Goodbye, Mr. Big

Actor Chris Noth discusses his role in 'Sex and the City,' characters he'd like to play in the future—and his hope for a home in Vermont

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Jennifer Barrett
Updated: 7:38 a.m. ET Feb. 15, 2004

Feb. 13 - Chris Noth is probably best known to audiences as Mr. Big, Sarah Jessica Parker’s on-again, off-again flame on HBO’s six-season series, “Sex and the City.” But though Noth (rhymes with both) says he's flattered by the comparison, he hopes Big is not all he's known for. The 49-year-old Wisconsin-born actor, who studied with renowned acting teacher Sanford Meisner and attended the Yale School of Drama, has also starred in several roles on stage and on screen, and has appeared in more than a dozen TV shows (most notably in the early 1990s as the young detective Mike Logan on “Law & Order”). What's next, now that "Sex and the City" is coming to an end?

Noth will don gold chains, vintage shirts and sideburns for his role as undercover FBI agent Mike Tozzi in the darkly funny drama “Bad Apple,” which airs Feb. 16 on TNT. The movie will run within days of the last two episodes of “Sex and the City,” in which he is also expected to appear (though three different endings have been shot for the series finale). Beyond the timing, there’s little similarity between Noth's two characters, which he says was part of the appeal of “Bad Apple.” He is also coproducing the film, based on one of a series of six crime novels by Anthony Bruno that revolve around Tozzi and his partner, Cuthbert Gibbons (played by Colm Meaney). So far, there are no plans to film the other five. NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett spoke to Noth by phone in Los Angeles, about "Sex" in the Big Apple, starring in the "Bad Apple" and other roles he still hopes to play. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What attracted you to “Bad Apple”?
Chris Noth: The film is just unlike anything I have ever seen—and the book was like nothing I’d read—in this certain genre, which has been well-mined with everyone usually going down the same corridor with this stuff. I am quite sure that some critics are not going to get this. As much as entertainment has been just barraged with “Law & Order” and “CSI”-type material, they are going to come to this and scratch their uneducated heads.

Whoa. "Law & Order"—that’s your former show you're talking about.
[Laughs] Well, all I’m saying is I think some will get this [“Bad Apple”] and some won’t. I think it’s really rich, funny, wild material, and it goes to places that no TV show goes to in this genre. One critic—and I’m not going to mention who—said that this show is not believable. I say that has nothing to do with it. It’s about entertainment and style and a different kind of substance.

I’ve seen it referred to repeatedly as a “gritty drama,” yet the first scene had me laughing out loud.
Yeah, I don’t know why we’re getting this "gritty drama" label, though there is a sort of gritty reality to it. But that’s not what it’s about. My theory is, aren’t you bored with that yet? I am. That’s why I am doing "Bad Apple," because I am so bored with the gritty TV reality shows. When they call them reality shows, they give you procedural shows. Human character is much more interesting than anything on those boring kinds of crime shows. Those characters are kind of uptight and they don’t say much, and they’re always in control, and they’re always intense. You know what I mean?

Yes, but "Law & Order" and "CSI" and their spinoffs are some of the most popular shows on TV.
My feeling is that people probably need that in these dangerous times we’re living in, to think that there is an apparatus that will always get the bad guy. It makes them feel safe. I am totally not interested in that.

Yes, I gathered that.
We’re interested in the complexities of characters, and these small insular worlds that are worlds unto themselves, where the boundaries get soft between the law and the people who are the criminals. And there’s interchange and vulnerability and lots of human error. My partner, played by Colm Meaney, and I are kind of like the odd couple. It reminds me a little, but with much more fun and zest, of my first partnership on "Law & Order," when my partner and I were at odds. But "Law & Order" would never really go and explore that, and in this show we do. That’s why I was so pleased that TNT went with it. If I tried to do this on any other network, I think you would have gotten a second-rate "Law & Order."

Why?
Because they don’ t get anything that is sort of beyond the crime-drama mentality. [Deepens voice] "Is that a pubic hair in the door?" "Yeah, let’s get that to the lab." [Back to normal voice] Wait—that’s even too funny for them.

Well, risky at least.
We’re not interested in doing what you expect on TV, because that’s what’s hugely done to conform to a budget and the rules of the FCC.

Well, the FCC is now talking about taking a harder look at what’s shown on cable, too, not just the networks, after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl stunt.
Hey, our girl kept her bra on!

You’ve done theater, TV and independent films—some feature films …
Well, truth be told, I haven’t done as many big movies as I’d like. But I can’t wait for Hollywood to decide they’re ready for me. I have to create myself….

So I was going to ask you, does it bother you that a lot of people identify you as "Mr. Big"?
It’s bittersweet. Sometimes it’s incredibly flattering, but when they just yell out your name, it’s a little like—why are you saying that? You could say, I like your work as that character ... You want to keep your dignity as a person instead of becoming this cartoon for people. We are living in a cartoon culture so you have to deal with it. I just keep on moving. I don’t even have it as bad as some people

There could be worse characters to be identified with than Big.
These days, unfortunately, what gets you the great roles in many respects is celebrity-type status and popularity. But let me cross that out by saying that I still believe that the work counts more than anything else. That will be my mantra because it’s too depressing to think otherwise.

In a recent interview you said, "I think you have to make a conscious effort to disrupt what the public thinks of you." What do you think the public thinks of you now?
I’m never quite sure. I don’t know what they think—if I did, I might want to go hide in Tahiti.

I don’t think you have to worry about that.
Well, I’m just always trying to find good writing, having come from the theater. I don’t mean this in any kind of pejorative way, but I think a lot of actors do TV for security and it’s big money, but most of them, after a year or two, don’t keep doing it because they love the material. It’s too compromised.

But, Chris, you spent five years starring on "Law & Order."
Yes, but when I first started that show, it was incredibly original. That kind of thing hadn’t been done before. It was revolutionary. I used to run to work I was so in love with it, but after five years, I was increasingly frustrated by the realities of doing a TV series, by those limitations. Dick Wolf has said that he believes the show is something that doesn’t depend on the characters. But I believe that character is everything. I want to see flesh and blood and all the idiosyncratic eccentricities that go along with that. If we’re getting away from that in entertainment, it doesn’t mean that I have to do that. So this—"Bad Apple"—is like my entertainment shot across the bow.

What would be your dream role?
I love historical roles, so anything to do with history interests me because history is made by people who are gigantic personalities.

You’ll be 50 this year and you’ve been acting for at least half your life. What role have you enjoyed the most?
Tozzi is one of the roles I’ve enjoyed the most.

And which role do you identify with most?
Every part you do, you are using a facet of yourself. But I’m probably a little more like Tozzi, at least in the dress style.

Really? Gold chains and sideburns?
Yeah. [Laughs] Well, this is one role I relished….

I do think a lot of people identify you, if not as “Big,” at least as a New Yorker. Would you ever live in Los Angeles?
I just bought a place here [in Los Angeles] actually, a studio.

You didn’t!
But it’s as close to a New York sense of feeling as I could get. I am in a condo building with a doorman. I can actually walk down to a place and get coffee and get a beer. I can create my own little reality. I just got tired of staying in hotels. I needed to get out here and face the music. My home is really in New England, though. I am going to look for a place in Vermont soon.

Wow. Well, you can’t get much farther from Hollywood than that.
I just love the green. I was actually brought up as a country boy. We lived in onnecticut when it was very rural, before they put up the parking lots. I fear for the world sometimes. We’ve got to fight for beauty and aesthetic truth as well as economic realities ... we're paving over this beautiful world … Wow, I sound like another liberal actor, and I am so sick of hearing actors wax poetical.

I won’t ask your views on President Bush and the war on Iraq.
I think you pretty much know where I’m at there.

OK, let’s talk about “Sex and the City.”
[Starts singing] It’s over. It’s over! [Pauses] Well, I think of "Law & Order" as five years in Moe Ginsburg suits. And "Sex and the City" is five years of wearing Gucci suits, eating in some of the best restaurants in New York, and I got to adore Sarah Jessica Parker. She got to break my heart, I got to break hers.

So are you going to break her heart again before the show ends?
We get together in Paris.

Careful—don’t give away the ending!
No, everyone knows I was in Paris [filming].

But so was Mikhail Baryshnikov [who plays Parker's love interest, Russian artist Aleksandr Petrovsky].
All right. I’ll give you a tip. It’s going to be a threesome in the end. We’re just all going to get it on.

If we were talking about Samantha, I might buy that. But I don’t think HBO would go with that.
They don’t know what they want to go with. We have more endings than interpretations of the Vietnam War. I truthfully don’t know where they are going with it.

If it was up to you, who would you like to see Carrie Bradshaw end up with—if anyone?
I don’t mean this facetiously but I think the girls end up with each other because the show is more about their friendship than anything else. That kind of friendship endures and that is what real love is, in a sense. The love they have for each other as friends is to me the thing that endures the most. Everyone talks about the fashion, the sex and the boyfriends. But what a great friendship they had through it all.

It’s still sad to think of the series ending. Will it be hard to say goodbye to "Mr. Big"?
You don’t want to do a role that sticks to you for the rest of your life, because then they’ll always compare you against that role and never fully experience what you’re doing now. That’s why you have to keep dancing, so to speak. I just want to keep doing roles that have some meaning.

 

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