Entertainment

High times on ‘Nurse Jackie’

Edie Falco jabs a needle into Julia Ormond’s butt on the set of “Nurse Jackie.” Ormond, long dark hair hanging in front of her face, lets out a deep groan as Falco, playing high-functioning drug addict Jackie Peyton, goes about her business with her usual, dutiful lack of cheer.

In the cramped control room at Kaufman Astoria Studios, where the edgy comedy is deep into its second-season of filming, the director, Paul Feig, asks for another take. Ormond is playing a mysterious woman on the show this season, the old flame of a major character.

The control room is situated in one of the examining rooms in All Saints, the hospital where Jackie works. In addition to Feig, there are three executive producers — Liz Brixius, Linda Wallem and Richie Jackson — a script supervisor and a production assistant taking up space in black director’s chairs; yet, no one is getting on each other’s nerves.

A former crew member — a young woman who is about to have a baby any minute — pops in and gets hugs all around. The script supervisor, Deirdre Horgan, tries to predict the sex of the baby by the shape of the woman’s belly (Horgan says it will be a boy).

After the scene wraps, the exec producers talk about their first season on the show. “We were incredibly humbled by the success,” says Wallem.

“We made the show we wanted to make and we had a great time making it,” says Jackson, who is also Falco’s manager.

“Because Edie was involved with picking the cast, there was such a special energy around it,” Brixius says.

The producers found in Falco, 46, an actress with an enormous reservoir of good will to tell their story of an extremely competent person who manages her commitments to her job and patients and family while living in her own personal Valley of the Dolls.

The depth of Jackie’s addiction was most powerfully rendered in the harrowing scene where she broke her own finger with a hammer to hook up with her dealer, Eddie, the hospital pharmacist and her lover played by Paul Schulze — Father Phil of “The Sopranos.”

“She takes the ring on and off when she goes into the hospital. So what would happen if she couldn’t get that ring off?” says Brixius. “She knows she has to get the ring off to hook up with Eddie. The only way to get it off is to saw it off. But then what are you going to tell your husband? What kind of excuse could you have?

“I haven’t broken a bone but I have gone to extremes. It’s part of the fun of being an addict,” says Brixius, who, like Wallem and Falco, is a recovering substance abuser. “Edie really gets it. We all remember those days. How much energy it takes to cover up a lie.”

Falco, in a separate conversation, says she didn’t know how hardcore Jackie was going to be when the show started and was amazed when she read the hammer scene.

“When behavior like that makes sense to her, you know Jackie’s gone,” Falco says, her hair grown in from last season’s severe cut. Playing such an unstable character did give her pause, though. “From the standpoint of who I really am, it’s upsetting and it’s so creepy. Because she’s lost. She can travel pretty far off the deep end and still fit within the realm of normal behavior.”

In the first episode, a few months have passed since Jackie’s apparent overdose. She’s cut ties with Eddie and clings to her family. Her challenge this year is to keep her husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), from finding out that Eddie was her lover, but she can’t quite get rid of him.

Falco says the tone of the show won’t change much this year. The writers say that the show will continue its “serpentine” storytelling path of going “dark, then light and very broad,” says Brixius. Walking around the set, Falco waves at the crew like the queen of England. She looks about as regal as you can in blue nurses’ scrubs.

“I hope we continue to enjoy ourselves as much as we did. That’s the only thing we can have any control over,” she says. “There was a level of excitement about the work environment.”