"With the iPhone, everybody could take a great picture and it kind of broke my heart." - Paget Brewster
Paget Brewster doesn’t look like herself on Another Period. The new Comedy Central show, a spoof of Downton Abbey and reality TV shows, has Brewster playing the spinster mother of two party girl socialites at the turn of the century. They are played by Riki Lindhome and Natasha Leggero, who created the show. Another Period premieres June 23 and airs Tuesday at 10:30 on Comedy Central. You can watch the first episode online now.
Brewster just wrapped the sixth season of Community which aired on Yahoo! Her longest TV stint was on Criminal Minds but she left the show and has been pursuing other genres, like comedy.
We know Paget Brewster as a photographer. She actually shot some sets for Suicide Girls, including this one of Erin, and the self portrait below. When I got a chance to interview Brewster for Another Period, I got the scoop on her photography. Also the pronunciation of her name reminded me of one of my movie obsessions, last year’s critically maligned Winter’s Tale!
Suicide Girls: I don’t know if you’ve seen or read Winter’s Tale.
Paget Brewster: Oh yeah.
SG: So you remember the scene where William Hurt tells Colin Farrell it’s pronounced Claret, like Fillet or Wallet. You’re Paget like Wallet, right?
PB: It is Paget, yes. Exactly. You know, I didn’t read the second half of the book. It goes into something completely different. Did you read both?
SG: After I saw the movie, I had to see how crazy the book was so I read the whole thing.
PB: The first 400 pages are the story that they made the movie based on but then there’s a book two within Winter’s Tale that becomes something else. I didn’t get it. I was so confused. So it doesn’t have anything to do with the first part.
SG: It does connect back, but it is completely insane.
PB: It does? Okay, I need to read the second part.
SG: The new character they introduce is a descendant of the character played by William Hurt in the movie. It plays out a little differently than the movie, but when Peter Lake comes back, he still looks like the paintings they painted in the early 1900s.
PB: Oh, because that was in the movie.
SG: It’s so weird. Someone is traveling by train, and a midget (Mark Helprin’s words) sets fire to the train, then dies in one line of dialogue.
PB: All right, stop. I’ll read it, stop it.
SG: But it taught me how to pronounce Claret, and now Paget. So they told you this interview is for Suicide Girls?
PB: Yeah, I e-mailed Sean, Spooky, the owner. I know Missy.
SG: Do you remember the photo sets you shot?
PB: Oh, it was so long ago. I want to say 2004. 11 years ago. I did three sets. I think I have all of those images on DVD discs from my computer. One I shot in my basement. I put the girl, her name was Erin, short black hair, beautiful. We did that Blade Runner spray paint across here eyes. She was in a little Mary Jane dress with Mary Jane shoes and I had her on a ‘50s TV set that was broken, so it was just snow. Then she undressed as we went along with this story of this sort of broken doll. A girl I shot in the bathroom of the Standard Hotel with another Suicide Girl photographer was shooting in the bar.
SG: Have you kept up with the girls?
PB: I know Chloe and Missy and I’ve met so many. Now there’s a bunch of girls from Portugal have come to town to shoot for Suicide Girls.
SG: Do you still shoot photography?
PB: I really don’t. I shot straight pinup, ‘50s camera club pinup for Baracuda magazine for five years. Around that time, I shot for Suicide Girls because I was like, “Oh, I’m so tired of having to hide tattoos and piercings. I’m just going to ask if I can shoot their girls” because I had to keep covering up people’s tattoos. So I was like, okay, I’m just going to shoot Suicide Girls if they’ll have me. Then with the iPhone, everybody could take a great picture and it kind of broke my heart. Photography didn’t really interest me anymore. I also started working a lot. I started acting more than I had been before. I didn’t have as much free time but I was kind of heartbroken that it was so easy for people to be great photographers after I’d studied so hard, working on light and medium format photography, aperture, focus, lenses and all of a sudden anyone can take a great photo. Didn’t the New York Times photography prize just went to someone using an iPhone with Hipstamatic. So it kind of broke my heart and I stopped shooting.
SG: I’m sure the technology makes it easier for talented people, but not everyone knows how to take a picture. If you just give your camera to someone and ask them to take your picture, you look at it and go, “What made you think that looked right?” They shoot low angle and frame your head at the bottom of the screen.
PB: Oh, I know. Are you a photographer for Suicide Girls?
SG: I’m not a photographer but I know what looks right. I’m a film critic. I know what images are supposed to look like.
PB: Yeah, but here’s the thing. With digital photography, I can take a terrible picture of you and an editor can crop it and change the color resolution and the light and airbrush. They can do anything to a photo as opposed to did you take an image on film? It’s just different.
SG: I need to learn how to do that so I can fix everyone’s bad pictures of me.
PB: Take your own picture.
SG: Like a selfie?
PB: Oh, see, I don’t know because I used to use a remote shutter.
SG: So after doing so many years of Criminal Minds, did you go on a comedy kick with Community, Another Period and the Amazon pilot Down Dog?
