They Would Kill for An Emmy

You came very close.
GRIFFITHS: Your left eye was half weeping, Michael.
HALL: They may have been watering.
GRIFFITHS: I think the truth is, we're all probably nominated for our body of work. I don't know if you can do a s––t job for 21 episodes and then do one award-winning episode. I think it's sustaining a character and running the marathon of the character, which every actor at this table is trying to do every season. That's what the Emmys are acknowledging: how you keep the character moving over three, four or five seasons. That's the Olympic feat. I think our focus is more on that than, you know, "This is my Emmy episode."

Do you watch yourselves on your shows?
PARKER: I watch my show. I feel a sense of responsibility towards it. I took it on to be the lead of it; I want it to be as good as it can be. I don't watch movies that I'm in, because I feel like once they're done, they're out there and I don't really care. But this has a true line. It has punctuation. It's a sentence. It's 13 episodes, and you want to know where it's going and you want to be able to follow it.

Michael, you once said that when you watched yourself on "Six Feet Under" you thought you looked like an alien.
HALL: That was when I saw the pilot. It was the first time that I had really seen myself in anything. And I felt like it was a show populated by real, living, breathing humans, and there was this alien in the middle of that world. But I've gotten better at being relatively objective after watching myself, maybe watching "Six Feet Under" over the years.

Do you ever feel like you look like an alien anymore?
HALL: Every now and then, I'll have an "I look like an alien" flare-up. But they're less severe, and the flare-ups don't last as long.
PARKER: Have you ever done a scene and watched it and thought, "God, I'm so much better than I thought I was!" I don't think that's ever happened to me.
SLATTERY: Sometimes I'm relieved. I thought I f–––ed something up, and go home, and you feel like s––t. I'm in the shower thinking, "I should've done this. Why did I do that?" And then you watch it and you go, "You know, it's really not that bad."
PARKER: When I did that, I came home and asked to shoot it again. Twice.

What do you mean?
PARKER: I was home and I was in the shower. No, I was not in the shower, I don't know where I was, but I just knew. You know when you get home and go, "Now I get it." And I went the next day and I said, "I understand it now." And God bless them, they let me shoot it again.
GRIFFITHS: Don't you think with theater you can have a better sensitivity and really know if something is working? In theater I've never felt, That was crap.
SLATTERY: In theater there's no disputing there's the silence in that room or the tension or whatever it is when that moment works. And you don't get that when a camera is involved. It's more of a feel or guess or whatever. The feeling that you've done right, and that goes for the 500,000 people sitting there and there isn't a doubt in the room.

Speaking of intimacy, John, didn't you get your first big break in a play where you had to do a nude scene? Terrence McNally's "Lisbon Traviata."
PARKER: Was that you?
SLATTERY: That would be me. It was the first job I've ever gotten in New York, with Nathan Lane. You know, it was a big deal. I remember being on a pay phone standing on Eighth Avenue, being told that I got the job and hanging up and saying, "Holy s––t, I have to take my clothes off." It was embarrassing. My father came to see it, and he was sitting in the front row and you could hear him clearing his throat, slinking down in his chair.
WILSON: I've been naked. Just for a couple of nights as the understudy in the national tour of "Six Degrees of Separation." I played the gay hustler.

Really?
WILSON: Yeah, and I was terrified that I was going to get a boner. Can you say boner in NEWSWEEK?

We are about to find out.
WILSON: But in fact, quite the opposite happened. [Laughter] It was very cold in the theater and I was very nervous.