Sedgwick will open ‘The Closer’


By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

Take heart, fans of “The Closer”!

A new season of 10 weekly episodes begins Monday at 9 p.m. Then the TNT network will air another five episodes this winter and six more next summer before the series comes to a close.

So there’s plenty of “The Closer” ahead.

But for Kyra Sedgwick, who stars as LAPD Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, the end is in her sights and on her mind. In December, she and “The Closer” wrap production.

And then? “I’ll be home,” replies Sedgwick with a display of fingers drumming idly on a table top.

“Knowing for the past seven years where you’re going to be for six months — working on this show — makes those other six months precious, special, finite,” she muses. “The idea that I’ll have the whole year not really knowing, waiting for the phone to ring, is going to be really different and hard.

“I know that intellectually, and I’m trying to prepare myself emotionally.”

These days, the 45-year-old Sedgwick and her actor-director-musician husband, Kevin Bacon, are already empty nesters, with Travis and Sosie, their grown son and college-age daughter, out of the house.

Then, in a few months, she’ll say “Thahhnk-yeewwwwww” in Brenda Leigh’s syrupy tones a final time.

“It’s all going to hit me — totally,” Sedgwick says.

But walking away from her series — a hit that averaged more than 7.6 million viewers last season — was Sedgwick’s decision, which she announced in December.

“I had thought about it for a full year,” she says, “and I was really back and forth. But at the end of last season. I was feeling really tired.”’

It’s been quite a ride these seven seasons playing Brenda, a crime-busting Atlanta transplant who, after all these years in Los Angeles, retains a Southern belle accent, as well as a no-nonsense approach to police work and a frazzled personal life. Sedgwick’s colorful portrayal won her an Emmy last fall.

“When I first read the pilot script, I felt like I knew her,” Sedgwick recalls. “I understood her struggle to see clearly the difference between right and wrong, and her unending desire for justice. I feel that way as a person: I get righteously indignant about stuff. But I can’t do anything about it.

“It’s been great to be Brenda saying, ‘[Jerk], you’re going down!”’ she laughs.

Though never a big box-office draw before “The Closer” premiered in 2005, Sedgwick had accumulated many solid credits, including the drama “Loverboy” (co-starring and co-producing with Bacon, who directed), as well as the HBO film “Something the Lord Made” and TNT’s “Door to Door.” And she’s proud of her performances in the films “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge” (1990), “Singles” (1992) and “Something to Talk About” (1995).

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