Profile : Straight-Up Bedelia : Filming NBC’s ‘Switched at Birth’ Reminds Actress Why She Disdains Television

Bonnie Bedelia doesn’t mince her words. On this lunch hour, for one instance, she was notice ably in final exhaustion, having that morning finished shooting “Switched at Birth,” an NBC miniseries that promises to go deadly direct for tear ducts tonight and Monday.

When the role was offered, she declared it “most unappealing”--and took it, she recalled during an interview near the location at Marina del Rey: “I said, ‘I’m going to be miserable the entire time I’m working on it.’ And I was right. I had dreams about dead babies and little girls covered with dust and it was totally everything I expected it to be.”

This was not the sort of regressive hyperbole that you expect from an actor during the promotional phase of a project.

“Switched at Birth” is one of those by-now-traditional TV dramas ripped out of the headlines and, in this case, the title might stir memories of the sensational Florida story about the Twigg and Mays families whose daughters were switched in the nursery. It wasn’t until 10 years later when little Arlena Twigg died of congenital heart disease that genetic testing revealed that the Twiggs weren’t the biological parents.

Kimberly Mays and her “father” Robert were located and the resulting custody case was one of the most gnarled in legal history. The last heart wrench of the movie is the first meeting between Mrs. Twigg and Kimberly.

Meanwhile, real life goes on and back in court. Mays feels that the girl, now 12, is undergoing emotional turmoil and he seeks to limit the Twigg visitations. Further, lawsuits by the two families may start soon against the offending Hardee Memorial Hospital in Wauchula, Fla.

Back to the miniseries: Bonnie plays Regina Twigg--”an incredibly tough role (given) the amount of pain that Regina went through,” said writer Michael O’Hara, who’s also executive producer along with Lawrence Horowitz, Barry Morrow and Richard Heus.

But Bedelia is one of the rare actresses in Hollywood acclaimed for emotional power, though it’s not so readily recognized in her dutiful wife to Bruce Willis in both “Die Hard” adventures. Still, she won praise for her deadly dutiful wife of Harrison Ford in “Presumed Innocent.” (Coincidentally, the first “Die Hard” airs on Fox opposite the second part of “Switched at Birth.”)

But besides the anguish dictated by the “Switched at Birth” script, this now was television, which has its special anguish for a film actress. Bedelia’s previous TV projects include “When the Time Comes” (1987), “Alex: The Life of a Child” (1986) and “Salem’s Lot” (1979).

“It’s like childbirth,” she said, relishing the analogy. “You have a kid (she has two sons) and it’s painful, and in the middle of a push, if someone asks you if you’re going to have another child, it’s like ‘No way.’

“And by the time the kid is 8 years old you’re like pregnant again and you forgot. I mean you remember that it was painful but you don’t remember the PAAAAAAAAIN!” She laughed, remembering the pain. Customers in the next booth and one passing waiter looked over at her.

She explained, “It’s a completely different process, TV than features, totally. I was in shock on this one for the first few days. I couldn’t believe things were being done this fast.”

Acting is “an evolutionary process, the development of a character, the working out of scenes,” she said. She related that on films the actors meet with the director and maybe after a few hours of heavy discussion they go to makeup and maybe get in a “master shot” of the scene before lunch. “You understand where that scene fits into the whole piece and where you are in the different dramatic arcs,” she said.

“In television, you walk in and the camera is set up and the director says, ‘OK, you come out of here and you walk over here.’ And if the scene for you doesn’t fall over and the pigeons aren’t making noise in the rafters and if you don’t have a helicopter (flying by) and if the focus puller has got it fairly well in focus, that’s it, and you go on to the next shot.”

Michael O’Hara chortled: “You know, we had this conversation every day. She’d say ‘Ninety percent of my time is blocking (the scenes) and 10% character.’ I’d always say, ‘That’s why we hired you, babe.’ ”

Bedelia said that TV movies are “newspaper headline stories” that in vast majority are “sensationalistic, about rape and incest and murdering family members and child abuse and wife abuse and, you know, I’m bored with them.”

But this project was “real, genuine, interesting.”

“I must say,” she said, “they made it very sweet for me. When you have people coming to you who have nice credits and they say, ‘Here’s this role and we want you to do it and you’re the first one we’re going to and we’ll pay you a fortune’ and, you know, these people really want to work with you and it’s a good role and a good story, well. . . .”

What about another miniseries? “No, forget it,” she said briskly, absolutely. “No, I mean it. This was awful. I mean, I think it will be good but I was fighting all the time. It was a struggle. It was awful.”

“Switched at Birth” airs tonight and Monday at 9 p.m. on NBC. “Die Hard” airs Monday at 8 p.m. on Fox.