Tell us about Tully. Tully’s very complicated because of the traumas she suffered in her childhood, the abandonment issues; all of that created a kind of wall around her that can be hard to play without it coming off too prickly. [But] I related to her. I understand the level of intensity of being a wife, a mother, running a home and also trying to make sure that your own needs are met and your own voice is heard. How involved was Kristin Hannah in converting her book to a series? Kristin just had a couple stipulations where we needed to stay true to the book. But other than that, she was comfortable with our showrunner taking some creative license, which we did. You’ve described yourself as a bookworm; were you a reader of Kristin Hannah’s books before getting the script for Firefly Lane? I am almost certain I had read the book before I received the script. It was like, “I know this story, there’s something familiar about it.” So I reread the book and then proceeded to read every other book she’s ever written. I am now a giant Kristin Hannah fan and I keep passing her books along to family and friends who love to read. She’s just extraordinary. The friendship between Tully and Kate is to be admired. It is all encompassing. What about you? Do you have strong women friendships like that? I was thinking about that a couple of days ago actually. I don’t know why it came to my mind. Maybe I hadn’t watched the series yet, or I hadn’t watched it recently. But I had been thinking, Do I have a friend like Kate in my life? One that I can truly say that I talk to every day, that I see regularly, that I am that comfortable with? I’ve never really liked calling my mother my friend, because she’s my mother, but she’s my person. I speak to my mom twice a day every day. I see her probably three or four times a week. We do everything. We do our grocery shopping together, we do lunches together, we do nails together. She’s my best friend, which is odd. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that until I asked myself that question. Which is fine as an adult, as long as she was your mother when you needed a mother. Well, that’s what’s weird, because she was such a mother that I’m not sure how it segued into this friendship, but there was some battling. I had to make myself seen and heard as an adult and not a child. She still bosses me around. Sarah Chalke plays Kate in this. How did you create that chemistry onscreen? I think that was just the grace of God. You never know; people connect or don’t connect. There’s no secret formula to ensure that you do. Sarah and I had actually chatted before she came on the show, because Dulé Hill—I was working on Suits, and Dulé Hill is a friend of hers. I was concerned about moving my family and everybody to Vancouver, not knowing where to live and where to go, and he said, “Oh, my good friend Sarah Chalke lives there now. She can help you.” So she took the time to get on the phone with me and tell me what areas of Vancouver would be great for the kids and what schools they could go to. She was just extraordinarily kind and generous with her time. And then when they mentioned her to me as an option for Kate, I went, “Oh, my God, she’d be amazing because I love her.” She’s just an effortlessly good person. So that’s really easy to be around, and I don’t feel like I have to be super guarded around her, or watch my back. She’s just a very good person and very supportive. This is a story about living with the choices that you make, both good and bad. Obviously, it’s easy to live with good choices, but what about the not-so-good choices? Well, in my personal life, you don’t really have a choice, do you? You just have to live with it. I’ve taken a lot of time throughout my late 30s and my now early 40s to let it go. I can’t change some of the choices I’ve made; I can’t change some of the mistakes. I can now only, hopefully, grow and learn from them, and maybe not dive back into the same patterns of behavior or thoughts or feelings that got me there in the first place. I don’t think Tully’s there yet. I don’t even know that she knows how to admit that she’s made mistakes. You don’t think she has regrets? I think she does, but I think she’s so guarded about that and so careful. Because if she started to really look it in the eye, the choices she made—choosing career over family, all of those things—I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily the wrong choices, but now she has to live with the fact that she’s very alone aside from Kate. And she gets to watch her friend have this very full and rich life with people that she loves and that love her, while Tully’s life is filled with people who adore her but don’t really know her. You played a couple of different ages in this. Obviously, not the youngest. But what was it like having to go from one to the other? Did you ever have to change in the same day, because the makeup and hair is so different? Yes, we did, and it was total chaos. Thank God they didn’t try to get us to play 14; playing 19 was enough of a stretch. But thanks to heaven for some decent CGI and those pretty filters, because it was a very humbling experience. I’ve always considered that I look pretty good for my age, but it was like, “Yeah, but I don’t look 20.” So we did face tapes, we did the