When I got cast inThe Hobbit, Peter Jackson said, I loved you inPushing Daisies.
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Pushing Daisiespremiered in an exciting, uncertain moment on television.
I cant believe its been 15 years.
Before you were onPushing Daisies, you were on a Bryan Fuller show calledWonderfalls.
So I watched the pilot and they were recasting him and Kerry Washington.
I was right outta school; it was probably the first year I was out of school.
And then they were gonna also recast Kerry Washington, who did the pilot.
And I suggested my friend Tracie Thoms, who I had gone to Juilliard with, to play Mahandra.
It was one of my very first jobs.
I bring upWonderfallsbecause its not the same world asPushing Daisies, but they feel like cousins.
Thats the kind of zone that it exists in, there is a real exploration and awareness of death.
I think what Id seen of his work before that wasDead Like Me.
That was my first step into the world of Bryan Fuller, and it was very Bryan Fuller.
He needed to be an alien inside the world.
And he then became spun off as his own thing forPushing Daisies.Oh, Id never heard that.
Thats exciting to hear.
I love the idea of Ned as a reaper character.
I cant imagine Ned without Chuck, though.
Were you actively looking for new TV roles afterWonderfallsended?I wasnt really actively seeking out TV roles.
I was doing a lot of theater at that time.
I was enjoying going from movie to movie.
I read Ned and thought,God, this character would be a lot of fun to play.
I think I feel a connection to him.
And he responded, Well actually, can we talk about you playing Ned?
That was part of it.
And she said, Everything is rhyming.
Everything is in threes.
Which is exactly how Bryan wrote.
It was technical, but we were all in it together, you know?
I was like,Wow, he just told a joke with a camera.
Thats a very difficult thing to pull off.
Theres no lets just punch in and get a quick close-up.
Its 30 minutes to take down the cameras, move them, relight the room, and continue.
It gave us time to learn our lines, basically.
And I remember when they mentioned Kristin Chenoweth, who I didnt know at the time.
It was the first time Id met Kristin.
She is very tiny, and you are very tall.
Chi McBride needed no box.
So you have this pilot, its extremely weird.
I wanted it to go and Im kind of an optimistic person.
It was my taste.
I didnt know if it would be everyones, you know?
You were just mentioning that you felt a real connection to Ned.
What about him resonated with you?I guess I just related to his feeling like an outsider.
Anna is one of the funnest people Ive ever met.
She just loves life.
And I am very Ned-like, Im much more introverted.
And I remember the impact Anna had on me, similar to Ned and Chuck.
Theres a constant sense of longing: Theyre in love, but they should not touch each other.
Ned is in love with somebody named Chuck.
I thought,Huh, this is a much queerer show than I realized.
Was that something you thought about at the time?Im sure I did think about it then.
This was the second show Id done with Bryan Fuller, who had by then become a good friend.
Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen were producing the show.
Its one of the things I loved about it.
It exists in a space that it carves for itself; it doesnt need the signals of other spaces.
Any person can come to it and meet it where it is, if that makes any sense.
Theres no barrier to entry, no matter, how youre coming to it.
That goes into the machine andPushing Daisiescomes out.
And then Mark Harelik, who was also a part ofNormal Heart.
Graham McTavish, who I didThe Hobbitwith later.
Molly Shannon and Mike White did an episode together.
An unbelievable list of people.And also they were given these wild characters to play.
One that was stuck in my head for some reason is Fred Willard stuck in concrete.Totally.
And I think Eric Stonestreet fell into a deep-fat fryer.
That was the episode where me and Kristin were at the food fair.
And he was murdered by being chicken-fried.
Hes kind of passive, along for the ride.
Well, hes terrified of himself.
He is constantly trying to keep people from knowing who he is.
Does that make sense?It does.
I think that would be the real danger of the show.
I think that Bryan would never let that happen.
Thats not the story that he was interested in telling.
Its a close-to-the-surface kind of heartbreak and I think a reason for the whimsicalness in a way.
You could eradicate one, but you then lose the point.
It would overbalance the show.
I mean, thats pretty sad, thats pretty serious.
This was the world, these were the terms that we thought in.
That dichotomy came up in all of our performances because it was in the environment around us.
And that was in the first season.
Talk about a curveball.
When we got the second season, I think everyone felt raised from the dead in a way.
So when we got canceled in the middle of that second season, we were stressed about that.
You did have the grace of knowing it was coming, though.
You could at least get that final shot of Chuck and Ned on the porch.
I think youre right.
Its kind of the nature of the show.
It was great that it existed.
It wouldve been interesting to see where those characters go with longevity.
Did you have souvenirs?
Im trying to think if I took some props, I remember those pies on set all the time.
There were these pies.
I mean, they looked delicious, but they were really made out of plastic and lard.
So they moved over to plastic-and-lard pies.
Do you still think about Ned?
I think thats very true of how life has gone.
It was 15 years ago.
I was 26, 27 years old.
I look back at that time very fondly.
It changed my life in a lot of ways.
I remember Peter Jackson, when I got cast inThe Hobbit, said, We loved you inPushing Daisies.
Thats why youre here.
How he went from Ned to the Elven king is very bizarre, but Ill take it.
It was formative for me and for a lot of people watching TV at that moment.
I think youre absolutely right about that.
And Im very proud to be hearing you kind of discuss it in that way.
One last question: You sometimes had to kiss through Saran Wrap.
I think we went into the big hall, and it was before the show had come out.
And I remember looking at Anna and being like, Holy moly, theres a lot of people here.
