Elizabeth Perkins isn't just funny on television. When I asked her this week how things were going on her hot comedy show "Weeds," she said casually: “Well, you know, we’re puffing away.” Perkins has loved playing the controlling, manipulative and image obsessed Celia Hodes for the last three seasons, earning two Emmy nominations along the way.
But that doesn’t mean she likes Celia, the PTA president who cheats on her husband, doesn’t like her daughter and failed to get much sympathy even when she battled breast cancer.
“I think she’s a complete horror show, she’s completely out of her mind but in a really great way for an actress anyway,” Perkins said this week. “But I think there’s parts of her that ring very true. The thing I love about ‘Weeds’ is that it’s very stylized, everything is amped up to 100 degrees. But if you just sort of pare it down and just get it back to the basics, it’s very real.”
The role of Celia marks the first series for Perkins who rose to movie stardom in “Big” opposite Tom Hanks and followed that up with such roles as Demi Moore’s angry best friend in “About Last Night” and as Wilma in the “The Flintstones.”
“Weeds” has provided her with a welcome return to those early comic roles.
“I don’t think people think of me as doing comedy and yet I’ve done so much comedy so it’s nice to be able to remind people every week that I can be funny...and that I will do full-frontal nudity on television.”
So, Is she surprised that the show has remained so popular?
Perkins: “I don’t know because it’s about marijuana.”