ER's Laura Innes is the real thing

By FRAZIER MOORE

24 April 2000

ER's Dr Kerry Weaver, played by Laura Innes is neither gallant nor preening and she's nobody's dream date. But the character has become a key member of the top rating show's cast.

Throughout its run (in more than one sense of the word), the US television series ER has excelled at creating a diversion.

While overdosing on authentic-seeming detail, it surrenders larger truths for raw sensation. Fast and furious, ER is motion absent substance, a gratuitous blur of scrubs and gurneys and doctor-speak and tears and blood.

And routine mayhem. By now, what calamity could catch County General Hospital by surprise? Another bombing? Another shooting or knifing or fountain pen through someone's cheek? What's left?

For ER, so adroit at keeping its audience distracted, characters and narrative are largely beside the point. Week after week, ER dazzles its viewers just by running in place.

Thank goodness for the exceptional Dr Kerry Weaver.

Unlike the rest of the ER crew, chief administrator Weaver is neither gallant nor preening. She is nobody's dream date. Often frosty when she isn't painfully blunt, she wouldn't be embraced by most viewers even as a friend.

But unlike her cardboard cronies, where what you see is what you get, Weaver is hard for the audience to peg. She is distant, yet hands-on; off-putting, yet relatable. A good person? Bad? In between? Yes. Weaver defies pigeonholing, as real people do.

"This is a great character," says Laura Innes, who has played Weaver since the series' second season five years ago. "She is good at her job. She has no vanity. She feels no compulsion to display a bedside manner. Nothing gets in her way.

"She's just very, very interested in being a good doctor."

Another thing that sets Weaver apart: In the show's Chicago setting, she is perhaps the only ER character with a Midwestern accent.

Nasal and flat, the accent comes naturally for Innes, who was born in Pontiac, Michigan.

Hers was a family that enjoyed theatre-going, even taking drives across the border to Ontario's Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where as a youngster Innes caught the acting bug.

She studied drama at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, then worked in Chicago theatre before moving to New York, where she performed on and off Broadway.

Five years ago, she was signed for ER.

"The other characters on the show for the most part are really charming, attractive, heroic people - that's why the show's a success," Innes observes. "But for me, it was great to have a harder edge, to play this person who goes back and forth.

"The most interesting people," she says, "are everything at one time or another."

Meanwhile, she has profited from the producers' decision to give Weaver a physical affliction - and one that, while always in plain sight, is never acknowledged.

Well, almost never. Earlier this season, a nosy new staffer sidled up to Dr Lawrence (guest star Alan Alda), a long-time acquaintance of Weaver's.

"She ever tell you what happened to her leg?"

"Not that I can recall," said Lawrence, brushing aside the question.

Wisely, Weaver's bum leg is meant to be no big deal, except as an audience reminder: There is much more to Weaver (and to Innes' performance) than the obvious.

"When I got the role, I tried a variety of crutches and canes," Innes thinks back. "We decided it would be good to use a crutch with a cuff, so she could do procedures and still keep her hand sterile."

Weaver - snippy, prim, with her arctic smile and intrepid gait - had arrived. But not to open arms.

"Viewers felt such an aversion to her, especially at first," says Innes, clearly still amazed at the hostile reception. "But as time went on, I was given more opportunity to do other things.

"I did sign language with this deaf child." Weaver hired her old mentor Dr Lawrence, then agonised over what to do when he displayed early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. And recently she risked her job to treat a retarded girl with a terminal disease.

"They give me enough stuff to make Weaver a whole person," Innes says happily.

But it's when Kerry Weaver does the insensitive thing, makes the calculating move, pulls a fast one on a colleague, that this whole person really comes together.

On the season opener last autumn, for instance, she blindsided Dr Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards) in a staff meeting. Beforehand, they had resolved to fight the confirmation of Dr Romano (Paul McCrane) as chief of staff. But after Mark voiced his harsh opposition, Kerry shocked him by agreeing with everyone else that Romano was the right choice.

"People do things that are political," Innes reasons. "I love the character, and I can see why she does the things she does."

Bringing Weaver to life on the otherwise robotic ER, Laura Innes lets viewers glimpse why, too. No blurring with her.