Melora Hardin
Melora Hardin’s film/TV credits may dwarf her stage experience, but don’t think the star of NBC’s hit sitcom The Office—now making her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago—is a musical newbie. The child of two stage actors, the Houston-born, Hollywood-reared Hardin is a triple threat who’s been honing her chops since the wee age of two. She spent her childhood doing guest shots on all manner of TV series, recorded two CDs of songs she wrote herself and got her first taste of musical theater glory last summer as Fantine in the Hollywood Bowl concerts of Les Misérables. Most recently, the country’s gotten to know her as Jan Levenson, The Office’s uptight New York hotshot who’s having a perpetually on-again/off-again affair and now a pregnancy with blowhard Michael Scott Steve Carell. Broadway.com met with Hardin in her dressing room at the Ambassador Theatre to talk about her glitzy childhood, one crushing disappointment involving Michael J. Fox and why she sometimes has a hard time leaving her character at work.
You’ve just made your official Broadway debut! How did it go?
It was so much fun. I feel so alive, really, just being able to use all three of my talents at one time. I’ve been able to sing in certain places and dance in other places and then act in places, but to do everything all at once is pretty new and exciting for me. It’s like being a marathon runner in the sense that you just feel spent. You’re like, “I’ve given you everything that I’ve got.” Which is a great feeling for an artist.
And playing a woman like Roxie Hart has got to be a blast.
She’s an amazing role. How often do you get to be sexy, be strong, funny, dance sing and act?
And murder people.
And murder people [laughs]. Yeah, it’s kind of an essential great role for a woman. In film or TV, you don’t get that too often. That’s what I love about Jan, my character on The Office. She’s a real multi-dimensional character. She’s continually surprising me and the audience.
How do you think Jan and Roxie are similar?
Jan always thinks on her feet, and Roxie does the same thing. They’re very different, obviously. Roxie’s soft and feminine, even though she’s hard and street-like, while Jan is hard and educated. She’s walled-up with lots of defense mechanisms, whereas Roxie wears it all out on her sleeve: “I’m gonna kill you, you son of a bitch!”
Roxie could benefit from a defense mechanism or two.
That’s right [laughs]. That would probably behoove her.
Workwise, how does The Office compare to Chicago?
They’re both very collaborative experiences, which I love. Theater takes it even further, since you’re also collaborating with the audience. Because they’re the ones who let you know what works, what's funny and what's not.
How do you gauge that when shooting The Office? Just making each other laugh?
Yeah. That’s it. We make each other laugh. It’s not much more complicated than that. We’ve got something that’s really ticking along now. Everyone knows their characters so well, and the writers give us such great stuff that it’s not a lot of work. It’s just about delivering it.
Let’s talk about your upbringing: Your father, Jerry Hardin, is a character actor [he played Deep Throat on The X-Files]. Your mother, Diane Hardin, is an acting teacher and manager. You’re like a real show-biz purebred, huh?
I am, actually. My parents were both theater actors who moved to Hollywood to get work. My mom taught River Phoenix, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, Elijah Wood and Molly Ringwald. I started acting when I was five; I’ve been singing all my life and writing songs all my life.
What’s the first song you ever wrote?
According to my mother, I wrote my first song when I was two. It was called “Coughin’ Jeanie,” about a girl who had a cold. My brother had a guitar and my mom says I wore a blood blister on my finger from singing and playing “Coughin’ Jeanie” all the time: “Coughin’ Jeanie/Sits by the window/she’s so sick.” [Laughs.] “Coughin’ Jeanie/sits by the window/She’s looking out/Cuz she needs to stay home.” And on and on.
When you saw your parents onstage, did you think “I wanna be up there” or you were more the shy type?
I was not a shy kid at all. “I wanna do that! I wanna be there!” I wasn’t a showoff, I just loved performing. I went with my dad tp this commercial agent’s office, and they were like [in a baby voice], “Oh you’re so cute! Don’t you wanna do commercials?” And I’m like, “Yeah!” So my parents made a plan: They would let me go on 10 auditions, and if didn’t get anything, they would ease me out of it. They didn’t want me dealing with rejection. Of course, I got the first thing I went in on.
