Elisha Cuthbert and ‘Happy Endings’

Elisha Cuthbert and ‘Happy Endings’

Elisha Cuthbert is basking in what remains of a late summer sun in the atrium of a hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., and if she seems relaxed on this evening it’s because Happy Endings, the third-year comedy in which she plays Alex Kerkovich, the
scattered youngest member of a group of tight-knit friends, has returned after a six-month hiatus.

For Cuthbert, Happy Endings marks one more step on the long and winding road to maturity. The Calgary-born former co-host of Popular Mechanics for Kids — a Canadian TV success story — is no longer playing a difficult, trouble-prone post-adolescent,
as she did for six seasons in 24, as Kim Bauer. She’s playing an adult in Happy Endings, albeit an adult still prone to trouble. Last season, for example, her character moved in with her singleton friend Penny, played by Casey Wilson, after
she ruined her own apartment with smoke damage.

“Who wouldn’t want to be doing an HBO show, where you can get away with so much more?” Cuthbert says, talking quietly with a small group of fellow travelers from home. “We try, though. You talk to people in their late 20s, early 30s — they’re swearing they’re
rowdy; they’re having a good time. They’re not afraid of bringing up leery topics. When we’re together on the show, we’re having a great time together. Its work, but we’ve all got to remember what it was like when we were kids. We’re not in our living rooms
back home. But we have fun. We try to push the envelope, and how far we do that is up to the studio.”

Happy Endings had modest beginnings. It debuted as a midseason replacement in April 2011, and did not look as if it would last. Reviews at the time compared Happy Endings unfavourably to similar relationship-minded TV comedies like Perfect Couples,
Traffic Light, Mad Love and Friends With Benefits — all cancelled within the year. Happy Endings is that happy, rare tale of a TV series that, despite initially low ratings, manages to cling to life in an ever-shifting TV landscape where sudden overnight cancellations
are more the rule than the exception.

Happy Endings has occasional long scenes of scripted lines, Cuthbert acknowledges, and sometimes the actors go off-script. Never off-message, though.

“It’s up to the director on the day, and the creator, to make a choice whether that’s even funnier than what was already there,” Cuthbert says. “We talk a lot about how we get to do improve, and we do. Everything is scripted, but sometimes, if we’re lucky,
we can take it our own way and something magic happens. You throw in a thing here and there, after the fact, and sometimes it works. There’s this magical thing that can happen on-camera, and you either keep it or you don’t.”

Cuthbert’s fellow actors — Wilson, Eliza Coupe, Zachary Knighton, Adam Pally and Damon Wayans Jr. — are familiar enough with their characters by now that they’re comfortable veering off-script into the occasional improvisation.

“We’re lucky we’re in our third season, because we’re not discovering our characters anymore,” Cuthbert says. “We’re there. Hopefully. We feel that if we do that little extra try-this or try-that, it really adds to what it is that we’re already doing.”

The new season picks up with Cuthbert’s character back together with her original beau, Dave Rose, played by Knighton. Happy Endings began with Cuthbert’s character leaving him at the altar.

“Dave and I are back together at the beginning of the season,” Cuthbert says, and laughs. “We’re really excited about that, because we haven’t had the chance to really show the audience what we are like as a couple. They know we have a history there. It’s
good, because in season two we got to show the audience who we were like outside that. And now we get to come together and discover what it means to be together.”

Happy Endings is back to Tuesday on ABC, and is one of the last returning series of the fall. That’s worth noting, because it looked for a minute as if Happy Endings might not be back at all. It was never the ratings grabber that populist
sitcoms like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are. Still, it inched its way up the ratings charts — from 103rd in its debut year to 48th last season — even as bigger, more heavily hyped TV comedies crashed and burned.
Happy Endings drew enough of a crowd to warrant a third year.

“From day one it’s always been the anti-romantic relationship comedy,” Cuthbert says. “It’s always been the non-happy-ending Happy Endings. I think we’re always going to have an undertone of ‘Nothing is ever going to be perfect.’ Our relationships
are always going to be about loss. And I think that’ll be good.”

Cuthbert has managed to find that tricky intersection between professional life and personal life. Raised in Montreal, she is engaged to Toronto Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf. The life of a working actress, tied down by long hours on a studio sound stage,
and a professional hockey player, with long days of travel on the road, can be hard to reconcile.

Cuthbert has learned to ride the curves, though. Her start on Popular Mechanics for Kids when she was just 15, alongside co-host Jay Baruchel, led indirectly to her breakout role in the 2001 made-for-CTV movie Lucky Girl, in which she played
a high-school student with a serious gambling addiction.

Cuthbert had an eye on an acting career from a young age. Lucky Girl — in which, as a relatively untested teenager, she was expected to carry the entire film — was the opportunity she had been looking for. Lucky Girl, directed by Da Vinci’s
Inquest and Being Erica veteran John Fawcett, threw her into the deep end of the pool with no lifeline. It was either sink or swim.

“My goal was to get to California and be a successful movie or television actor, or whatever it was going to be, and not have to go home to Mom and Dad and ask for money. My first goal was to make a career out of it. And the next thing I knew, I was on 24,
and I thought to myself, ‘Now I’ve got to be the best dramatic actress I can possibly be.’

“Your goals change as you get older. I’ve always been about reinventing myself, just to prove that I’m not a one-trick pony. I feel like a real actor is capable of doing all things. Am I doing all things? No. But I try. It’s keeping me motivated to keep
going. It keeps me interested in what I do for a living. It’s a dream. Would I have guessed then, when I was much younger, that I’d be doing what I’m doing now? No. To have been on two successful television shows, to be here on our third season, is such a
special privilege. There are a lot of actors who would love to be in my shoes. I know that. I’m trying to make the best of it, and trying to put out the best work I possibly can.”

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Posted by Fahad Zafar on Oct 23 2012. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry