Profile : Karen Sillas : Over Her ‘Suspicion’

Karen Sillas remembers the day last spring that she auditioned for her role as Detective Rose Phillips on “Under Suspicion,” CBS’ moody Friday night police noir drama, as a kind of a 12-hour lurching frenzy, a spinning blur like nothing she’d ever been through.

She’d jetted into Los Angeles that morning, found herself being hustled into limos and run through a glad-handing gauntlet of producers and network executives with their hugs and their handshakes and their Hollywood smiles. They told her they loved her, which was certainly nice, but she didn’t have a clue who most of them were.

She hadn’t expected things to be quite so manic. It was just a reading, her agents had said, an audition for some CBS types who’d seen her buzz-generating performance in a small independent film called “What Happened Was,” an emotionally potent two-character drama that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival.

Sillas, who’d built her career in the bare-bones world of independent films, had never auditioned for a TV series before. She was, after all, a serious New York actress who’d grown up in Brooklyn, studied with Strasberg and painted houses for a living when she couldn’t pay her rent. But, the way she saw it, whatever she sacrificed in paychecks she made up in artistic integrity.

“I’ve never done material that I don’t want to do,” she says, her Brooklyn bluntness beginning to come through. “I don’t want to do something if it’s crap. And I won’t.”

When she graduated in 1985 from the nationally renowned theater conservatory at the State University of New York in Purchase there were plenty of agents pursuing her with promises of fortune and fame, touting L.A. as the promised land.

“Part of it was probably fear,” she says now, asked why she didn’t give in. “But I also felt I didn’t want to become like everybody else. I didn’t want to be just another blonde.”

So she waited. She only read the “Under Suspicion” pilot script because her agents promised it wasn’t a typical television part. Rose Phillips was no perky prime-time babe. She was a complicated woman, with tightly bundled emotions, struggling to be taken seriously without sacrificing her femininity. And besides, it was only a reading, right? How big a deal could it be?

She couldn’t have known that Jacqueline Zambrano, the creator and executive producer of “Under Suspicion,” had been trying to cast the part for months and, as production deadlines for the pilot grew near, was approaching a state of absolute panic.

She’d systematically rejected a slew of high-profile name-brand actresses, many of them suggested by the network, holding out for someone who fit her vision of the character.

“I wanted a real woman, not some anorexic girl,” says Zambrano, “someone who could some in and just be the part, who doesn’t have to act tough because she is tough. They would throw names at me and I’d say, ‘I don’t believe her as a cop.’ And, occasionally, I’d say, ‘I don’t believe her as a woman!’ “

Lisa Freiberger, head of casing at CBS, spotted Sillas’ chiseled features in “What Happened Was” and flew her to L.A. for an audition the same day Zambrano saw a print of the film. Before they’d even met, Zambrano had already made up her mind.

“After she finished reading for CBS,” Zambrano remembers, “they shoved her in a taxi, she came over to us. We chatted. She read. We shoved her out of the room and I said, ‘I want her, she’s brilliant.’ ”

“I was on my way to Portland (where “Under Suspicion” is filmed) that afternoon, so I walked out, said to Karen, ‘Congratulations, you’ve got the role. I’ll see you when I get back tomorrow.’ And I left for the airport.”

Sillas, who still wasn’t quite sure what had happened, spent the night with a friend in Los Feliz. “We went out samba dancing,” she says, “and drinking red wine.

“And at some point, late that night, it hit me that, wait a minute, nobody had even asked me if I wanted to do a TV show. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘No! I don’t.’ ”

It took Zambrano most of the next day to convince Sillas to take the part, assuring her she’d still be able to do films and promising her a collaborative voice in the shaping of her character. Five days later the two of them were flying to Oregon to film the pilot episode.

Although the ratings for “Under Suspicion,” hamstrung by its Friday night time slot, have been less than stellar, CBS has ordered a full season of episodes and Sillas’ reviews may well be the reason.

The look of “Under Suspicion” is intentionally dark, the gray skies of Portland setting a backdrop for a world of shadows and silhouettes . The only thing that cuts through the fog, more than one critic has pointed out, is Sillas, a tight-lipped ice princess who can dominate a scene without saying a word.

None of this appears to have affected Sillas just yet. Part of it, she says, is that she’s been too busy to notice, working 16-hour days a long way from whatever hype may be bubbling out of L.A.

“But every once in a while some of it does seep in,” says Sillas, who , after a lifetime in New York , has taken up residence in a 90-year-old farmhouse 20 miles outside of Portland. “I’m just beginning to realize that I have my own show, that a lot of people have taken a risk and had faith that I can pull this off.”

“Under Suspicion” airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on CBS.