Having alienated her husband and best friend, the walls are closing in on Nurse Jackie (Edie Falco). (
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When last we saw Nurse Jackie, she was trapped. Her husband and best friend had just confronted her with proof that she was a drug addict. Hiding in the bathroom, Jackie tried to imagine herself repenting and addressing a group of strangers at a 12-step meeting. Please. She took one look in the mirror and said, “B–w me.”
On paper, Nurse Jackie is “not someone you want to spend one day a week with,” says Edie Falco, 47. But Falco’s peers disagree. Last year, she won her fourth Emmy, as Best Actress in a Comedy Series, for the offbeat Showtime series. It was an historic win: she became the first woman to win Emmys for a comedy and a drama series (“The Sopranos”).
“Nurse Jackie” has already been picked up for a fourth season and next month Falco will star on Broadway. Producer Scott Rudin has wanted to work with her for years and offered her a job by sending her manager, Richie Jackson, an e-mail: “Ben Stiller. Edie. ‘House of Blue Leaves.’ What do you think?”
The production opens April 25 at the Walter Kerr Theatre. “I’m very, very excited,” Falco says.
Despite her success, the fear that she might have to support herself as a waitress again is always at the back of her mind. Sitting in a dark, empty examining room on the “Nurse Jackie” set at Kaufman-Astoria Studios, she says, “I still can’t believe that I don’t have to go back for brunch.”
Paul Schultze, who plays Jackie’s dealer and lover, Eddie, and famously played Carmela’s priest, Father Phil, on “The Sopranos,” has known Falco for 30 years. Back in the day, she was living in a studio on West 4th Street with a hot plate and “debt up to her eyeballs,” he says. One day, when Schulze was a bartender at the same restaurant where Falco was waitressing, she came up to him and said, “I’m done. If life doesn’t support me as an actor, then I’ll starve.”
Now, Falco has nannies and an assistant to help her run the show and take care of her kids, Anderson, 5, and Macy, 2. But she’s still very much a girl from Long Island, and thinking, now that she’s had a chance to have summer vacations out there, of relocating from downtown Manhattan.
“The schools are more manageable. The school situation here in the city is so psychotic,” she says. “And it’s unbelievably expensive. The idea of waking up and seeing trees — I hate to say it, but I’m ready.”
The atmosphere at Kaufman-Astoria is low-key and convivial. “If you can make Edie laugh, it’s a good day,” says executive producer Linda Wallem, a veteran TV writer whose was once Liza Minnelli’s chauffeur.
She and her writing and producing partner Liz Brixius plan to use the supporting characters such as Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli), Mrs. Akalitis (Anna Deveare Smith) and Zoey (Merritt Wever) to make the audience laugh more because if anything, the defiant Jackie is headed to a dangerous, more underground place.
“We painted her into an unforgivable corner,” says Brixius, a tall, wiry woman with spiked hair. “She’s going to be, ‘Don’t f–k with me.’”
When Falco first hit on “The Sopranos,” fans would call out to her out on the street, “Hey, Carmela.” Now they say, “We love Nurse Jackie.” But sometimes Falco gets irritated. “People say, ‘Oh, we love Nurse Jackie. She does all the drugs we do.’ Jesus Christ. You people are so missing the point.”
Nurse Jackie is someone she thinks about only at work. “There’s her and there’s me and never the twain shall meet. I used to lose [perspective about acting]. I thought that was meant I was good, but it meant that I was stupid,” she says with a laugh.
NURSE JACKIE
Monday, 10 p.m., Showtime