Thursday, October 8, 1998
Attorney to join new
‘Law and Order’ season
TELEVISION: Harmon to replace Carey Lowell in series’ evolving
ensemble
By Frazier Moore
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Say hello to the latest "L & O" newbie.
She’s Angie Harmon, who joins "Law & Order" in the role of
Assistant District Attorney Abbie Carmichael as the crime drama
notches its ninth season.
And eighth cast change. The series’ key positions (three at the
precinct house investigating each week’s crime, three at the
courthouse prosecuting the suspect) have thus far been filled with
no fewer than 14 actors.
"Law & Order," the longest-running drama on TV and arguably
the best, maintains rock-solid consistency in its scripts,
production values and evolving ensemble.
This tradition should continue, based on early sightings of
Harmon. Sure, "Law & Order" fans will miss Jamie Ross, the
straight-arrow, statuesque "second chair" played by Harmon’s
predecessor Carey Lowell (who took her leave two years after
replacing Jill Hennessy, who three years before that had replaced
Richard Brooks from the show’s originally all-male cast).
Abbie, a fiercely independent Texan who cut her teeth
prosecuting drug dealers, seems likely to stir things up in the
District Attorney’s office. ("Law & Order" airs Wednesdays on
NBC at 10 p.m.).
Harmon, a former model who speaks with a smoky twang that evokes
her native Dallas, learned that she had landed the role on a
Wednesday in July. Next day she was dispatched to New York, where
that Friday she took part in a "table read" of the season’s first
script. Then she flew back to Los Angeles for a network publicity
event. Then back to New York that Sunday night.
Then, first thing Monday at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers Studios,
she claimed her place alongside co-stars Steven Hill, Sam
Waterston, S. Epatha Merkerson, Jerry Orbach and Benjamin Bratt as
the cameras rolled.
"I think I’m kinda settled now," she says during a recent
interview. "I was a little intimidated on the show at first, but
now I’m getting my boots on, getting down and dirty with my
character and everybody else."
As she speaks, Harmon has polished off five episodes, as well as
a to-die-for apple tart here at Bergdorf Goodman’s fifth-floor
cafe. Aglow from lunch following her brief shooting day, and with
money to spend in Bergdorf’s that afternoon, she seems pleased with
her life.
It’s a welcome recovery from her roller coaster ride the past 12
months. Last fall she was a regular on ABC’s new drama "C-16." She
played Amanda Reardon, a rookie in the FBI’s elite C-16 crime
unit.
"I was so close to the character," she says. "Amanda wanted to
prove herself to the other members of her group, and so did I, as
an actress, to the rest of the cast. It was so parallel."
Conveniently, Harmon’s character was supposed to appear unsure
of herself. For Harmon, new to series television, portraying that
was a snap.
"I could walk out on the set after they called ‘action,’ and
slip and fall and throw papers all over the place and sneeze, and
it would totally work. They’d say, ‘Yes! She’s brilliant!’"
Just before Christmas, Harmon, with the rest of the "C-16"
company, found out her show had been canceled. "It was such a
crushing blow," she says. "I’m one of those people who likes to
believe that when a door closes, a window opens. But when we got
the news, I was thinking, ‘Where’s my window so I can jump out of
it?’"
Months later, still with no prospects, she beat a temporary
retreat from L.A., driving up the California coast. "When I got
home, my electricity was shut off. My phone was shut off. So I’m
trying to go around paying my bills and in the middle of all that,
do an audition."
She means one of her umpteen auditions for Abbie, a character
who radiates strength and self-confidence.
"Then, when I came out of the audition," she recalls, "I get in
my car and the window explodes."
The glass in the driver’s-side door of her BMW inexplicably had
shattered. "I’m waiting for my head to go like this," and she
mimics a severed head toppling off her shoulders.
"I had tiny points of blood all over my arms and face, and when
I went to pay another bill, the woman said, ‘Are you all right?’ I
said, ‘Don’t shut off my gas! OK?’"
And they didn’t. Angie Harmon won her case. Soon after that, she
won her role.
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