Today's Evil Beet Gossip

The Hollywood Reporter Covers the Drama Actresses’ Emmy Roundtable

photo of hollywood reporter cover drama actresses pic
The Hollywood Reporter has gone and done their annual Emmy Roundtable, and this month’s edition features the leading ladies of the most-talked-about shows on television. Claire Danes, Emmy Rossum, Kyra Sedgwick, January Jones, Julianne Marguiles, and Mireille Enos all sat down for an interview and a pretty photo shoot (the pretty photo shoot was my favorite, no surprise there). This is what they had to say about their careers and their respective shows.

Claire Danes for ‘Homeland’:

“When I started Homeland, it had been God knows how long since I’d last done an episodic show. I was 14, 15 when I did My So-Called Life. And Homeland is just so dense. The volume of material that you have to commit to memory is overwhelming … [Also], I don’t love stripping down, but I also don’t love the idea of being kind of coy or prudish for the sake of it.”

Emmy Rossum for ‘Shameless’:

“When I got on set – I’d never done nudity before – I was like, ‘Oh, everyone here is human.’ Some days you feel like, ‘Oh, God. I wish we were shooting this last week, I felt so skinny.’”

Shut up, Emmy Rossum.

January Jones for ‘Mad Men’:

“I started this season of Mad Men eight months pregnant, and I finished it with a 5-month-old [son Xander]. It was bizarre. And I was in seven hours of prosthetics every morning, trying to rip off a fake chest piece so I could breastfeed. I loved [the fat suit]. When Mad Men started, my character had a bunch of monologues because she was in therapy, but the therapist never spoke. I had no exercise to try to help me with that. So I recorded myself saying stuff and then listened to it while I slept, hoping that it would stick like a bad song. And it worked!”

Julianna Margulies for ‘The Good Wife’:

“In what we do with episodic work, it’s a nonstop train. I mean, there are days when, I was saying this to Kyra before, I had worked until midnight and then I had to go and shoot something else at five in the morning. I looked at my husband and I was like, ‘This is why Judy Garland was on pills. I can’t keep this up. I need a pill!’”

Kyra Sedgwick for ‘The Closer’:

“He [husband Kevin Bacon] was the one who supported my doing The Closer. It was a huge commitment and life-changing thing for both of us. We always read each other’s scripts; he often follows my advice, and sometimes I’m wrong, but he’s not. And I’m so grateful we have that, I really am. … I really want to do more films. I would like to do other characters for a shorter amount of time. But the TV experience was amazing, and it afforded me the experience of delving into a character and growing with her.”

Mireille Enos for ‘The Killing’:

“Is it wrong to admit that having to kiss Brad Pitt was very, very terrifying? It was [in] World War Z, which I shot last summer and it was the second day of shooting.”

So these are your Emmy ladies. And I’ll be honest when I say that I’ve seen all of these shows with the exception of the much-talked-about ‘Homeland’, but after hearing a lot of you guys talk about it, I think I know what I’m doing this weekend. YAY FOR TIVO.

Who’s your favorite leading lady for an Emmy? Check out the gallery for individual portraits.