"It was a very, very dark drama. And that was the very, very first time, while doing Will and Grace and being in this raucous, funny world that I stepped into something very, very, very dark and realized that there were challenges there that I wanted to work on that were different than the challenges of comedy,” The Wedding Date star tells Parade in an exclusive interview.
Rose Clasen
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Working with De Niro was a dream come true for the Smash alum, whose mind was blown by the experience of improvising with the legendary actor. "He just started going off script," she recalls. "And I thought, 'Oh, my God, I am improving with Robert De Niro.' And I thought, 'All right, it's dive in, sink or swim.'"
The actress had to remind herself that she has a master's in acting from NYU and had improved before. "So, I was ready," she says. "And it made the work more fun and more free, and the whole experience was better than I ever could have imagined it being."
Every day that she was on set, Messing found herself learning from De Niro, whom she dubs "the greatest of all time." "I will absolutely be approaching my work differently now that I have had the opportunity to watch him and to act opposite him," she shares. "There is an effortlessness and a self-trust that he has that was so inspiring, and I hope that I can endow my work with just a little bit of that going forward."
Rose Clasen
"I am Jewish, and it was very important to me that a Jew was able to play this Jewish character. There are not a lot of great Jewish women characters that are really rich. You know, it's usually comic relief," Messing says. "So to see this opportunity, I felt that she had a dignity and a strength and an intellect and a softness that I just really loved, and I loved showing this particular Jewish woman."
The activist, who executive produced the documentary October H8te: The Fight for the Soul of America—which examines the rise in antisemitism following the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel—believes that, especially today, more Jewish representation is needed in pop culture.
"We absolutely need more stories about Jews. The stories that are told are usually about the Holocaust. It's usually about the killing of Jews, and it would be really great and I think at this point, it's necessary to have creatives to write stories that highlight the humanity and all the multifacetedness of the Jewish community," Messing says, noting much like how that was done with the "gay community in media, in storytelling."
Rose Clasen
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Messing adds, "I think that social change comes directly from what we imbibe in terms of media and content."
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