The titular star of Fox’s “Raising Hope” is the baby, Hope — but the show’s real heart is stage and screen star Martha Plimpton.
As Virginia Chance — mother to Jimmy (Lucas Neff) and grandmother to Hope — Plimpton is the person who holds everything together.
Virginia, a child-bride herself, is not thrilled when her 23-year-old son knocks up Lucy, who, it turns out, is wanted for the murder of several previous boyfriends. Lucy gives birth to Hope (initially named Princess Beyonce) while in jail, and is then executed for murder. (Played out in sitcom form, this is not as horrible as it sounds.)
Jimmy steps up and decides to keep his six-month-old baby, even over the objections of his mom and dad, Burt (Garret Dillahunt). Jimmy’s addled grandmother, Maw Maw (Cloris Leachman, “who is out of her mind in the best possible sense,” says Plimpton), lives with the family as well, although she’s barely aware that Hope is there.
Plimpton, 39, the daughter of Shelley Plimpton and Keith Carradine, has been acting since she was 8 years old. Her breakout role came in Steven Spielberg’s “The Goonies” in 1985. In 1986, she starred with future boyfriend River Phoenix in “The Mosquito Coast.”
Since then, Plimpton has been working steadily, in television, film and on stage. In the past few years, much of her work has been in the New York theater, starring in Lincoln Center’s “The Coast of Utopia,” for which she was nominated for a Tony and Drama Desk Award, and also headlining “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on Broadway. She earned her second and third Tony nominations starring in “Top Girls” and “Pal Joey.”
Plimpton was not the first choice of show creator/executive producer Greg Garcia when he considered actresses to play Virginia. “You don’t think grandmother with her. She looks younger than she is,” he says.
“But when I was looking for actresses, I went back and did the math. For someone to have been 16 when she had Jimmy, she would have had to have been born in 1970. I looked up actresses who were born in that year, and when I realized Martha was on that list I was so mad at myself.
“Why did it take me so long to realize she would be perfect for the role?”
Still, with her impressive resume, it’s a bit surprising that Plimpton would want to star in a sitcom, which can require a long commitment.
“I made this decision very consciously,” she says. “In the past, I didn’t want to commit to something that I wasn’t going to have fun doing. But with this situation, the time was right for me to try a new thing.”
What attracted Plimpton to Garcia’s show and to Virginia was that “she loves her family but she’s not really sentimental,” she says. “She’s not a long-suffering, annoyed wife either, and I’m glad because I’m so bored of that. She’s not a typical sitcom mom who is exhausted by the ne’er-do-well boys of the house. She’s got her own self and I really like that.”
“Raising Hope,” which follows “Glee” Tuesdays at 9 p.m., isn’t exactly burning up the ratings charts, but it’s doing well enough that it was the first show this fall to merit a full-season order.
“We were all really proud of that,” says Plimpton.
“If you’ve been in this business for five minutes, you know to have no expectations of anything or anyone.”