She plays feisty Nora on Desperate Housewives, and if there’s anyone to disprove the saying, “what you see is what you get,” it’s Kiersten Warren. Intelligent, insightful, and incredibly funny, she is proof that there is hope for Hollywood to regain its substance and reputation. You can catch Kiersten on Desperate Housewives Sundays at 9/8 central on ABC.
THE STAR SCOOP:
Tell us about the Desperate Housewives experience.
KIERSTEN WARREN:
Well right now I’m covered in bruises, it’s not anybody’s fault, but the lengths to which we’re going to throw ourselves around and to insinuate ourselves into the role is kind of funny. It looks like we’re stuntmen or something. I’m having just really so much fun. It’s the best role I’ve ever had to date.
THE STAR SCOOP:
You seem immensely different from your character, Nora. Are there any similarities between you two?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
Oh let me see, you know, probably not. I guess, you know, the fact that I could find her is just a creative process, it’s not really a whole lot. I think to be like Nora would be all things damaging and the worst things about being in the third grade. So I would have to think, no.
THE STAR SCOOP:
Have you been affected by your role in Desperate Housewives yet?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
Not yet, because I don’t think I have finished the stint on Desperate Housewives to then go out in the world and see how it’s affected my career. I think I’ve been protected from it a little bit. I have a baby, so that’s the focus of the day. The husband, the baby, that kind of thing. Husband, baby, work, you know?
THE STAR SCOOP:
Has Nora worked a release for you? You get to act in a way that’s completely different from how you would act in real life.
KIERSTEN WARREN:
It can be a release but what I have found works best for me is just to create the conditions and circumstances that would be Nora’s life, and then you just kind of act like a human being in her shoes, and that’s kind of how I approach the work. I try not to ever bring any of my own life into it, because I find that too chaotic, and then you take it home with you. I like to take it off, like a costume and go okay, it’s something I created. I would rather be a less than perfect actress than have it affect my life at home. I value my life more than I do my job.
THE STAR SCOOP:
You have a character on Desperate Housewives who is pretty relevant. Is there a potential for her to stick around for quite a while?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
I think so. I think that Nora could withstand anything that’s thrown at her. She seems to be a formidable competitor, and a tough little thing. I think she’s taken a lot of knocks over time, and she’s not about to be frightened by a bunch of women who shower daily.
THE STAR SCOOP:
You seem to play characters that are younger than yourself.
KIERSTEN WARREN:
That’s very true. The characters are aging progressively, but they consistently stay about ten years younger than my real age. I just happen to look, it’s not like I’m still playing seventeen. That would be a typecast from hell, wouldn’t it? I just think it is what it is. This business is all about illusion. Some people will always play younger than themselves, some people play older than themselves, some people play nice people who are not nice people. Some people play very sexy people who are decidedly not. It’s an illusion. And you work, and you get jobs based on what you look like period, first off. For starters. And then your talent and everything comes into it. Nobody really cares what your real life is, if that’s not what you embody on screen, if that’s not what you look like?
THE STAR SCOOP:
Does that take a toll on you, being in that kind of businesses where it’s all about your talent coming second to if you have the right look? What does that do to you as a person?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
Los Angeles is a town that is based on Lookism. We have no theater. It’s not like you can put on a hat and a funny voice and project and be immensely talented and play things that are not what you really look like up close. You have to walk into a room and people have to believe you, five feet away from you as being this person. So there are some girls, like we were just talking about, the age thing, friends of mine who are maybe twenty-four, twenty-five who have a decidedly mature, womanly young mom thing. I’m so much older than them, but I still don’t really get called in to play the traditional Mom thing, because it’s just maybe a glove that doesn’t fit. It just has to fit, and some people look like accountants, and some people look like nutty one night stands who are trying to extort money from their ex-lover (laughs).
THE STAR SCOOP:
What do you have to do to top the wealth of what you’ve done so far?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
(Laughs) well I’ll let you know. I don’t know. It’s a journey, and it’s been an incredible one thus far. I would like to focus more on writing and creating some stuff for myself and for my husband and I to do together. That’s just a creative focus of mine, and then going out and continuing to just audition. It’s so much fun because daily as you’re working on a different character, you come to the breakfast table as a different person practically, you know, your head is in a different space. You’re exploring say, what it’s like to be a cowgirl in the 1940’s in Texas and yesterday you were a divorcee from Long Island. You know it’s very fun, because they’re lives I haven’t lived, but I have the attention span of roughly a caffeinated ferret. And, we find that that’s a lot of fun for my husband and I, even though we’re dealing with the difficulties of productions on opposite coasts, it works for us, because we’re a couple that, it’s like having honeymoons in different cities every two, three weeks when we see each other. The scary thing for us would be to be more of a stay at home couple where the only thing that happened that day was, say, the water bill came. That’s harder for us.