PB: I did decide that I wanted to pursue it. Criminal Minds was great and I love everyone there and I still see everyone from there, but I wasn’t having the greatest time playing an FBI agent anymore and I wanted to do something else. So I left and now I’m really happy that it did work out because for a while, I just thought, “Okay, I’ve been on a great FBI show.” Everyone was offering me parts as an FBI agent or a cop and I just thought, “I did that. I’m not going to do that for a little while.” And just waited for comedy and projects I really wanted to do. I had some nice weeks of vacation time the past couple years. All of a sudden, starting with Another Period, everything happened all at once.
SG: Starting with this? You’ve done a lot of comedies since Criminal Minds.
PB: I did a lot of guest stuff and I did pilots that didn’t go and I’ve done movies, but I didn’t get on a show shooting every episode for months until Another Period. That started in September and we shot 10 episodes of Another Period. Then I did Down Dog and then I joined Community immediately after this ended. Now I haven’t stopped which is great because I enjoy doing it.
SG: Had you been a fan of Community before you were on it?
PB: Yeah, I guested a year and a half ago playing the IT lady in the basement and started watching the show then because I didn’t really know it. So then when I was shooting Another Period in October or November, I just got a call from my agent saying, “Community wants to know if you want to do season six with them.” And I went, “Yes, I do. Absolutely I do.” Never even found out what I was playing or what was going to happen. I just said, “Yes, please. I want to be on Community, yes, please.” Right before we started shooting, I found out what my character was.
SG: Have you ever done a dramatic period piece in the era of Another Period?
PB: No. No, I haven’t. Maybe one day I will. This was kind of the best of both worlds because I play a late 50s morphine addict matriarch. I had old age wrinkles and a wig and these crazy 1902 outfits. My stuff was actually even older because I’m this whackadoo, the mother of Natasha and Ricki. So crazy outfits, it was really fun. I’m a morphine addict basically mimicking Maggie Smith from Downton Abbey the whole time.
SG: Were you specifically channeling Downton Abbey in Another Period?
PB: Yeah, because it was their description of the show to me to begin with. “Hey, it’s the Kardashians meets Downton Abbey.” I thought that’s hilarious. In Downton Abbey, Elizabeth McGovern plays the mother. She’s an American in a British household. So I sort of made my mother of these kids more British in an American household, so I just kinda cribbed from Maggie Smith, a combination of the mother and the dowager countess. I got to wear these fabulous clothes and we shot up at Paramour Manor. It’s like a 1920s mansion on top of a hill in Silverlake that is a 360 degree view. It’s all giant taxidermy, I mean taxidermy polar bears. Every room is decorated. You really forget that there’s a modern world out there when you’re shooting. Or you see a crew member and you think, “Oh, cargo shorts.” You really get used to this elaborate way of living.
SG: Do the costumes seem funny to you in and of themselves?
PB: The costumes are actually beautiful. It really is a gorgeous looking show. The art design and the costumes, everything’s really beautiful. It looks like a multi-million dollar feature film, and it looks like film. It doesn’t look like video, but when people get intimate they have to have their clothes removed off of them by servants. Then they have sex in long johns really. That’s funny, but everyone looks fantastic which is kind of why it’s so strangely funny.
SG: Who breaks you up the most on Another Period?
PB: That’s a good question. Actually Rich Fulcher who played Mark Twain. He was hilarious. Lauren Ash who plays Hortense, my other daughter. She’s amazing. Riki and Natasha always because it’s theirs. They wrote it, they own it, they created it. They know the tone of it but everybody cracked everybody up actually a lot on Another Period, which was hard because we didn’t have that much time. We really had to get knuckled down and do it. 10 episodes, we shot it all in 35 days so each episode is three and a half days of shooting. Community shoots five days for a half hour episode. Some shows shoot eight days for a half hour episode. Criminal Minds shoots eight days for a one our episode. So to shoot a show in three and a half days is nuts. It’s crazy. We just proved it can be done so I’m hoping people respond really favorably to it. I would love to keep playing Dodo, do it next year.
SG: As a morphine addict, do you get to have any coked out rages?
PB: Oh yeah, oh yeah. At a certain point, my character Dodo decides to stop doing drugs and she goes on a rampage.
SG: How much energy does that take for you to do?
PB: It’s funny, because I hadn’t had this experience before. The only way that this kind of comedy works, the tone of this show is even though it’s absurd and really over the top, you can only make it work by playing it real. So when my character is running through the house tearing the house apart trying to find her drugs, I was shaking and crying and desperate for my drugs. Peepers, Michael Ian Black, is in the scene with me and he was really just dramatic acting this absurd moment. It was really exciting and thrilling, kind of strange. It wasn’t just big hardy har har. The way to make it funny is to be completely real about it. I’m looking forward to seeing that. I’d like to see what that scene looks like.
SG: Do you still do a live comedy show?
PB: We’ve been doing a show called Thrilling Adventure Hour for 10 years. We perform two shows, sometimes four shows a month at the Largo at the Coronet. We’ve also performed in Seattle. We go to the Bell House in Brooklyn for two shows, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego. We did New York Comic-Con and San Diego Comic-Con panels. It’s a show in the style of ‘30s serialized radio so we stand on stage all dressed up in ‘30s, ‘40s, all the men are wearing suits and the women are in gowns and tiaras. They’re new. They’re written by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker but they’re similar to the [serials] from the ‘30s. We have a big fan base now and we shot a concert film. We sell out every month.