by josie
Jean Smart plays a mother coming to terms with her daughter’s mental illness in Lifetime’s “Call Me Crazy.”
Having scored impressive ratings and an Emmy nomination two years ago for the breast cancer anthology Five, Lifetime premieres another film in the same format this weekend, this time with the subject of mental illness tying the quintet of short films together. Call Me Crazy: A Five Film, debuting April 20 at 8 p.m. ET/PT, features a stellar cast that includes Octavia Spencer, Melissa Leo, Jennifer Hudson, Lea Thompson and Chelsea Handler, with directors Ashley Judd, Laura Dern, Bonnie Hunt, Bryce Dallas Howard and Sharon Maguire.
The shorts run the emotional gamut, from heartbreakingly sad to darkly funny. Jean Smart plays mom to a recovering schizophrenic (Brittany Snow), “an ordinary mother trying to deal with something really painful,” Smart says. “I think everyone knows someone who’s dealt with these issues, and I think there are still a lot of misunderstandings and stigmas still attached to some kinds of mental illness. The more you know about something the less you can ignore it or write it off. Knowledge is power.”
Smart, the Designing Women star whose recent roles include guest arcs on Harry’s Law and Hawaii Five-O on TV and a role in the film Hope Springs, finds that “once you’re past a certain age you’re not going to play the lead anymore,” Meryl Streep excepted. “All I can see is how much less there is the older I get,” Smart says.
Nevertheless, Smart, 61, has more projects coming up, including two indie films, as well as a Hallmark Channel movie in which she plays a schoolteacher in 1910 that’s due to air in October. An NBC sitcom pilot starring The Office’s Craig Robinson is also in the works and casts Smart as a middle school principal in Seattle. It’s familiar ground: Smart is from Seattle, where her father was a teacher, and her great-aunt was the vice principal of the middle school she attended.
Smart thinks that the key to aging well in Hollywood “is to fight the panic you might start feeling and just be true to yourself,” she says. “I try to be true to what I feel I have to offer and let the chips fall where they may. I’m fortunate in the sense that I was never really an ingénue, even in high school,” she says, adding that character roles “are always the more interesting parts anyway.”
As for staying fit and healthy, she admits to only exercising “in spurts” but recently bought a rowing machine-like contraption in a thrift store and hopes to use her pool and trampoline now that it’s spring. But what really keeps her going is her 4-year-old daughter Bonnie, adopted from China. “We spent years thinking about it and it took a lot longer than we thought to get her,” confides Smart, noting that her son Connor, 23, was 15 when they started the process. “She was definitely worth waiting for.”
Asked what she’s proudest of, Smart answers quickly and then corrects the order. “I’m a good mother, good actor and a good person,” she says, before adding, “Make actor third.”
Photo credit: Brian Bowen Smith/Lifetime
