Addicts can make a person furious. Actress Julie White, who’s playing Nurse Jackie’s AA sponsor on the Showtime black comedy, now in its sixth season, got so angry at Edie Falco’s character that she uttered one of those words so offensive that she later had to dub a substitute expletive: bitch.
“It’s not that she’s gonna die,” says White, 52. “It’s that she could kill some other people too.”
The veteran theater actress joined the “Jackie” cast after the cancellation of the NBC comedy “Go On,” in which she co-starred with Matthew Perry. She had worked with show writer Liz Flahive on a play years ago, but hadn’t counted on the material being so dark.
“Filming it, I felt a lot of anxiety,” she says over breakfast in her neighborhood, Park Slope. “It was a really good day when I got to be done. Dealing with addiction is so frustrating. Probably all of us tangentially have dealt with addicts. We all belong in Al-Anon,” she says cheerfully.
White is frankly amazed that Falco has played the role for so long, able to throw back her head and “howl with laughter” on set and then leave it behind at the end of the day.
“It’s kind of amazing,” White says. “If I was playing that part I think I’d be banging my head against the wall.”
White got first-hand experience of dealing with real-life addiction when she co-starred with Brett Butler on ABC’s “Grace Under Fire,” a series she left after four years because she just could not deal.
“They originally hired Mary Kay Place to play that part. I’ve seen her since and told her she dodged a bullet,” White says.
How bad was it? She lets out a brief, sinister laugh.
“I did sign a document that said I would not talk about it. It didn’t have a sell-by date so I guess I don’t have anything to say about it.”
After a pause, White continues, “It was a learning experience and I did do it for four years and I was a single parent of a small child. It was a great blessing. But in some ways, it was really, really hard.”
White’s daughter, Alexandra, now lives in San Francisco and White, who is divorced, is itching to do another play. She has about a million friends in the theater since moving to New York to study at Fordham University. One of them, actor John Benjamin Hickey (“The Big C”) literally followed White to Fordham from Texas State University.
“I wanted people to talk about me the way they were talking about Julie White,” says Hickey by phone from the set of “The Manhattan Project” in New Mexico. “I didn’t know her from Adam but I wanted to be like her. I followed her to Fordham. If there’s anybody who can get to the heart of the scene and circle the joke, it’s Julie.”
Until White books her next play (she won a Best Actress Tony for her role as a Hollywood talent agent in “The Little Dog Laughed”), she’s going to concentrate on her next move — out of Brooklyn.
“I just bought a house up the Hudson, right below Peekskill, in the town of Cortlandt,” she says. “The house used to be owned by the great Yiddish actress Molly Picon. I’m going to try living up there and see if I like it.
“Brooklyn may be over,” she says, laughing. “That’s what I’m telling myself.”