Desperate times

Drea de Matteo. Photo / Supplied

Drea de Matteo is used to being killed. Her most famous demise was when her character Adriana was cruelly exterminated from The Sopranos.

These days she's able to laugh off the slow, painful death of her foray into comedy on the ill-fated Matt LeBlanc sitcom, Joey.

After that, the star - used to being a fixture on one of the best TV shows ever made - found her career slowly being "strangled". After a small break from the screen she did a round of auditions and got nowhere.

"I was heartbroken all the time," she says. "I tried to act and people were just like, 'yeah, whatever'. And I got real close to a lot of roles, but I fall in this weird age range. It is either they want you to be 45 or 27. And I'm 37.

So I was like, 'there is nothing for me. And I'm going to go home with my tail between my legs."' She didn't however. De Matteo has finally landed a plum role - as Desperate Housewives' best new character.

Angie Bolen arrives on Wisteria Lane with her landscape designer husband Nick, troubled teenage son Danny (introduced last season), and thick New York accent. She's not without her baggage, least of all a horrendous scar on her back that, along with the tough persona, signals a dark and secret past.

Oddly, it's neurotic Bree with whom she forms a bond as the two housewives share recipes. The role seems to have revived de Matteo's confidence.

Today she sits swinging her cowboy boots on a director's chair on the deceptively chilly set of Desperate Housewives and, although she doesn't possess the delicate features of co-star Dana Delaney, or the stick-thin figure of Teri Hatcher, she has an earthy, natural beauty set off by her long, gold hair. It's that earthiness that sometimes gets lost on screen, hardened along with the New Jersey accent.

Despite this elegance, she is self-deprecating about her good looks, pointing out they could have found a younger, prettier actress to replace the saucy Nicollette Sheridan, whose character Edie Britt was killed off at the end of the fifth season.

"My character is not the minx on the block. She's not like my other characters. I'm not strutting my stuff. I can't anymore. They don't want to put me in lingerie, the ratings will go down."

That's unlikely but de Matteo has had her brush with low ratings, and the inevitable difficulty of living up to the hugely successful Sopranos. She took the role as LeBlanc's sister Gina on Joey as a way to broaden her range but now confesses to feeling out of her league.

"I had the best time of my life on Joey on Friday nights after the show. But I should never have been there. I come from dramatic theatre not vaudeville and comedy, and the notes [from directors] were always: 'Bigger. More cheerleady. Smile more.' It was a dance recital. And it just didn't work for me at all. I felt they wanted that character from Sopranos because I didn't make a caricature out of her and then I was forced to turn her into a caricature and that made me sad. So after that I just quit for a while. I didn't want to act anymore."

She wasn't ready to give up entirely though, and landed a role as the bike gang leader's drug-using ex-wife on TV drama series Sons of Anarchy. But when she was written out of that show, she decided to focus on her personal life, and supporting her boyfriend of six years, country singer Shooter Jennings. It paid off in unexpected ways. De Matteo fell pregnant, and in 2007 gave birth to daughter Alabama Gypsy Rose. Not long afterwards came another surprise.

De Matteo was standing in the wings watching one of Shooter's concerts when he dragged her on stage and proposed in front of the screaming crowd. She should have been thrilled but instead she was shocked - and a little angry. She'd always told him he'd never make her a desperate housewife.


"Am I anti-marriage?" she muses. "Not for other people, just for me. I think contracts are crazy. And I also know how ruthless I can be. So if he ever did anything to screw me over, it would be over for him and he knows it. And I told this to his mum and to everybody in his family. 'I'm trying to protect you here, why do you want to get involved with someone as crazy as me? I will take everything from you'."

Then she mutters under her breath so quietly it's hard to know if she's just being facetious, "even though he doesn't have anything". She accepted his proposal as ungraciously as possible but, even now, it's evident it's a bit of a bugbear - de Matteo just doesn't like to be tied down.

When she was asked to be a wife a second time just 24 hours later, she found it much easier to accept. This time the proposal was from Marc Cherry, creator of Desperate Housewives. De Matteo was ecstatic - this was exactly the kind of show she was looking for. Not only did it offer stability, a decent pay-cheque and a manageable schedule for the new mum, Angie was a good, meaty role. That didn't curb her nerves though, particularly when Cherry expressed his surprise at her speaking voice during the audition.

"I guess he wanted me to do the New York thing. Then he heard me speak and he goes, 'wow, you don't have the accent. Maybe you should play it straight then, because you sound different enough from the rest of the girls and your voice is deep.'

"I got suddenly nervous that I was going to play her straight on a comedy and I'm not comedic, it's not my normal thing unless it is super-deadpan, sarcastic humour."

"I knew they wanted an Italian-American. Marc said, 'I want you to at least challenge yourself and not feel like you are doing the same thing that you are always doing'.

And I was like, 'I'm so old now that I don't really care about typecasting my job' ... But [Angie] was going to be tough and she was going to be opposite of all the girls on Wisteria Lane." De Matteo knew she couldn't afford to rest on the laurels of a hit show.

Each season Cherry sets out to break new ground, much as he did in the fifth season when he brought the action forward five years. This time around, he and the writers knew they had to invigorate the show with new cast members, many of them younger, to bring in the next generation of fans. But even that was a risky move as new characters introduced for previous seasons hadn't always boosted ratings.

Viewer numbers slumped during the second season when Alfre Woodard and Mehcad Brooks were introduced as the Applewhites, a dark storyline that has parallels with the Bolens.

Neither family fits the white picket-fence mould of Wisteria Lane and both are hiding something dangerous - the suggestion is that the Bolens are fugitives on the run.

Already in the US de Matteo has been plagued by rumours that, fictionally at least, she's about to be whacked yet again.

Everyone has been welcoming, she insists, and in many ways the ensemble cast "family" on the Desperate Housewives set reminds her of the friendships she made working on The Sopranos. But there's no denying de Matteo is the odd one out. She's like a rock musician playing with a string quartet, a straight-shooter in a gaggle of perfectly groomed Hollywood beauties, a woman who says she feels like an "a**hole" talking about herself. She seems genuinely staggered by how much her castmates exercise.

So it seems odd that she says she most identifies with uptight housewife Bree. "I think a lot of it is because of she plays such a giant character and I always play these giant characters, too, that couldn't be more opposite of who I am. And Marcia [Cross], I thought she would be like [her character] Bree the way everybody thinks I'm like Adriana or something. But she is the complete opposite.

"You have to work for [great characters] like these and then when you get it, it's like the greatest thing."

* Desperate Housewives screens on TV2, Mondays at 8.30pm