Edie Falco, Blair Brown and Marin Ireland Discuss ‘Morning Sun’

You’ve had decades of careers where you somehow avoided playing the characters of wife, mother, and girlfriend. Edie, you played Carmela Soprano, one of TV’s most famous wives, but it’s a character with sheer interiority. So how did you do it?

BROWN If you are a particular person, you are not actually offered those particular roles. They knew it wouldn’t fit.

FALKO I was neither a wife nor a mother until I was 40. This allowed me to work for many years where I was asked to imagine my way into roles that had no repercussions for me. I like when people think we’re making choices about which roles to take or not. I went where the job was.

IRELAND I am still not a wife or mother. Maybe never. Who knows? I certainly consciously made choices not to go after most of these parts. Because I didn’t have a relationship with them. Sometimes I had to argue with agents because I used to say, I’m not going in for that. If you’re telling a story about a mother and her child, I’m not your daughter. I won’t be as good at this as anyone else.

How did you get away with playing absolutely adorable characters?

BROWN I was called to California. There used to be a system where they put you on all these television shows, “Marcus Welby, MD” and “The Rockford Files”. The parameters were very narrow because you always had to be very cute. My way of dealing with this was actually to take Valium every morning when I went to work. I came back to New York.

FALKO I have to love it, at least a little. Or I need to understand why he made the choices he made. Underlying all of this lies people’s desire to be connected, to be happy, not to suffer. If you can achieve this on an instinctive level, people tend to take a ride.

IRELAND If we bring out the ugly parts of ourselves, other people who see it won’t feel like those ugly parts, they have their own special flaws. They’ll say, ‘Oh, okay, everybody’s like that’. It’s a liberating thing to show people – ugly things, cheesy things. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. That’s one reason the three of us came to this game.