What was that?
It was a Peak toothpaste commercial. I stood in front of a mirror and played with a doll and imagined the doll and I were doing some dance.
You were on The Love Boat as a kid!
I guest-starred on, like, every TV show you can possibly imagine. Quincy, Police Story, Little House on the Prairie, Diff’rent Strokes…
Was there ever a point when you realized maybe you weren’t having a typical childhood?
That didn’t really dawn on me until I was 12 and went to public school. I was out of school a lot for work, and the other kids were seeing me on TV and were jealous about that. But I had a really joyful childhood. My parents shielded me from a lot of things about this business. My dad took really good care of my money. I never even knew how much I’d made until I was 18, and I was able to put myself through college and buy a car. I was taught to value the craft of acting. My upbringing was about being an artist, not a star.
I understand that you were cast in Back to the Future as Marty McFly’s girlfriend, which Lea Thompson ended up playing in the final cut. What happened there?
I’d been hired because I was a great match with Eric Stoltz. He’d been cast as McFly, and he’s the picture-perfect height for me. But, they weren’t happy with what they were seeing with Eric, so they let him go, even though we’d already done publicity pictures and been fitted for costumes. Then they got Michael J. Fox, who was so short compared to me, [the producers] didn’t think it was even possible. It was a real disappointment, obviously.
How old were you?
I was 17. There’ve only been a handful of moments in my career where I can remember feeling really crushed, and that was one of them. [Screenwriter] Bob Gale and [writer/director] Bob Zemeckis sent me a huge bouquet of flowers to apologize. They called me at home to tell me they loved me, that it had nothing to do with me and that they wanted to work with me again. [Pause] I’m still waiting for that call, by the way.
Obviously it wasn’t the end of the world.
My parents were like, “There will be other jobs and things you’ll like just as much.” And they were right. You really can’t be in this business and not be a resilient person. If every single rejection meant the end of the world to you, you’d be dead.
Tell me about making your directorial debut with You, a movie your husband [Gildart Jackson] wrote. How did that come about?
I’ve been told many times that I should direct. Then my husband wrote this beautiful script, which I read and was like, “Can I direct this?” So we tried to raise some money, and when we couldn’t raise enough, we decided to fund it ourselves. It’s a beautiful story about love and loss that asks “What if you lost your soul mate?”
What inspired him to write it?
When we had our first child, [seven-year-old] Rory, I started fantasizing about her wedding day, and I even knew the speech that I was going to say at her reception. I started to say it to my husband, and then I started to cry [laughs]. I’m thinking, “There’s this little two-day-old baby and I’m already having this fantasy of her wedding!” But he was very struck by it and wrote a story about a widower raising his daughter alone and how he keeps his soul mate alive in his imagination. She’s still very present for him. I’m really proud of it. It’s got a really nice music to it. [Hardin starts putting on her Roxie makeup].
How long into the Roxie Hart transition do you begin to feel like you’ve crossed over?
Right before I go onstage. A look really feeds me. I put the wig on. I get the makeup on. I put the costume on, do a little stretching and then I start to feel like her. She has a body language that’s different than mine.
In what way?
When she’s around people she wants to impress, she’s always making sure that she looks pretty and sexy and proper—in her mind what proper would be, which isn’t necessarily proper! She’s aware that people are looking at her all the time.
What about after the show? Ever have hard time transitioning back to Melora?
[Laughs] Actually, my mom and my husband threw me a little party last night, and I did find myself standing like Roxie, even though I was just with family and friends. I was like, “Oh god, what are you doing!?” I do that a lot when making movies, too. I end up buying clothes that the character would buy. Then I get home and see all these clothes and it’s like, “What the hell am I doing with this stupid suit? I would never wear this!”
See Melora Hardin in Chicago at the Ambassador Theatre.
