Laura Linney stars in Showtime’s ‘The Big C’

August 14, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

PASADENA, Calif.

It took a deadly disease to coax Laura Linney back to TV. But that’s not a bad thing. Linney is starring in a surprisingly upbeat comedy series, “The Big C” on Showtime, premiering Monday.

She plays a woman who is diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma. It’s how she handles the sentence that fascinated Linney.

“When this script came to me, what hit me the most was the theme of time and what do you do with time? What are the choices that we make? How we spend our time? The fact that we all have a limited amount and that it’s a privilege to grow old. And that’s something that I think a lot of people have forgotten in this very fast-paced world where youth is overly celebrated.

“So it was meaningful to me,” she adds. “It was what the whole story was about more than just the wonderful character that’s there. Clearly, I thought it was something that I could spend some time with and would be challenged by. But more than anything else, it’s more, for me, about time.”

Linney, whose father was a playwright, graduated from Juilliard and began working in the theater. She’s best-known for films such as “You Can Count on Me,” “The Truman Show,” the “Tales of the City” TV programs and the “John Adams” miniseries. But mostly she’s cleaved to New York and has worked in Hollywood only occasionally. This show, too, is filmed on the East Coast.

“I think there are two viruses in LA,” she says. “There’s the what-I-have-is-not-enough-virus — deadly. And the what-do-they-think-of-me? virus, which can drive you insane. And everyone is going to feel that. Everyone is going to be affected by it at one point. No one is immune to it,” she says.

“But they can cause you to make foolish decisions. And so it’s about being centered enough to really realize what do you want? Do you really want to be famous? If that’s what you want, great, go for it. Do I really want that? Or is it about the other stuff?

“You have to figure out what’s important to you. That doesn’t mean not to try unexpected things. [It’s] not just so you can be proud of yourself as an actor but as a human being, and how you choose to live your life day-to-day and treat those who work for you and with you and those you work for and with; that’s something you have to keep an eye on, because you can be easily morphed or brainwashed.”