Bellamy Young (ABC)
In the last new episode of ABC’s “Scandal,” the president of the United States tells his wife, who’s nine-months pregnant, that he wants a divorce.
It’s never going to happen.
Mellie Grant, that first lady with that bulging bump, played by Bellamy Young, is a deliciously duplicitous diva who is going to “blow your mind,” she says, to keep her husband in line.
“You have no idea how far she will push the edge of the envelope to make sure he stays in the White House.”
And you thought Lady Macbeth went to great lengths to put herself in power.
We already know she will break the law to ensure her position. In a recent episode Mellie committed treason when she forged her husband’s signature — he was in a coma after an assassination attempt — to thwart a power play by the vice president, Sally Langston (Kate Burton).
“Treason!” says Young, with a laugh. “You say potato, and I say potahto. This was an opportunity, and I took it.”
It’s Wednesday afternoon and Young, at home with a bad cold, is cuddled up with her purring cat, Bean, as she explains the psyche of the first lady of “Scandal.”
Mellie is a key player in the pivotal love triangle with her husband, President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn) and Olivia Pope (series star Kerry Washington), DC’s ultimate crisis manager, who is loosely based on political fixer Judy Smith (her clients include Jill Kelley and Monica Lewinsky).
And the tension is at a boiling point.
Do not put it past Mellie to use her pregnancy as a weapon. She has done it before. Last season, Mellie was fake-pregnant as a brilliant political ploy, and this season she’s really pregnant. The pregnancy has gone on forever. When is she going to have this child?
“The baby is imminent,” says Young, 42, “and it will be shocking.”
When Young auditioned for the pilot, her character only had two lines, but she wanted it so badly, she bought a new outfit. “And I hate shopping,” she laughs.
Wearing navy blue clam diggers, a blue button-down shirt, flats and a multicolor “neckerchief,” Young says she was” Camp David fabulous.”
With this get-up and her Southern charm. Young was able to win over “Scandal” creator Shonda Rhimes and co-executive producer Betsy Beers. “She looked camera-ready, was genuinely warm, and had a patrician air perfect for Fitz’s wife, “ Beers says.
For years, Young had been toiling in the theater, in shows such as Randy Newman’s “Faust.” She made her TV debut as Dr. Courtney Evans on the defunct NBC soap “Another World.” She’s had small roles in huge hit films like “Mission Impossible: 3,” and rode a merry-go-round of recurring roles on “The West Wing,” “CSI: Miami,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “NCIS” and “Two and a Half Men.”
Still, she wasn’t a household name. “Scandal” gave her the chance to change all that, even though Young was hired only for a three-episode arc. This year she became a cast regular.
“Mellie is truly a sign of the times,” says Young.” She is a touchstone for gender politics, and as the role expands, it shows the incredible facets of the character as she slides into the algorithm of the show.”
Born Amy Young in Asheville, NC (she had to change her name when she joined SAG), her mother was a teacher and her father was an auditor who died when she was young (her mother’s two subsequent husbands also died). Young says she knows heartbreak, and in early middle-age is just becoming ready to settle down, find a husband and have children.
“You know, I am adopted. My mom and I have had a very particular road, with a lot of death,” she says. “I want to find a man and have a family.”
It isn’t only her own experience that allows her to give such a nuanced performance. Like her character, Young is no dummy.
She graduated from Yale, with dual degrees in English and theater studies. She also studied drama at Oxford, so she saw “Scandal” as an opportunity for a crash course in American History, particularly the life of America’s first ladies. When she plays Mellie, she thinks about Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Edith, called the “secret president” for the role she played in running the government after her husband suffered a stroke. She also calls upon the lives of Jackie Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. And when she thinks of how to achieve the perfect balance between an astute political thinker and first wife, she thinks of Michelle Obama.
“Jackie O was so capable in so many ways,” Young says. “Hillary tried to redefine the role when she got into public policy, and Michelle Obama is able to move smoothly between form and function, style and substance.”
But Young looks to Jackie O, and not Hillary, when it comes to playing a wife whose husband cheats on her.
“We will always wonder: Did she know? Did she not know? What kind of deal did she make with herself to stay as first lady?” she says. “ I don’t think Mellie ever understood the depth of her husband’s affair until he took Olivia to see the Constitution. I realized then that Fitz and Olivia have the kind of love that she and Fitz will never have.
“I know women understand her,” she says. “We have all been the third wheel.”
And yet never underestimate a skilled power player like Mellie Grant.
“She is not a woman who walks through life in a passive way,” Young says. “She will use her last card — and make a major move. What matters to her is that she wins in the end.”
Could that be the cries of a newborn baby in the background?
SCANDAL
Thursday, 10 p.m., ABC