Stevenson Cuts Out Sugar and Likes the Bitter Taste

Cynthia Stevenson finally gets her turn to be bad. And you know what? It feels good!

The actress has played women so serenely sweet, so endearingly gullible, that her characters have reformed a womanizer (“Watch It”), turned tearful romantic (“Forget Paris”), been driven to exhaustion (“My Talk Show”) and been maligned into humiliation (“The Player”).

No character is more aptly named--or so well defines Stevenson’s most familiar role--than her current TV persona, Hope Davidson, on NBC’s sitcom “Hope & Gloria,” where, you guessed it, she springs eternal as optimism personified.

But in “Home for the Holidays,” she’s “not likable at all ,” the actress says gleefully over lunch at a Los Angeles restaurant. She describes Joanne--her character in Jodie Foster’s latest feature, which opened Friday--as “very bitter.”

Stevenson, 33, plays a dysfunctional family’s middle child, with Holly Hunter and Robert Downey Jr. as her siblings and Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning as the parents.

“I wear a big giant cross on my back. I’m just a big martyr,” Stevenson says. Grinning from ear to ear, she adds: “She’s a very ugly character, very rigid. It was so great to play her.”

The Vancouver-raised Stevenson says that despite her theater background, where she “often played really awful, ugly characters,” when she arrived in Hollywood, “and you look like me, it’s like, ‘Oh, she’ll be the nice girl.’ And then I always got those kinds of roles.”

Hollywood, Stevenson asserts, often doesn’t give actors “a massive variety of roles, because it’s easier to say, ‘Oh, this is what she does, great, let’s plug her in there.’ I’m so grateful for this very different character.”

Joanne is quite a departure from TV’s Hope, whom Stevenson played simultaneously as she jetted between Baltimore, where “Holidays” shot, to L.A. for the NBC sitcom during the beginning months of 1995.

“Hope is unbelievably naive, sweet and the kindest woman who ever walked the earth, so it was so great to just go back and forth,” she says. “I loved it!”

Returning to L.A. as Hope, she’d “walk around like a spinning happy top.”

That whirling joy could describe Stevenson’s own feelings when she arrived in L.A. in 1985 armed with an education from the American Conservatory Theatre. Unfortunately, a pin was poised to burst her bubble.

Her smiling eyes wide, the actress recounts, “The very first agent-manager I met in L.A. looked at me like this.” Stevenson purses her lips, scowls and moves her eyes up and down. “She finally said, ‘You’re nothing. You’re not glamorous. You’re not interesting enough. You’re nothing.’ ”

Stevenson raises her right palm to her mouth and gasps. “I thought, ‘Oh, God!’ She finally said, ‘I suggest you gain a lot of weight and try and do a quirky thing.’ ”

Welcome to Hollywood. But Stevenson prevailed and the next year was cast in the syndicated sketch-comedy series “Off the Wall” and in other TV guest roles.

In 1990 she landed the starring role on the decidedly quirky syndicated “My Talk Show,” which she describes as “ ‘Larry Sanders’ without the money.” She left after 60 episodes, “totally exhausted” and ready to return to Vancouver and--yuck, she adds--consider going back to school in pursuit of a different career.

But she continued to find TV work and then met with Robert Altman, who cast her in his 1992 hit “The Player.” That solidified her career choice and garnered much commentary on her topless scene. “Oh, brother!” she sighs of the movie’s much-discussed first shot of her--nude, seated in a hot tub reading a script. “It had a point . Gosh, these people were in such a pathetic relationship and that scene just captured it.”

Later that year she won the role of Bob Newhart’s daughter in his CBS series “Bob.” Executive producers Cheri and Bill Steinkellner had remembered her from a recurring part on “Cheers” as a secretary to the character Norm.

“She made a meal out of sharpening a pencil,” Cheri Steinkellner says, “and we realized what a creative, funny, interesting person she is.”

When “Bob” bombed, the Steinkellners started work on “Hope & Gloria” with Stevenson in mind. The series, which premiered last spring, is a female buddy show with Stevenson as an optimistic associate producer of a TV talk show and Jessica Lundy as her flashier, more experienced neighbor, a hairdresser. Stevenson has “this ‘X’-quality, this charisma,” Steinkellner says. “She’s incredibly gifted as a comedian and a fantastic technician.”

Stevenson demonstrates her grasp of the craft in “Live Nude Girls,” an independent film that is due out Dec. 8. Like “Home for the Holidays,” it takes place in one house during the course of one evening, but in this case the occasion is a slumber party. It was shot in 21 days in September, 1994.

“It was so much like real life,” Stevenson says of the female-bonding movie, which also stars Dana Delany, Kim Cattrall, Lora Zane, Olivia D’Abo and Laila Robins. Shooting followed a week of rehearsal. Director Julianna Lavin “was so open to improvisations, it was great.”

Although the low-budget ($1 million) movie “didn’t have the luxury to ad-lib on film,” points out Lavin, “Cynthia had wonderful ideas in rehearsal [that] we ended up shooting. She’s tremendous at improv.”

Stevenson, who is married to Tom Davies, an assistant director she met while working on the 1992 film “The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag,” is happy moving back and forth between movies and TV, and has her eye on several “really great books” she’d love to make into films.

In the meantime, she is impatient to have people see her on the big screen as nasty Joanne. “It’s so great,” she repeats. “Everyone’s going to hate me.” Maybe in the movies, but on TV, she’s still full of Hope.

* “Hope & Gloria” airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. on NBC (Channel 4).