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When creating “Political Animals,” a catty USA miniseries about a powerful political family living among a nest of vipers, creator Greg Berlanti found many real-life inspirations for his characters: Bill and Hillary Clinton; the Kennedys. The show’s main character, Elaine Barrish Hammond (Sigourney Weaver), a former first lady who runs for president, loses, then becomes secretary of state, draws heavily on Hillary Clinton’s history of achievement and heartbreak.
The one twist is that the TV Hillary — we mean “Elaine” — divorces her cheating husband, Donald “Bud” Hammond. And isn’t “Bud” just like you know who?
Berlanti, the mastermind behind ABC’s sudsy family drama “Brothers & Sisters,” says he bases his characters as much on Madeleine Albright and LBJ as on the most visible American power couple of the past 20 years.
“The personal lives of politicians was something that’s always been really intriguing to me,” says Berlanti, who speaks to The Post, along with producer Laurence Mark and several members of the cast, at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo.
“When Larry and I started developing the script, it just seemed like, whether in the vein of something like a ‘Primary Colors’ or maybe even ‘The Devil Wears Prada,’ you’re clearly in a world where you wanna grab some of the narrative of some very public faces.”
To that end, Berlanti and Mark relied heavily on the memoir of Clinton-era secretary of state Albright (“Madam Secretary”) in crafting Elaine’s character. But despite being based on two accomplished women, Elaine is more than a policy wonk, and the pair saw Weaver as the perfect actress to convey her complexity.
“Sigourney doesn’t get to do comedy that much, and we know she can. So she also does physical comedy here,” says Mark, who produced the hit movie “Working Girl,” in which Weaver was the butt of many jokes. Referring to moments such as the one where Elaine swats her son on the head with a newspaper, then immediately after caringly fixes his hair, Mark says, “It’s always fun to show the different colors of actresses and we hadn’t seen that color [from her] in a while.”
Bud Hammond, producers say, was closely modeled on Lyndon Johnson.
The former president, played with a heavy drawl by Irish actor Ciaran Hinds, is a gregarious sort who is still much-loved by American people, despite his horndog personality.
By contrast, the role of Elaine’s cantankeous, hard-drinking mother, Margaret, doesn’t seem to have been “inspired” by a famous person. Berlanti based her on one of his grandmothers, a torch singer. Ellen Burstyn had trouble with some of Margaret’s dialogue, as when she remarks to Susan Berg (Carla Gugino), a smug, smarmy journalist, “You must give one hell of a hummer, lady.”
“We had quite a conversation, Greg and I, about the language,” Burstyn says. “We traded some — ‘I’ll give you one of those for one of those.’ I was OK with ‘hummer.’ There were some other ones that were harder. But we have a nice system worked out.”
Burstyn was more intrigued that Margaret was such a lush. “I have to get to why she’s still drinking,” she says. “Most women I know who drank earlier in their lives got to a point where they started to protect their health, and those bad habits fell away. Hers haven’t, so I figure she’s dealing with a lot of pain she’s looking to turn off.”
Susan Berg, Berlanti says, was an amalgamation of “the female columnists and journalists I read and admire.” Really? Early in the pilot, we learn that Susan has blackmailed Elaine into cooperating for a newspaper profile by telling her that she knows scandalous information about her gay son, T.J. (Sebastian Stan).
Gugino says that as one of the first scenes filmed, it allowed a lot of pressure that had built up during pre-production to come to a boil.
“It’s been a long time since I had such mounting anxiety before shooting something,” she says. “There was a point where I was like, I’m going to explode if this does not get out of my head, and I can start being this person instead of thinking about her. When we finished the scene, I thought, thank God that’s out of me. And Sigourney’s like, ‘I know. It’s kinda like a scab that needed to be picked.’ ”
“Political Animals” comes to us in an election year where one film about campaign infighting, “Game Change,” drew a tremendous response from viewers and much commentary in the media, perhaps because its subject, Sarah Palin, was all too real.
Berlanti and Mark are convinced that people will tune in “Political Animals” to watch the intriguing characters and not just the backstabbing.
“We have more scenes around kitchen tables and dining room tables than we do around conference tables,” says Mark. “That’s what the show is about. It’s about the masks that we see, and what happens when those masks come off.”
POLITICAL ANIMALS
Today, 10 p.m., USA