Cynthia Nixon Looks Back on "SVU"

[JamesG]

Cynthia Nixon won her second Emmy, this one for Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series, for her portrayal of Janis Donovan, a suspect pretending to have dissociative identity disorder.

It was an intriguing acting challenge for Nixon, who likens pretending to have such a disorder to the act of performance itself. She watched Sally Field's breakout performance in Sybil to prepare, and also drew on lessons she had learned from legendary acting teacher Uta Hagen.



"Uta said, 'Don't worry. If you're a confident person and you're playing a meek person or vice versa, don't worry about it because think about the person around who you feel confident or the person who makes you feel inadequate, and just pretend that that's the person you're talking to,'" Nixon recalls.

"'And you'll find that person inside of you.' Because we all have the sexy person, the shy person, the confident person, the mean person, the superior person, the insecure — we have all of those. When you're playing a multiple personality, those people might have different tones of voice, accents, or genders. It's a great thing for an actor to be able to do, and we all do a much narrower, smaller, less discernible version of that [in our work all the time]."

https://ew.com/role-call-cynthia-nix...-roles-8661174