different contouring makeups that we could try to figure out to try to look young, but really it just comes down to doing it on a computer, just put a filter over it. I felt I looked really strange with the face tapes, like a bad facelift essentially. You also did a film with Harry Connick Jr., Fear of Rain [Feb. 12 on VOD; Feb. 16 on DVD and Blu-ray]. Tell us about that. That was a really interesting project for me. It was a young, really talented female director who I was really grateful for the opportunity to work with. Madison Iseman played my daughter in this movie, and Harry was just awesome. But the story really intrigued me because it really dives into mental illness and mental health. I had been going through some things my whole life, but only starting to understand it by the time I was about 35 and addressing some mental health issues I had been suffering. It was interesting to me that this film came to me at a time where I had just begun to understand and embrace and get help for something. I wanted to be a part of it because I think it’s a much more prevalent issue than people realize. I think it’s a very isolating and lonely issue. And I think that stories for me, at least my whole purpose in what I do is stories connect us and stories help us feel less alone. And stories give us sometimes hope, sometimes an outlet, sometimes just entertainment. But this one I thought, Well, this is interesting, because I just felt that anybody out there like me could see this movie and go, “Ah, I’m not alone, they’re making a story about that.” How did you spend your time quarantining on your ranch in Utah? I was loving being home, being with my kids [daughters Naleigh and Adalaide and son Joshua], getting to indulge all my hobbies. I love to paint, draw, knit, cook and I got to do all of these things because suddenly I didn’t have to jet off for another job, or go to another place to work or go travel for promotion. Does the fact that you live in a remote area in Utah make the pandemic easier for you? That’s pretty right on the nose. It’s almost life as usual, but the children not being in school all the time is tough. But remote learning, I am not a teacher, and that has become very evident and I am very grateful to their teachers. But we are in such a remote area and I’m a total homebody when I’m here in Utah anyway, but none of us thought it was going to go on this long, or I didn’t. But for the first, I’d say, four months, I was really enjoying it, quite frankly. Now, I’m getting a little stir crazy. I am starting to really miss interacting with friends more and socializing more, which is odd for me because, typically, I used to think that I’m more of an introvert. Other than the fact you’re not a teacher, what has 2020 taught you about yourself? It’s taught me that I must slow down, and if I don’t, I become the worst version of myself. And then there’s all that regret, “Oh, I didn’t behave well in this situation,” or “I didn’t handle the situation great,” or “I wasn’t calm.” I’ve realized that often I do this to myself, and I always thought it was more of an external thing. I’ve been working since I was 9, but in film and television since I was 12, and I always thought it was just the circumstances of my job. That my job was so overwhelming. That my job could be demanding. That my job asks so much of me. But it’s me. It’s me asking all of that. I’ve struggled and I still struggle to find a way to slow down and to give myself permission, I guess, to do nothing. It’s very hard for me; it’s very uncomfortable. But if I don’t, then I become a madwoman. So I’m still figuring it out, but it’s been an interesting year. You have the animal foundation named after your brother, the Jason Debus Heigl Foundation. What kind of work are you able to do these days on behalf of the foundation? We placed a lot of animals in loving forever homes, and that has been the real silver lining, the blessing, in this pandemic. We have a ranch up here in Utah and a really beautiful kennel, and we take a lot of high-risk dogs out of Los Angeles and other areas and bring them up here to the ranch and get them adopted up here in Utah. A lot of them are older. We always cover all the medical expenses for any that have medical issues. And we partner up here with another animal rescue called Nuzzles & Co. It’s just extraordinary. All of the dogs that we had at the ranch have been adopted, so we were able to bring up another, I think, we have six right now. People really used this time because they were home and they felt that they could make that commitment to a companion animal, to adopt. It was just so wonderful that these dogs have found their forever homes. So many of them are just living the high life now, and that’s what they deserve, that’s their purpose. We do that and we fund a lot of programs. We fund a lot of free spay and neuter days. We’ve been doing a lot of food drives here in Utah for people who are out of work and can’t afford their animal’s food. We have done a lot of work at a reservation up here, where there’s a lot of abandoned and homeless animals. We’ve been paying for Nuzzles to get them, bring them in, spay and neuter them, take care of medical and get them adopted. It’s really rewarding. Next, A New Year in Books: The Best 2021 Releases to Read This Winter
