People are afraid of Chandra Wilson. In the supermarket, they give her a wide berth. “The expectation is that I am mean and people are cautious,” says Wilson, who has spent the last four years playing Dr. Miranda Bailey, a doctor with a gift for terrifying interns, startling viewers and giving the medical soap opera “Grey’s Anatomy” its tough-talking, soulful center.
Wilson laughs – giggles, really – sounding bubbling, cheerful and nothing like her character, who could cut you to shreds with one scathing comeuppance. No wonder people keep their distance.
“I used to think that people were being so respectful, you know? Really kind. Very aware of boundaries. It turns out they were just scared.”
What makes the public’s fear so funny to Wilson is that she only stands five feet tall and says she “could be squashed like a bug in a second.” Furthermore, she insists, she is nothing like Dr. Bailey, even when she wants to be.
“I still can’t call her up when I want her to be there,” says Wilson, who is 38 and the mother of three children, ages 14, 9, and 2. “Like when I’m in line at the supermarket [and someone is bothering me]. I’m thinking, ‘What would Dr. Bailey do at this moment?’ But there are no cameras there. And she doesn’t show up.”
But the truth is that Wilson does share some striking similarities with her my-way-or-the-highway character. For one thing, they’re both fiercely guarded about their private lives. Ask Wilson about the man she’s been living with for almost 20 years, the father of her three children, and she is adamant about protecting him. She won’t tell you his name. She won’t even tell you if they’re married. What she will say is that they met in 1988 “when he was a security guard at my school.”
Another similarity is that Wilson wastes no time cutting to the chase. Ask her about the work stoppage that is crippling her hit show and in short order, she gives you a simple, powerful plan of attack.
“These are really important issues that are going to affect the industry for at least the next generation,” she says. “So it doesn’t make sense to wait for a 3-year business plan in order to figure out what could potentially be the profit or loss from new media. You could come up with a formula today: If we make money, we all make money. If we don’t make money, none of us do. You’d think practical minds would prevail.”
Hers always does. Hard-working from the start, Wilson was born and raised in Houston, Texas, graduating from that city’s High School for the Visual and Performing Arts. Then she headed straight to New York, where she got her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She’s done Broadway (“Caroline, Or Change”) and had a number of small roles in films (1993’s “Philadelphia”) and TV shows including “Law & Order,” “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.”
But her practical nature (“I had to know where my next paycheck was coming from,” she says) also led her to spend eight years (1996- 2004) as a loyal employee of New York’s Deutsche Bank. She worked nights and weekends in their document-processing department, “creating all of their documents for mergers and acquisitions,” she says. She became a whiz on the computer after shunning high tech most of her life. “I didn’t want to hear anything about any Internet,” she says. “But I learned so much.”
What she’s learning these days, she says, is the true make-up of her compelling “Grey’s” character. But as steely as the surgeon dubbed “The Nazi” can be, she can also be achingly vulnerable. Dr. Bailey’s all-too-human side started to show when she let Dr. Izzy Stevens (Katherine Heigl) get too close to her doomed heart patient, when she was (briefly) passed up for chief resident, and when her husband decided he was tired of waiting for her to drop the scalpel and come home. And now, in the last remaining original episode of “Grey’s” to air until the writers’ strike is settled, her child’s life hangs in the balance.
“This may end up being the toughest year of her life,” says Wilson. “As much as everyone wants to pigeonhole her [as a tough cookie], this is a three-dimensional human being. Right when you think you know her, there’s more.”
But you could definitely go up and say “hi.”
GREY’S ANATOMY
Thursday, 9 p.m., ABC