Ask Jennifer Beals
what she's learned playing a gay gal on The L Word, Showtime's sexy
melodrama about lesbian life in L.A., and she sizes up the human condition:
"There are more similarities among us than differences."
The L Word, which returned Sunday for its second season, reunites the
dishy sapphic sisters played by (among others) Mia Kirshner, Katherine
Moennig, Erin Daniels and Leisha Hailey. The season premiere, encoring at 10
tonight, finds Beals' character, Bette, in a real stew.
This season Bette will face fearsome funding problems at the art museum she
runs. Worse, it looks like her relationship with Tina (Laurel Holloman), her
longtime partner now pregnant with the child they had dreamed of parenting,
is on the rocks.
"What a brutal year! It's awful!" Beals says with a chuckle. "There's this
moment in the eighth episode where Bette has one little moment of victory
and joy. I burst into tears when I read it. `Something good happens to
Bette, everyone!' I was so excited."
A veteran actress who at 41 appears barely older than she did as the
welder/would-be ballerina in 1983's Flashdance, Beals says she
originally came to The L Word far less focused on portraying a
fashion-forward lesbian than on the challenge of depicting an art museum
boss.
A lesbian relationship "is about love and it's about attraction," she says.
"I understood love and attraction. I didn't know anything about art."
The art of The L Word has been its spicy recipe of girl-on-girl
explicitness blended with a hip California lifestyle anyone might fantasize
about.
By design, the series is au courant. But thanks to Bette and Tina, with
their ups and downs, it has scored a bit of unsought currency: Since The
L Word premiered, gay marriage has become an issue splitting the nation.
"I'm always shocked that gay marriage is such a big deal," says Beals. "You
have to realize how precious human life is, when there are tsunamis and
mudslides, when there are armies and terrorists -- at any moment, you could
be gone, and potentially in the most brutal fashion.
"And then you have to realize that love is truly one of the most
extraordinary things you can experience in your life. To begrudge someone
else their love of another person because of gender seems to me absolutely
absurd.
"It's based in fear, fear of the other, fear of what is not like you," she
says. "But when you are able to see lives on a day-to-day basis, rather than
reducing it to politics, then it humanizes a whole community of people that
were otherwise invisible."
Since she took a break from Yale to make off-the-shoulder sweat shirts de
rigueur in Flashdance, Beals has logged dozens of films.
Hers is a career she's happy with, "and I hope I'll be acting till the day I
die. It's something you can never finish, never get to the center of."
Happily, she isn't finished with The L Word: It's already renewed for
a third season.
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