Blair Underwood is busy

Were it not for the writers' strike, Blair Underwood would be appearing on three prime-time series in the next week. Instead, he'll have to settle for just two.

On Tuesday, he makes his debut on HBO's In Treatment, playing a bottled-up, arrogant Navy pilot who sees a psychoanalyst played by Gabriel Byrne. And starting next week, he'll reprise his role on CBS' New Adventures of Old Christine as a love interest for Julia Louis-Dreyfus' character. And then there's Dirty Sexy Money, which got a full-season pickup from ABC soon after the strike began and, according to Underwood, still has a couple of completed episodes yet to air.

So how did all that work out? Luck and good timing, according to Underwood.

"With the schedule of In Treatment, we'd shoot one episode over two days, so I'd work two days and be off for a week and a half," he says. "So that made it possible to do Old Christine. And after the final episode of In Treatment, Dirty Sexy Money happened -- they were kind of dovetailing. So I finished that and started [Dirty Sexy Money] a week later. As it turned out, we were shooting In Treatment on Stage 25 at Paramount, and Dirty Sexy Money was right next door on 24 and 23. So they were geographically desirable, and the timing worked out."

More from my interview with Underwood:

These are all really different roles -- do you see any commonality in the characters?
Hmm -- not really. I see them all as very different. And the mediums are different -- one is a sitcom, one is a very intense drama, and of course Dirty Sexy Money is kind of a combination of both.

It must be fun to play such different people, one after the other.
Sure. Just having the challenge -- I mean, most actors will tell you that we just want to work, and having said that, work on interesting, challenging roles. ... The reason I was interested in doing Old Christine is I've never really done many sitcoms, at all. I think Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a master of comedic timing, and also Andy Ackerman, our director, who did a lot of Seinfeld. So that was really the pull.

I wanted to talk more about In Treatment. I've seen the first couple of weeks ...
It's a lot to watch [laughs]. Thanks for checking it out.

Sure. With something that's almost all verbal, how do you approach it?
I approach it like a play. All my training was in the theater initially. I went to college at Carnegie Mellon and studied theater. ... And Gabriel said early on -- it was new to all of us, the rhythm of it. The difference is you approach it like a play ... but with a play you have weeks of rehearsal time, and here we didn't have that. For the pilot we did, but once we got started into the weekly series ... it was Gabriel who said, "You know what? We're not really doing a TV show, we're doing a one-act play every two days." I think once you frame it like that, you say, "OK, I can approach it that way."

For me, I had to just put everything aside and really get into just the sheer volume of dialogue, first of all. Once you get that into your head and under your skin, let it become second nature, then you can start playing the colors, the dimensions, the levels.

Your character, Alex, seems like a guy who's not comfortable giving up control. He's constantly testing Paul [the therapist played by Byrne].
I found it so fascinating to watch [Byrne]. I didn't read a lot of the other characters, or even his own therapy sessions, until I finished. But by the third or fourth week, once the audience starts getting into his life, especially the sessions with [Paul's own therapist] Dianne Wiest, where we see how he really feels about this stuff. ... It's so multi-layered with him.

You mentioned that there are a couple more Dirty Sexy Money episodes still out there?
Yes. We shot three that haven't aired yet.

When we left off, it seemed like some pretty important stuff was coming for your character, Simon Elder.
You asked earlier about the similarities between these characters. If there's any similarity between Alex and Simon Elder it's that there are so many layers underneath that he's not readily showing ... especially in Simon Elder's case. He most certainly has an agenda, and Peter Krause's character, Nick, has called him on it a few times. Is this really all about getting back at the Darlings and destroying them or is it about his larger mission for New York City, making the city better for everybody, and the Darlings just happen to be in the way.

When you hear a character description like that -- a billionaire who wants to radically remake Manhattan -- do you just go, "Man, I've got to do that"?
I love it. This character is so -- well, rich, of course, but not just in the literal sense. He's so complicated, and really in many ways a character we haven't seen before: The fact that he is a self-made billionaire, he is African-American, he is very worldly, born and raised in Russian orphanages but left there and lived all over the world. All that will come out -- I'm not really giving anything away, [the show] has alluded to that, but that will all come out later.

I just think it's quite brilliant on [creator Craig Wright's] part and the producers' to, on this canvas, create characters as complicated as that ... in the fabric of a show that is ultimately fun. It's a fun, enjoyable ride. ... So do to that and not necessarily be campy for the sake of camp, but be interesting at the same time, it's great. I'm having a ball with it. ... I can't wait to get back and play him again. I want to get back to work.

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