On The "Cupid" Set With Paula Marshall
By Helen A. Lee
This article appeared
on the TVQuest.com website
in September 1998.
Actress Paula Marshall doesn't really want to be famous. "It sounds weird," she says, "but I don't want to be a movie star. I don't want to be a TV star--I don't want to be a star at all." If her clever new show "Cupid" (debuting Sept. 26 at 10 ET on ABC) is a hit, she just may have no choice in the matter.
Marshall spoke to TVQuest in her air-conditioned trailer wearing full makeup and curlers, outside the tin-roofed warehouse in Chicago that contains the set of "Cupid." In the hour-long drama, she plays Dr. Claire Allen, a renowned relationship expert who thinks matches should be based on logic and not chemistry.
Clair meets Trevor Hale (Jeremy Piven) at the hospital where he's under observation for telling everyone he's the Roman god of love, trying to get back to Mt. Olympus. Trevor is being punished for a series of bad matches he made and can't return home until he's put 100 couples together, but this time he doesn't have magic to help him. Naturally, Claire thinks he's nuts.
"It's kind of the beginning of a very strange friendship--I don't even know if I should use that word," Marshall says. "Trevor kind of tells me I don't know what I'm talking about--and sometimes he's right. It's funny how sometimes he says something that makes complete sense and I, of course, don't want to admit to it. I don't want to give into it that easily, so there's the struggle."
The conflict between the romantic god and the rational psychologist promises to be one of the most interesting aspects of "Cupid," and Marshall has her own ideas of how the relationship should--or shouldn't develop: "I think as soon as they get together, the show's over. I think we're going to have this very odd, intense friendship--and those are really neat and very rare between men and women. But, because we're doctor/patient, hopefully that will always remain and you can't step over the line too much."
Though she admits to writing lists, just as Clair does, Marshall denies any other similarity between her character and herself. "Clair does not follow her heart--you'll find out in the show that she did, or she used to, and it didn't work so there's a reason she's such a stick in the mud. I follow my heard, I will get trampled on if I have to, because I think you have to. I don't have as many walls up as this woman does. I'm more easily read. With Clair, you can read right through her, but she doesn't think you can."
Marshall, who's been in Chicago about four weeks, plans to visit her boyfriend, actor Bruno Campos, in Los Angeles about once a month. But the show's shooting schedule makes it nearly impossible to do much of anything besides work. "I don't even know what day it is. It's weird, we just started and I'm exhausted already," Marshall says. "I'm not complaining, it's just that I never realized I was going to work 14 or 15 hours a day. I mean I go home, I take a shower, I wash my face, I make a cup of tea, I learn my lines and then I go to be. I can't even work out. I have no energy to work out so I have to be very careful not to get huge here."
Marshall freely admits she's afraid of Chicago's famously brutal winters. "I will be very honest about it. I don't like cold weather--that's why I live in southern California. So we'll see what happens when it's 30 below and they're calling me to come outside to do my scene and my eyeballs are frozen--which I hear happens. We can't have big old clothes on because it's TV--you have to look good. So I kept telling the wardrobe people, I'm wearing hats and scarves and mufflers or you know, ear things."
Besides the weather, Marshall has noticed some other differences since landing in Chicago. "TV is on earlier. Some of the hairdos--it's like wow, we are in the midwest. Chicks wear different shoes. And I have only seen one pair of fake breasts since I've been here."