Willie Garson :: beyond Stanford Blatch
"Stanford is still a male. That’s all I can tell you," said actor Willie Garson, who is beloved for his portrayal of Stanford Blatch throughout the Sex and the City series and the first and upcoming second film. While the Sex and the City details were slim during a recent phone call with Garson, there were definitely comparisons to be made between his work on the still-popular HBO series and his current gig as informant Mozzie on USA’s newest hit series White Collar.
First, Garson stated he doesn’t see being closely associated with a character as a negative. "It’s mostly a blessing. What’s great about television is over the course of seasons, it gives you such an opportunity to explore everything about a person from top to bottom, which you don’t often get in movies because you only have two hours to tell a story. In this case [with White Collar], certainly in this first season, we have 15 hours to tell a story. So each episode, you try and add one more facet of the person. This character definitely shares a lot of my fear of big business and big government and my kind of cynical outlook."
In talking about the Sarah Jessica Parker series, Garson added that he’s trying to put a little of himself in the new role. "In Sex in the City, I definitely shared the kind of snarky wit and style of Stanford. In each of them you find things inside of yourself that hopefully have something to do to form the character that has been created for you. In this case, the wonderful Jeff Eastin created this guy [Mozzie] and it’s our job to service it and bring what we can to it, so that’s what I’m trying to do here with this guy."
The NYC factor
Another similarity with his former series is that White Collar is also set in New York City and the Big Apple is used like another character in each episode.
"I find a lot of shows shoot in New York and they might as well be shooting on a sound stage," Garson said. "On our show if I’m talking in a scene, we really make a strong effort to have basically the Empire State Building sticking out of my head. There’s such an energy and there’s much architecture and people and vibe on the street that we try to grab all of that as much as we possibly can. It does provide an energy and just kind of a sea of humanity that really helps us in terms of telling the stories."
So far in the episodes, Garson explained further, "we’ve shot right at the Central Park fountain. We shot in Grand Central Station... crazy massive backdrops that really inform how big it is behind all of us."
