Jason Meyers
LOS ANGELES (TNA) – To Holly Hunter’s way of thinking, it’s her obligation as an actress to get naked. In fact, she says, “You’ve got to be willing to show everything.”
That’s a philosophy that male moviegoers can get behind wholeheartedly.
Alas, the Oscar-winning leading lady of TNT’s “Saving Grace” is speaking largely in the abstract. She’s referring to emotional nudity, which she sees as being liberating for the actor and satisfying for the audience.
Sure enough, throughout her career, Hunter has consistently delivered performances that are raw, unguarded, believable and, in a word, naked.
That said, when circumstances call for it, in such movies as “The Piano,” “Crash” and “Thirteen,” she also has been known to drop her duds for real. And we’re happy to note that, unlike some high-minded actresses, she doesn’t dismiss a nude scene as a kind of necessary evil. In fact, she seems to get off on it.
Perhaps that’s why, in “Saving Grace” (which wraps its first season with episodes airing on Monday, Dec. 17, and Tuesday, Dec. 18), Hunter has left little to the viewer’s imagination. During her first scene in the first episode, her character, Grace Hanadarko, sweated up the sheets in some of the most athletic and acrobatic soft-core porn ever presented on basic cable.
And no body double was used. “That’s all me,” says Hunter, who, at age 49, can rev up the sex-cougar dynamic big time when she slips into character.
That introductory fuck sequence, in fact, played a big part in luring Hunter into starring in the first TV series of her career.
“I’ve been offered various series over the years, but I was never interested, not until I read this character,” she says. “How could I resist a script that opens with the lead character naked, having sex with a guy and saying she wants to come?”
As Hunter sees it, a character just doesn’t get any more real than that. So Hunter signed on, in part because, “I didn’t want anyone else to play Grace.”
It’s worth noting, of course, that “Saving Grace” isn’t expressly about sex. It’s actually a gritty crime drama with treacly touches of pseudo-spirituality thrown in, making it kind of an “NYPD Blue” meets “Touched By An Angel.”
Grace is an Oklahoma City police detective who, seeking a cure for a lot of emotional pain in her life, drinks too much, drives too fast and sleeps with all the wrong men. She’s literally speeding along in the fast lane to hell when a “last-chance” angel confronts her, urging her to change her ways. When Grace is slow to forego her life of debauchery, a tug-of-war battle for her soul ensues.
So the show isn’t just about Grace’s sex life, but it’s a pivotal element. And Hunter zeroes in on the character’s animal magnetism because there’s a lot she feels compelled to convey about the matter.
“As an actress,” Hunter says, “I want to talk about sex and you don’t often get to.”
Now she has a forum.
Hunter finds it refreshing that a woman TV character in her late 40s can so thoroughly enjoy a vigorous, commitment-free sex life. She digs that a woman in her late 40s can feel so free about her body that she can hook up with younger men and routinely put on peep shows for the old guy living next door. She likes the show’s implied statement that “women of a certain age” don’t dry up sexually.
“For women in this puritanical country,” Hunter says, “sex is for people under 30—or else it’s demonized.”
Never mind the fact that Earl, Grace’s last-chance angel, cites whoring around as one of the many reasons she’s going to hell.
Hunter, who admits she isn’t convinced that Grace really needs “saving,” doesn’t see Grace’s slutty nightlife as being immoral. To the contrary, she thinks it’s “beautiful.” But most of all, Hunter savors the idea that a 49-year-old actress – any 49-year-old actress – can portray so carnal a human being.
“She’s very much a force of nature and I find it galvanizing,” Hunter says. “I don’t really judge it. I just find it compelling.”
Rationalize it any way you want, Holly. But speaking for most guys, we’re just happy to see you get naked.