There are 18 participants on my video call with Jean Smart, the veteran actor whose striking return to the spotlight has brought about what US commentators are calling “the Jeanaissance”. It’s a rather grand title but it seems justified – especially if this high-security interview experience is anything to go by. The disorientating vetting procedure involves multiple texts and emails, two different Zoom calls, one “breakout room” and 16 industry bods silently observing our interview. Clearly, the 70-year-old is extremely hot property in TV land.
Smart may not be a household name in the UK but she’s an increasingly familiar face. Across the Atlantic, she’s long been both. The actor first found fame in the mid-1980s as one of the leads in Designing Women, a trailblazing sitcom set in an Atlanta interior design agency populated by female characters who were, she says, “so distinctive, so original and so detailed”. But it wasn’t just progressive in a feminist sense: “No one had done a show about southerners that made them real three-dimensional characters, so that was fun!”
