Once you play a character as iconic as Ally McBeal, it’s hard to follow it up. Having kids trumps any typecasting though, so Calista Flockhart spent five years raising her son after her last show ended. Now she’s back on TV in ABC’s Brothers & Sisters, created by Jon Robin Baitz.
Calista Flockhart Talks Brothers & Sisters
“I have a relationship with Robbie that I’ve had for many years doing theater with him in New York,” said Flockhart. “So I had a certain amount of trust. I think he is extraordinary and really intelligent and I thought the characters were so smart, and they banter and they’re smart and they’re funny. They’re complicated grown-ups.”
Hey, Ally McBeal had smart characters who bantered. This is kind of different though. “Ally McBeal, as you know, is very high comedy. Sometimes it was dramatic and sad and poignant, but for the most part, we weren’t living in reality. This is a very real show about very real issues and that attracted me.”
Flockhart plays Kitty Walker, a right wing political pundit. That alone could provide some family conflict. “Her political views are fundamentally different from mine for the most part, but it is really interesting and compelling to learn something about somebody else’s point of view, and that definitely attracted me to the part.”
Now she’ll be a working mommy for the first time in her five-year-old’s life, but perhaps growing up with two actor parents made little Liam sympathetic. “Fortunately, it’s been a rather easy period of adjustment. For whatever reason, we talk about it a lot and he’s really okay with it. He always says, ‘Well, you’re a mom but you’re an actress too.’ So for me it was exciting. It was a hard period of adjustment. I can’t say that I had an easy time but he had a pretty easy time.”
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