TV

“Cashmere Mafia” Brings Lesbians Back to Network TV

It has been nearly a year since broadcast television included a regular lesbian/bi character – Laura Innes’ Dr. Kerry Weaver left ER on Jan. 11, 2007 – but thankfully that drought is coming to an end this Sunday, Jan. 6, when Cashmere Mafia premieres on ABC. The dramedy centering on four successful businesswomen in New York includes not one but two lesbian/bi characters: marketing executive Caitlin Dowd, played by Bonnie Somerville (NYPD Blue, Friends), and the woman she falls in love with, Alicia, played by Lourdes Benedicto (The Nine, 24).

Asked for his opinion on why the number of lesbian/bi characters on prime-time network television hovers around the zero mark, Cashmere Mafia creator Kevin Wade said bluntly to AfterEllen.com, “Lazy writing.”

He continued with a laugh: “I was not aware of stepping into a void here or anything. It just seemed a natural for the show.” Then he added, “I’m glad that we’re doing it, and that we’re out in front with it.”

The premise of the show – a drama focusing on the professional and personal lives of a group of highly successful and ambitious women – originated with executive producer Gail Katz (The Perfect Storm), who based it on her experiences with her female friends from Yale Business School.

At a press conference last July, Katz explained: “I think what I ended up realizing is … [women] want, in a way, what men have, which is we want the same opportunities. We have different challenges than they have and maybe different assets, and that is what this show is about. But basically, we just want the same opportunities. So we want to be able to have a personal life, have a home life. We want to be able to go to the gym. We want to be able to achieve whatever our dreams are, whether it’s business or whatever. It seems to be shocking to some people, though.”

Katz brought her idea for Cashmere Mafia to Darren Star, best known for his popular HBO series Sex and the City, and Star became an executive producer on the series. But the task of writing the pilot fell to Wade, who also penned the classic workplace comedy Working Girl. Wade said that part of the inspiration for Caitlin’s character – particularly her sexuality – came from a friend of his.

“She’s in the cosmetics marketing communications business, and she’s very smart and very accomplished, and she’s gay,” Wade said of his friend. “I said, ‘I’m just going to need to call you a lot because I’ve got to write about four women, and I want to be specific, and I want it to be based in reality.’ And she said, ‘Well, the first reality is you’ve got to make one of them gay.'”

Wade took her advice to heart. “It just felt like a natural place to find a character who is in a sympathetic crisis in her life that could also be funny and poignant and all those things that you look for as a writer,” he said. “So there wasn’t any sexual or political agenda to it. There was purely a character agenda to it.”

To play that character, the show’s producers cast Bonnie Somerville, who started off as a comedy actor (viewers of Friends may remember her as Ross’ girlfriend, Mona, in Season 8). Though Somerville originally read for Lucy Liu’s character, publishing executive Mia Mason, and Australian actor Miranda Otto (The Lord of the Rings) was initially considered for the role of Caitlin, Somerville’s comedic touch proved to fit the role better. Otto was ultimately cast as hotel COO Juliet Draper, and British actor Frances O’Connor (Artificial Intelligence: AI, Mansfield Park) rounds out the group as investment banker Zoe Burden. “We found that she brought a lightness and a comedienne quality that I found would be much more useful than someone who came off as quite serious,” Wade said of Somerville. “Bonnie … brings an energy to it that’s kind of like the messy little sister who hasn’t quite figured everything out, and she’s kind of more endearing for it.”

“I like this character,” Somerville said simply, in an interview with AfterEllen.com. “I think this character’s definitely the funny one, the comic one. I love physical comedy. I like that they wrote a little of that.”

Casting the role of Alicia, Caitlin’s love interest, was something of a lucky break. The producers had been auditioning several actors for the part, but it wasn’t until Wade went to a benefit for New York’s Sacred Heart School in February 2007 that he found the right woman for the job. His sister-in-law, who runs a program at the school, insisted that he meet Lourdes Benedicto, who had been a student of hers.

“It was the funny thing of I saw her at a party, and it was not unlike the character’s reaction to seeing her when she walks into her office,” Wade recalled. “I just went, ‘tweet tweet tweet tweet.’ She’s just so pretty, and there’s just something about her that’s very attractive.” He asked Benedicto to contact their casting director, and that was that. “I don’t know how much it did meeting Kevin,” Benedicto said in an interview with AfterEllen.com, “but at least that’s how I heard about it the first time. … It was kind of kismet, yeah.”

Benedicto’s most recent previous role – that of Eva Rios on the short-lived ABC series The Nine – was quite different from that of Alicia. (Benedicto has also had recurring roles on 24, NYPD Blue and Dawson’s Creek.) Though Benedicto had never played a lesbian or bisexual character before on television, she said she was “excited” to take on the role.

“I think she is very confident,” Benedicto said of Alicia. “She is very comfortable in her own skin. She knows who she is and what she wants out of her life. I think she’s very caring and open, which is … what’s lovely about seeing her in this relationship with this woman [Caitlin] who’s only just discovering her sexuality right now. And she’s also really good at what she does, just like all the other Cashmere Mafia women. You know, she’s career-driven and she knows who she is and she knows where she stands, and I like that about her.”

Although Alicia’s last name is Lawson, and no explicit mention of her ethnic background is made on Cashmere Mafia, Benedicto is half-Latina and half-Filipina. Having a multi-ethnic face on a lesbian character on broadcast television is still quite revolutionary – lesbians of color are even more rare on prime-time network television than their white counterparts.

Like Benedicto, Somerville had no hesitations about playing gay. “I grew up in New York City,” she said. “My friends have always been gay.”

