Kyra Sedgwick on How The Closer Changed TV for Women: ‘People Wanted to Mimic' Our Success
If you’re wondering how the Sedgwick-Bacon household is spending their time amid stay-at-home orders, well, they’re cleaning.
“We really are,” Kyra Sedgwick tells PEOPLE with a laugh. The actress says that she, husband Kevin Bacon, son Travis, and daughter Sosie mop and wash dishes in lieu of game night. “When you’re home all day long, you make a lot of mess. I bought a puzzle, but I have yet to start it.”
Also like a lot of people right now, they are watching television. “We’re watching Killing Eve, which is great.”
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Michael Kovac/Getty Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
When reminded that Sandra Oh’s character in the BBC series — an incredibly smart, capable, very messy and fallible American working in British intelligence — is a lot like Sedgwick’s fish-out-of-water role on The Closer, she pauses. “She is” like Brenda Leigh Johnson, an Atlanta police chief relocated to Los Angeles, Sedgwick says. “God, I loved her so much. I relished every day I got to play her.”
It’s been almost exactly 15 years since Sedgwick returned to television (she got her start on Another World while in high school). And unlike today, where Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon are regularly on our flat screens in TV roles, when The Closer premiered on TNT in 2005, there weren’t a lot of “movie stars” on television.
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“That’s the thing I am most proud of from that show,” Sedgwick says. “Whether we started this or not I don’t know, but after the success of The Closer, a lot of women in their 40s got great, great roles on television. And that’s the best. Because I’m a big fan of women. Of The Woman.”
Sedgwick says the reason for more actresses in their 40s getting work was largely economics. “When you make people in Hollywood — or any company — a lot of money, people want to mimic that.”
Her role of Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson role would ultimately garner Sedgwick an Emmy and Golden Globe, and allow her to begin directing, something she continues to do today. She recently directed (and acted alongside) her Closer castmate J.K. Simmons on Brooklyn 9-9. But it was the first time she played a cop that she does still miss.
“That was a great role for me,” Sedgwick says. “A strong female character in the lead, just killing it. Being ballsy and brave, but also deeply flawed and very vulnerable and fragile at all the same time. And very feminine and also just an ass kicker.”
Kyra Sedgwick
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It was those very real, and stereotypically contradictory characteristics that Sedgwick even learned from. “You underestimated her," says the star. "Who is the person you would underestimate the most? A woman. Not just a woman, but a Southern woman. Not just a Southern woman, but a Southern woman in a skirt."
Sedgwick says she’s also been underestimated. She says every woman has. “I’ve been in this business since I was 16 years old. But every woman knows she’s an underdog. We are in a patriarchy — all women have that experience. Playing the system, playing the game. Then knowing they are playing the game because they have to.”
