the ones being run by friends of friends, not by any larger organizations.
Yeah… you know, there are things, you just have to seek it out, but there’s not as much of a life on the street any more as there used to be. You used to be able to find some amazing vitality on the streets of New York and an amazing mix of people—and it was also a lot more dangerous. So people want to be safe and shop, basically, now. So that’s too bad. In the end, also, it’s sort of a global—I don’t know. Apparently no one wants to be different. They want to do the same things, look the same way, go to the same stores, so there’s that uniformity that’s really the opposite of what New York has always represented. Anyway, I’m going to have to board the plane in a few minutes, is there anything else you wanted to…?

Yeah, I just wanted to touch on Law and Order. You’re not returning for the next season, are you?
No. Jeff Goldblum’s taking over, actually.

How come you decided not to return?
It was actually sort of a mutual thing. I got to the point where if I was going to return they were going to have to pay me a lot more money, which they couldn’t afford to do. The group of people I worked with, I really loved, and I couldn’t find a better partner than Julianne Nicholson, and that’s the hardest part, losing some people on the crew, the wonderful camaraderie there. Eric Bogosian, I really enjoyed working with him. But, basically, the whole structure of Law and Order… I got bored with it. It was so story-oriented that even if you gave something a little different it often wouldn’t even end up in the show because they don’t have an eye to see it. Basically, it just got too monotonous. It was no different than factory work, except you’re putting out episodes and you’re getting paid very well to do it. So the bottom line is the money is great, it was in New York City, but I was feeling depressed by it. There’s no other way to put it. I just got the feeling it didn’t matter, you know? It was sort of like fast food, no matter how you looked at it. I felt like there could be anybody doing the part and it wouldn’t matter, and that kind of hurts your psyche. You want to feel like you make a difference. They could replace me with Bozo the Clown and people would still watch it.

I would like to see Law and Order with Bozo the Clown.
Yeah. I mean, I’m being facetious, obviously.

No, obviously.
You know, all the TV guys look the same now. All the TV detectives look the same to me. You wanna just take a shot at doing something different, rather than putting people to sleep by your show! [laughs]

This concludes our interview with Chris Noth. Keep an eye out for his upcoming film My One and Only, which is due out sometime in 2009.