The Record Online

Thursday, November 20, 1997

By VIRGINIA ROHAN
Staff Writer

Laura Innes likens her chillingly steely, sometimes shockingly softhearted ER character to someone she once knew and loathed. "I remember very clearly having a fourth-grade teacher I just hated -- she seemed very mean to me -- and then seeing her out at a restaurant with her kids, and she was snuggling with them," Innes recalls. "I've always felt that people are very capable of functioning one way in the workplace and being very different in private, and I don't see any limits on Kerry Weaver."

Apparently, ER writers don't, either. This season, Weaver -- who first popped up as a recurring character in the show's second season, and was made a regular last season -- has assumed an increasingly important role, within the hospital, as well as the wider dramatic arena. The things that make Weaver so fascinating are her unpredictability (yes, Weaver did write that anonymous, hospital-based romance novel last season, Innes confesses) -- and her mystery. This woman is one multilayered onion.

"We don't really know a lot about her background," Innes says. "We're sort of slowly unpeeling her."

It has never even been explained why Weaver uses a Loftstrand crutch -- and Innes doesn't explain it. The actress, who is not disabled, says she "works with" a woman who had polio.

"When I auditioned for the part, Kerry was written as a character using a cane. The reason why hasn't been revealed on the show, and there's a very nice byproduct of that -- the disability is kind of a non-issue."

Over last season, Weaver showed a different side -- through her compassionate support of Jeanie Boulet (Gloria Reuben), the HIV-positive physician's assistant. But then, this year, her relationship with Boulet has turned thorny. Recently, Weaver, acting emergency-room chief, had to fire Boulet, for budgetary reasons. And in an earlier episode, she laced into Boulet for violating the carefully defined parameters of how HIV-positive health-care workers should treat patients.

"Most viewers would say, 'My God, she's such a bitch,' but I sort of have to separate myself from how I am coming off," Innes says. "That was the kind of hard-line attitude she needed to take."

But this tough cookie is also heading for a hot romance -- with Ellis West, an efficiency expert.

"Everybody's so happy that I'm finally getting laid," Innes says, laughing. "They think I'll get into a better frame of mind."

The latest developments for Weaver grew out of a meeting Innes had with the show's writers at the end of last season. "I said, 'You have to give her a romantic life, because one of the stereotypes is that a disabled person is viewed as an asexual person,'" says Innes -- who, before ER, was best known as the sweet but promiscuous Bunny on the sitcom Wings.

"I also said, it's really great that she's so tightly wound, but when you're playing that kind of character, you don't want to wind her up so tight that the springs just start busting," Innes says. "She really wants to be this incredibly successful leader in the hospital, but now she's over her head."

It's a far cry from Weaver's arrival in the ER -- when she mainly provided what Innes calls "a real source of sort of steely conflict."

"It was valuable to the chemistry of the show, and as an actress, it was very liberating to play someone who almost had no vanity. She was focused on her job, sort of to the exclusion of everything else in her life," Innes says.

"Television is so populated with characters that kind of exist to be charming and sympathetic, and say 'Like me, like me.'"

Innes came up with a "back story," in her head to explain Weaver's lack of vanity. "It had to do with her living a lot of her growing-up years out of the country," Innes says. "I have this idea that her parents were in Africa, which made her almost oblivious to the [American] culture." (The writers have picked up on some of this. During her debut season, Weaver "had an African boyfriend, for like five minutes," Innes says.)

Born in Pontiac, Mich., the youngest of six children, Innes earned a theater degree from Northwestern University. (Clancy Brown, the actor who plays Weaver's love interest, was, coincidentally, a classmate there.) After graduation, she did theater work in Chicago, then New York. In 1991, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband, actor David Brisbin. (The couple have a 7-year-old son.)

Before ER, she did television guest-stints and starred in Louie Anderson's short-lived sitcom, Louie. But she got the most attention as Bunny, Lowell's ex-wife, on Wings. "It was great fun," Innes says. "She was just this odd duck, a sweet and normal woman, who was just horny all the time. Sweet sluts are fun to play."

What's ahead for ER -- and Weaver?

About those stories that ER will essentially become a free agent, going to the highest network bidder, at season's end, Innes says, "All that stuff is amazingly separate from us." As for her character's future, Innes says, "We're continuing the Jeanie thing, which gets more and more kind of painful and sticky, as well as this Ellis thing, which for Weaver is really great."