Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:44
Please Welcome Sharon Lawrence : Award-winning actor + epic human in real life!
The play was so demanding on so many levels because it's so emotional, and Sharon was on stage 100ft for me, and I just couldn't believe how strong her performance was and how only very few people could do that role, and Sharon was among them. So I'm just so happy to have her here, swell to kind of riff with us about her life. It's such an honor
Sharon Lawrence
@siennaprods · 4:56
And while Kay is known for her courageous leadership of the Post, which is famed and won a pulse a prize for the recovery of Watergate, which brought down President Nixon based on his administration's criminal behavior spying on the democratic headquarters and also her courage to publish the Pentagon papers which revealed the inner workings of the Vietnam war through the lens of the Johnson administration. And it was risky because the paper could have been sued by the government
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:10
Hey, Sharon. God, it's so interesting you said that. And the irony of the play being a solo play and this weird new way of having conversation, which I've been finding over the past three and a half years. Very, very peaceful and calming because there's grace in taking time, and I'm happy you took time here. And imperfections of our risk singing into our phone are so delicious to me
Sharon Lawrence
@siennaprods · 5:00
And that's so important for anybody that is taking a hobby or an art form that they love to know when they decide to make it become their career. Because something now becoming business means you might not have that same opportunity to kind of protect the joy because it becomes much more subject to other scrutiny and expectations. And when you can't control all of that, there can be just a different level of pressure involved
Sharon Lawrence
@siennaprods · 4:42
And I learned recently that my high school ended up changing the musical that they were going to do when I showed up from another town, because they had thought of one thing, but they identified me as who they wanted to feature. And while that doesn't sound fair, that's life in the arts is it's fluid, so you can plan, but you must be able to pivot and adjust
Sharon Lawrence
@siennaprods · 5:00
It ran for twelve years, but I was with it for the first six until David Milch left. And I said yes to doing a sitcom because that was really exciting to me. Something different. There's a theme here, and that is I get bored easily. And I remember as a kid I used to say, for me, the 8th deadly sin is boredom
Sharon Lawrence
@siennaprods · 5:00
And it demands a lot of my life, whether it's leaving to do it in different places in the world or just the schedule and the way you have to just take care of yourself and tell this very harrowing story over and over again about a story about domestic violence, about mental illness, about suicide, really triggering things that are challenging and worthy and yet ultimately is a story that is not exploiting those conditions. It's a story about resilience
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 3:29
But I also am so resolute around my own gratefulness of being alive and not dead. So that's just my goto place. I'm like, I'm alive and not dead. I got a good brain on me. I have good friends, and I go there. But what's your advice? What's your narrative? How can you help people who struggle around this actors are so dead in this business around aging
Sharon Lawrence
@siennaprods · 4:54
I find it harder now to do my own makeup because I have to learn new techniques, and it takes me longer, and I don't necessarily enjoy it, but that's just the realities, right? That's how I feel in a moment in time. And in another moment in time, I'll look and I'll say, wow, I look like my mom
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 3:16
And I think everyone who suffers from a certain degree of vanity is relieved when they look away from the mirror and they just look outward at the world that they're trying to walk into and bypass that sense of fear that someone's seeing you in a way that's not whatever for them doesn't meet an expectation or whatever. It's so beautiful to want to look like our mothers at some point