IT all comes down to chemistry. That’s how Andrea Roth, the beautiful blond 39-year-old actress who plays Janet Gavin on the FX show “Rescue Me,” characterizes her often tortured, always mercurial relationship with Denis Leary’s character, firefighter Tommy Gavin.
It would be a big understatement to say that Janet and Tommy have been through a lot together.
They’ve endured the death of a child, a divorce, infidelity, spousal rape, prescription drug addictions, kidnappings, erectile dysfunction, renegade daughters, alcoholism, verbal abuse, and just about everything else that human beings can conceive of doing to each other or themselves. They’ve screamed, yelled, set stuff on fire, hit each other over the heads with frying pans. In a recent episode, Janet hits Tommy with her car.
And both of them keep coming back for more.
“I think Tommy is a sexy, charismatic, funny partner,” says Roth, when The Post spoke to her on the phone.
“He can be a complete pain in the ass, but there is this base attraction. They have this great chemistry, incredible fireworks between them – and somehow, despite everything, they haven’t killed that yet.”
Life hasn’t been good lately for Janet Gavin.
For the last season, she’s been lying in the house in a cloud of postpartum depression, disinterested in her newborn baby. Roth says she often films episodes with unwashed hair and on only a few hours of sleep, so that she’ll look the part. Janet is still grappling with the death of her lover – Tommy’s younger brother – while living with Tommy in a supremely awkward platonic arrangement.
In a recent episode, Tommy gives Janet’s baby to her Italian arch-nemesis, Sheila (Callie Thorne), for a large sum of money. After all, the baby isn’t his . . . it’s his brother’s. Janet doesn’t seem able to take care of the baby, and his brother’s ghost keeps counseling him to drop the baby in the river. Also, money has been scarce. Why not hand him over to his dead cousin’s pyromaniac wife – who also happens to be his former lover?
As it turns out, this move could be the thing that wakes Janet up from her emotional pain. She drives over the Sheila’s house and – in an award-winning ‘Bad Parent of the Year’ move – uses her adolescent daughter to get the baby back.
Is this the beginning of a turnaround for Janet?
“I hope so,” says Roth with a laugh. “Because I can’t cry anymore.”
Roth’s character is like the Irish Carmela Soprano, the put-upon wife tormented by a troubled, passionate husband.
“That comparison is ridiculously flattering,” says Roth. “Though I agree that there are similarities; such troubled characters. But Carmela was not as messed up as Janet.”
Roth’s scenes with Leary have an incredible physicality to them, a rawness which would be a challenge for any actor to portray. But Roth – who has never studied acting formally – says it’s relatively easy to get in the moment.
“Denis is such an alive, immediate actor,” she says. “He’s completely engaging. I’ve found that the biggest scenes – the so-called rape scene, the kitchen scene – those are easy. We just go, ‘Ok, now I’m going to grab a frying pan, now he throws me on the couch’ and we talk about it and then we just do it and start filming.”
So which came first, the crazy relationship or the crazy individuals? It’s hard to say. “They have these lousy parameters for a relationship,” says Roth. “You can only do as well as the skills you have, and they don’t have good skills. I don’t think they know how to live without each other.”
RESCUE ME
Wednesday, 10 p.m., FX