She continued: “I think it’s really interesting to play a character like this on an ABC show that’s not on cable. I find that really interesting. And I’m completely pro-gay rights and gay marriage, and like I said, I have so many gay friends that have partners, that have kids. So for me to be able to represent that, I’m proud of that.”

Although Caitlin’s attraction to Alicia is immediate, Somerville does not believe that Caitlin had any previous same-sex relationships before meeting Alicia. “I think she’s kind of a late bloomer in that area, so maybe she never even thought of it,” she theorized. “The person that Caitlin represents is … the one that can’t ever have a relationship,” Somerville said. “I think that she’s the one who just hasn’t had any luck in that area, so that’s why this is such a big deal.”

Considering Caitlin’s sexual orientation, Somerville said: “I like the idea that she just meets a person and she has goo-goo-ga-ga birds and flowers and whistles over her head. I like that they just kind of did it, and she meets this person and she likes her. … Those things that are made more of a big deal, to me [they] are more offensive than, you know, somebody meets someone and they like them.”

The nature of the casting process meant that Somerville didn’t have much time to prepare for her role, but she was able to bring much of her own experience to Caitlin. “I’m from Brooklyn, and I was raised Irish-Catholic, and I’m from a blue-collar family, so that was really great ’cause I could put a lot of myself and my struggles into her,” she explained. “I’m a single woman who is successful, I guess, and I haven’t had much luck [in love] myself. … So I think I can bring a lot of that to the character.”

Both Somerville and Benedicto were enthusiastic about working with each other. “She was a lot of fun,” Benedicto said of Somerville. “She, like myself, is from New York originally. We had a great time together.”

“She’s awesome,” Somerville said of Benedicto. “I love her. She’s so cool, so easygoing.” Somerville said neither of them were nervous until the day they had to shoot their first kiss. “Look, even if you’re making out with a guy on camera, it’s the most uncomfortable thing,” she explained. “I mean, you meet this person, you know nothing about them, and then your tongue is in their mouth in five seconds. It’s like, come on!”

But after some encouragement from the director, Peyton Reed, and a glass of wine, the two relaxed. “And then after a couple of times,” Somerville recalled, “we were like: ‘Whatever. Let’s make it hotter. Let’s steam it up.’ We got a couple of catcalls on the street, of course, because we were shooting outside.”

After their first kiss – on a sidewalk near Caitlin’s car – Caitlin retreats into her car and looks both shocked and pleased with what has just happened. Somerville explained what she, Wade and Reed decided was going through Caitlin’s mind at that moment: “It was a combination of (a) shock, like, ‘I just kissed my first girl’; (b) meeting someone you like; and (c) when absolutely the last thing you think is that you’re going to get kissed that night, and so you have that butterfly kind of like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ Which I think is such a nice feeling.” That moment, which will surely go down as one of the more joyful first same-sex kisses on television, might lead lesbian and bi viewers to wonder if there is going to be more of the same in Caitlin’s future. Those who have seen more than one “lesbian” character return to heterosexuality after a brief same-sex story line might be excused for wondering if all this is too good to be true.

“She’s going to at least be bi,” said Wade of Caitlin’s sexual orientation. “I think one of the jobs of this show is to set up expectations and then reverse them in ways that define character and entertain and keep the audience watching these characters. Because I don’t think anyone turns to this or any show to make sure that they’re secure in their jobs, secure in their love lives, secure in their sexuality, secure in their – you know, whatever. You tune in for the insecurity. You tune in for the risk. You tune in for the reversals of fortune. But it’s certainly going to be a through-line with her.”

Benedicto continues to play Alicia for the first seven episodes of the show, which is all that was filmed before the Writers Guild strike shut down production.

“It’s not something we’re going to take lightly, as far as it’s not a gimmick,” Wade said of the story line. “If a gun comes out in the first act, it better go off in the third; it better not be like, ‘What happened to the gun?’ And this is a bit of a gun that we have that I want to play out.”

After the pilot was filmed, ABC did tweak the series to bring out more of the humor in the series, and additional scenes were shot to expand Caitlin’s coming-out story line. And though the characters’ personal lives will become more of a focus, the women’s careers will remain central to their stories. “I think it will naturally go more to their personal lives,” Wade said, “but personal lives can be played out in terms of rivals, adversaries, romances that take place coming out of the workplace or in the workplace.”

“I think people are ready for something that’s a little more sophisticated and maybe female-driven,” Somerville said. “You know, women are funny. Women are interesting. Women work hard. Women have lives. … Men are not the only ones out there that have water-cooler humor and swear like sailors and truck drivers. I think people are ready for that.”

One thing’s for certain: Bonnie Somerville is ready to become a lesbian icon. When asked what she’d like to tell lesbian/bi viewers, she quipped, “That I think I should be in the top five [on the AfterEllen.com Hot 100] and bump Sarah Shahi out next year.” (Shahi, incidentally, is a friend of hers.)

She continued more seriously: “I hope that they like the show. I hope that I do a good job at playing it real and being a real person. … I just like that she meets this girl and she kisses her and they don’t make a big drama about it. Because I think that the lesbian and bisexual and gay friends that I have – that’s the thing. They’re normal people, and everybody always wants to make it such a big difference, but why is it so different? It shouldn’t be.

“And that’s what I’m interested in: playing it just like you would play a doctor or a lawyer or if I played somebody that was from Germany. Playing a lesbian, playing a bisexual, it shouldn’t be so scandalous. That’s the problem, because the more big of a deal that it is, the more segregated we are, and then it’s like we haven’t moved forward at all.”

Cashmere Mafia premieres on Sunday, Jan. 6, 2008, at 10 p.m. ET on ABC. Keep up on all the latest Cashmere Mafia news, interviews, forum topics, and episode recaps in our new Cashmere Mafia section.

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