Most of the time I am thinking “How would my character make love at this point?” What’s the situation with her partnership? Prior to the baby, after the baby?  Is she tired? Are they in a good spot?  Are they fighting?  You know we have kind of really run the gamut with the relationship, and there have been some pretty painful scenes. Is there trust?  Is there not trust?  And so for me just because you are making out with someone (on screen) doesn’t mean you can just relax and think…. “Hey I think I’ll just relax and make out!”  Because all of a sudden that would be Laurel in that moment, and I can’t play what Laurel would be in that moment because I have to play Tina. You have to create where that character is because I believe that people behave and act differently even in a sexual act if their relationship is positive and loving and warm or if it’s been damaged through betrayal.

Jennifer and I talked about the love scenes, and there is so much blocking, it’s like “if you bring your arm here and do your left arm here and your right arm there, and swing your leg over here . . .Yeah that works for me! Ok!”  By the time you have blocked it all out, it’s all so technical and there’s a camera there.  We used to say that it is very like Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers, and it is.  It’s just like a dance step.  It’s just like learning stunts.  It was very similar to learning a fight scene in Angel. 

A sex scene in the L word is just like a stunt scene in Angel!  The emotion behind it is different, well except for maybe the last scene in the first season.  But it’s so technical because actresses all have different clauses as to what they can reveal and what they can’t on screen, and there are all these different types of articles of clothing that make it appear that you are nude, so you have to be really careful.

To be quite honest the first love scene we did in season 1, Jennifer was taped so I had to keep my hands in the same place, so after a while I felt like I was climbing a tree, you know and I remember saying, “I don’t want to look like a bad lover,” but I can’t move my hands, so we had to try and make that look natural.  Rose Troche was directing that episode, and it started to become like a joke, because you have to find all this humor.  At the same time you don’t get that long to film a scene like that because you know we film a whole episode in about 7 or 8 days

so you have a sex scene that will take up two minutes or maybe three minutes of an episode, and you have another 50 minutes or so to film, so we have a joke that the sex scene will come at the end of the day when they have 5 minutes and they are like, “Ok, go!”  And you’re like, “‘Hang on a minute!!!’”

Laurel on Season 3

It’s going to be a difficult season.  It’s going to be one of the most complex I think. I’m actually very nervous about the season that’s about to air, and if anyone is going to be the hot couple, I think it’s going to be Shane and Carmen this year.

If you look at Bette and Tina’s history, they have come together because of the baby, but they didn’t process the infidelity, the cheating. They  didn’t process some of the problems and the co-dependency that went on, and I think when you come to look at Bette and Tina you will see that there really was a lot that wasn’t processed,  so their relationship is sort of band-aided, but not really worked out.

I think it’s important to the story.  You also have to have somewhere, hopefully if the show runs for a long time, for relationships to go.  I think there wouldn’t be a lot of drama if we were to just stop home, make out and watch TV, and look after the baby. There wouldn’t be a lot of drama if we were perfectly happy, and there weren’t any temptations and there weren’t any job issues.   You know this is TV, and the Network knows that what people like to see is a bit of drama. 

What’s really going to happen third season, or what I think will be interesting,  is to see where Tina is. I think Ilene set her up so that once she has the baby, she’s feels great and it’s all going to come together for her.  What you see is the circle becoming more complete, and what ends up happening is that she finds that it’s actually ok for her to go back to work.  There’s a great opportunity for her and all of a sudden it’s really coming together.

There’s this part of her identity - and I have talked to a lot of women and I actually feel this for myself - where if you decide to have a child for a long time and maybe there was a journey to get there, it’s a little bit of a struggle, and when it finally happens, there’s at kind of completeness. I think it happens with Tina. In some ways that’s where life gets altered, and changes for her and Bette, whose character has always been wrapped up in her work, and then they have this baby and their world is rocked.

Tina actually starts working a lot. In Season 3, you are going to see what happens to both of them, and the flip flop might change the dynamic of whether they work because they work in a certain role.  But the question is do they work when the roles are reversed?  When the power shifts?  This happens in so many partnerships, and I just want to say not just same sex, but heterosexual relationships too.  We do this as a society where we say the person that’s the bread winner calls the shots, but that’s not necessarily a happy functional way to go because both people should call the shots because child care is just as hard as working. You both need to come to some agreement. 

I think that issue is going to be explored very heavily next season.  Can one person go from being the worker to being more of a traditional wife role, and can they support each other at the same time?  Or does one person say “I’ve supported you for so long”-- I don’t mean support financially but, “I’ve stayed home for you,” or “I took care of the work side.”

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