THE STAR SCOOP:
You’ve been in the industry for a long time. How do you have longevity in this business? What do you have to do to continue to work?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
We talked about being a town based on Lookism; I think longevity is all about talent. And I don’t think you don’t get to stay around forever unless you have something, and that’s a little more than just your look and appeal. So I hope to think it’s because you’re versatile, and flexible, and you can do many things. You like the drama, and sometimes you’ll get a very comedic role, and another time you’ll get something because you look exactly what they want. There are varying, different reasons for getting picked, you know for having the scepter raised above your head to be hired for a certain role. Sometimes it’s that you blew the room away, sometimes it’s that you had such chemistry with the person, sometimes it’s that you just really are so vulnerable or you really were that funny. So you have to have a lot of little animals in your closet that you can pull out, and I think that speaks to longevity. And the people I have seen that have worked forever, they can do almost anything.
THE STAR SCOOP:
Your amount of work is so impressive.
KIERSTEN WARREN:
I’m a working actress, just your basic working actress. That’s what it’s been like. There has been job after job after job and you get jobs but what you really want is a break. I think this is definitely the latter, Desperate Housewives is a fantastic stage to get to take a turn on.
THE STAR SCOOP:
Is there something out of all you’ve been involved in that sticks out over everything else?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
Yeah, it would probably be, due to the relationship and the fantastic time I had with Robin Williams, that I did a movie called Bicentennial Man, which wasn’t a very successful movie, but I would sign up to do another unsuccessful movie with Robin Williams any day. It was such a pleasure to work with that man, who is so fiercely bright, and so talented. And I know he’s iconic status already, but I would say he’s underrated until you actually sit in a room with him and mix it up with him across a few months that you realize just the depth of his character, and just what a great guy he is. I remember somebody asking me, is he crazy like that all the time? And I found myself almost a little insulted, and it reminded me of a book, where [it said] said that [these] Indians don’t have any translatable word for crazy, but rather they use the word enchanted. And to me that’s always the way I would describe Robin Williams. Nothing crazy about him, it’s just kind of an enchanted, you know, just different state of being, like maybe the rest of us are just very slow is the way I think of it. I don’t think he’s crazy at all. I think we’ve all just decided that you know, okay, this is the status quo, but I think it’s decidedly boring
THE STAR SCOOP:
What would you like to do in the future? Any new projects?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
I have a movie called The Astronaut Farmer with Virginia Madsen and Billy Bob Thornton, coming up. I’m not really sure what the release date is on that. And then I start work on a new cartoon called “Slacker Cats” where I’m the voice of one of the kittens there. And beyond that, while I’m working on Desperate Housewives, it’s really hard to go out and make another deal to do something else, because you’re employed. What will I do next? I don’t know!
THE STAR SCOOP:
Anything to add?
KIERSTEN WARREN:
I’ve been part of the working actress thing, for a long time, and that it’s really rewarding. You don’t have to be an above the title actress, to both be gainfully employed and feel like you’ve made a big contribution and get your artistic jollies out. It’s great. Kind of like teachers, you know? School teachers are teachers, and they go to school every day, and they teach, but doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve won teacher of the year every year. I think there’s such a focus on celebrity that actresses tend to feel a little underused or unrecognized unless they are one of the top 20 in their field. That’s too much pressure to put on anybody’s life. I think that it’s just not true, and it’s a formula for unhappiness. The path is the goal, the goal is the path…but I think it’s true in this scenario, and I would like to encourage any actor or actress that I see that it’s about whatever you’re doing right now, be it school play, community theater play, Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial, go have fun and lighten up your set and meet a new hundred people. Go out and make some art. It is a luxury. It’s not your right. It’s a luxury to get to pursue this. It’s this intense heat, and focus on celebrity. And I find it hurtful. It’s not really an acting field that people are celebrating, they’re celebrating the celebrity. I think it’s really wrong for children to aspire to do nothing but to be famous. That kind of fame is very fleeting. The quicker the assent to celebrity hood, of course the more drastic the fall. It was put to me once like this, and I think it’s a really good analogy. The bus does eventually stop for all of us at some point. You’ll get an opportunity. If you have some talent, and some looks and you’re of mediocre intelligence, you’ll get into the right room, and you will get a job. But whether you have the correct change when the bus stops for you determines how long you get to ride.
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