Entertainment

CLOSE CALL

“There’s this perverse thing that if you go to TV, it means your other career is over,” says Glenn Close. “It’s such BS. It really is BS. This is an incredibly creative, well-written show and I’m home.”

The celebrated actress is bluntly weighing in on her crossover to television and her new series, “Damages,” a legal mystery that debuts on FX Thursday night. Close, 60, plays Patty Hewes, a ruthless litigator, the kind of patrician puppeteer she can play without breaking a sweat. With her shark’s smile and deceptively soft speaking voice, Close, as she has shown in her greatest film roles, can still send shivers down your spine.

And she loves it. Tell Close that Patty Hewes is going to make people lock up their pets again the way they did after that poor bunny was found boiling on the stove in “Fatal Attraction” and she lets out a wicked gale of laughter. She’s positively giddy that she’s getting such a rise out of people again. “Patty is so wonderfully perverse,” she says.

“This is a great part. I don’t know if you know who Ann Roth is, she’s one of the great costume designers. I’ve known her my whole career. She’s designed clothes for me for the theater and she did ‘Garp.’ She’s so smart and I gave her the script, the pilot script to read, because I wanted her opinion and she said, ‘You are lucky to get this.'”

Close’s contentment is evident once you sit across from her on a couch in her dressing room. The actress is friendly and relaxed, much softer and funkier than the uptight, manipulative characters she often plays in the movies. She’s dressed down for this non-working day in black running pants and a black T-shirt, her tousled blond hair framing her freckled face and ocean-blue eyes. She has her small white dogs, Bill and Jake, with her; she’s brought an electric piano from home, which she’s learning to play.

Like many actors starting a brand-new venture, Close rhapsodizes about everything associated with the “Damages” – the writing, the cast, the role she’s playing – but will admit the fast-paced world of TV production keeps her on her toes.

“The whole aspect of episodic TV is new to me in that I don’t know where we’re going,” she says with a hearty laugh. “It’s tricky, but I really like it. The guys here are very clever so I feel like I’m in good hands. And I’m at home so what could be better?”

The importance of working in New York cannot be stressed enough. The five-month shooting schedule keeps Close near third husband David Shaw, a biotech entrepreneur, and daughter, Annie Maude. The series is shot at Steiner Studios, the sparkling, state-of-the-art production facility in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Close’s dressing room offers views of the lower Manhattan skyline, East River bridges and some Navy Yard equipment still used to repair ships.

Her involvement with the show began shortly after she completed a one-season role as a detective on “The Shield,” the long-running L.A. cop series. Show creators Todd Kessler, Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman report that once they pitched the idea for the show to the top brass at FX, Close was suggested for the role. The creative trio had a three-hour meeting with their future star and explained their vision for the show; she gave them notes.

“If you want legal counsel of this sort, you want Patty Hewes,” says Todd Kessler, a former writer and producer for “The Sopranos.”

And if you want your show to have a fighting chance, you want Glenn Close to star in it.

While Kessler and his partners went off to research female attorneys and write their script, Close did her own homework. She met with some of the top women lawyers in New York: Mary Jo White, Lorna Scofield and Patricia Hynes.

“They were fascinating to talk to, just the whole issue of what it’s like to keep your power. It does make a difference for a woman,” Close says. “It’s a hard road. I heard some stories about meeting a client for the first time and the client saying, ‘Oh, you’re a woman.’ I find that interesting. And the cost, what did it cost them to get [to the top].”

What it costs Patty to stay at the top is her relationship with her teenaged son. As she tells her new associate, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), in the first episode, “Kids are like clients. They want all of you all the time.” But Patty doesn’t dwell upon what she can’t fix. “Damages” will concentrate on a single case over the course of the season and Patty’s efforts will be directed at bringing down Arthur Frobisher, a billionaire who is being sued by his employees over squandered pensions.

Frobisher is played by Ted Danson. It’s the first time Close has worked with the popular TV actor since they played husband and wife in “Something About Amelia” the groundbreaking 1984 TV movie about incest. Even then, Close had the sense to sign on when she read the solid script.

“Everybody was telling me, ‘Don’t do TV, it will ruin your career,'” Close recalls. “And I never quite understood that because I thought, Isn’t it about what comes out of your mouth? Isn’t it about what the writing is? I thought that was a really well written script. And it ended up making a huge impact.”

If anything, Close’s quarter-century relationship with TV has allowed her many opportunities to shine. She produced and starred the western story “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” won an Emmy for playing a gay military officer in “Serving in Silence: the Margarethe Cammermeyer Story” and, most recently, played Eleanor of Aquitaine in Showtime’s production of “The Lion in Winter.”

In some ways, the FX series is the culmination of Close’s long relationship with the medium. She kept her hand in all these years and she finally has a series of her own. “Damages” has a keen sense of black comedy and honors her greatest screen performances, with a few clever references to “Fatal Attraction” in the first episode Patty Hewes herself is really a modern update of Close’s best role, the magnificently evil Marquise de Merteuil in “Dangerous Liaisons,” the French aristocrat who set who sent her ex-lover to take the virginity of a young woman before her wedding day.

Asked why she has such an affinity for fierce women, Glenn Close just shrugs her shoulders and laughs. “People seem to see me that way,” she says. “I don’t know why because I’m really very nice.”

DAMAGES

Tuesday, 10 p.m., FX