TV

More Lesbians Than Ever on “Nip/Tuck”

After a summer of rumors and spoilers – many of them centering on a lesbian relationship involving characters played by Joely Richardson and Portia de Rossi – the fifth season of Nip/Tuck premieres tomorrow night at 10 p.m. ET on FX. The series, which centers on plastic surgeons Sean McNamara and Christian Troy, has featured lesbian characters and story lines since its first season, but this fall promises to be more queer than ever, with three lesbian/bisexual characters and two out lesbian actors (de Rossi and Rosie O’Donnell) joining the cast.

As this season begins, Latina anesthesiologist and lesbian Dr. Liz Cruz (Roma Maffia) is surprised to learn that Sean’s ex-wife, Julia (Richardson), is exploring a new relationship with a woman – Olivia Lord (de Rossi).

“Julia falling in love with Olivia is kind of unexpected,” said Roma Maffia, who took a break on the set of Nip/Tuck to talk with AfterEllen.com about the show. Though she was in the middle of getting ready for a shoot and was being shuffled between makeup and hair stylists, she was warm and talkative, even offering me chocolate (which always results in a better interview) as we chatted in her trailer on the Paramount Studios lot.

“Liz doesn’t believe that Julia is a lesbian,” Maffia explained. Until Julia’s affair with Olivia this season, she had only been involved with men. In a preview of several fifth season episodes that Nip/Tuck made available to AfterEllen.com, Liz displays the typical ambivalence that lesbians often show toward bisexual women. Still, Liz makes the sisterly gesture of supporting Julia’s decision to enter a relationship with a woman.

“But,” Maffia concluded, “I don’t think Liz thinks this is anything that is really going to amount to anything.”

Liz herself has a history of being unlucky in love. Maffia described her character as being “very practical” except in matters of the heart, where “she sort of loses herself.” In Season 4, for instance, Liz is briefly involved with Poppy (Alanis Morissette), a relentlessly upbeat, success-minded woman who convinces Liz she needs to undergo plastic surgery to enhance her appearance and become her best possible self.

Though uneasy about Liz’s motivations, Drs. McNamara and Troy agree to undertake the operation. But both doctors balk when the controlling Poppy bursts into the operating room, instructing them to perform liposuction and additional procedures while Liz is under anesthesia. When a clued-in Liz breaks things off, Poppy suddenly falls apart, revealing the desperate neediness beneath her brazen self-assurance.

The conflict between inner and outer selves – between what’s real and superficial, what’s secret and what’s displayed – is a major theme of Nip/Tuck. In Liz and Poppy’s relationship, this theme expresses itself as a tension between strongly voiced outward convictions and inward self-esteem.

In the series, the disparity between inner and outer selves is evident in the signature question Drs. McNamara and Troy ask every prospective patient: “What don’t you like about yourself?”

In another fourth season episode, Liz has the worst one-night stand ever when she becomes the victim of organ robbers. Picked up by a beautiful woman in a bar, Liz falls into bed and winds up drugged and missing a kidney the next morning.

The incident leads to one of the finer dramatic moments in Season 4, in which Liz, on dialysis and desperately awaiting a kidney donation to replace her failing organ, is offered a replacement by a stranger. That stranger is lottery winner Dawn Budge, skillfully played by Rosie O’Donnell; she reprises her role as Budge this season. Although the kidney replacement story stretched believability to an extreme, Maffia said she doesn’t get distracted by the freakier elements of Nip/Tuck‘s plots. “Whatever happens on the top, it’s still going to boil down to the same ingredients,” Maffia said. “And so it’s going to be the human condition.”

Ryan Murphy, Nip/Tuck‘s openly gay creator, executive producer, writer and director, sets the tone for the show. Concerning what’s coming up in Season 5, Murphy commented, “I think there’s a great surprise for the audience in terms of Joely’s character, Julia, what she is discovering about herself.” Murphy keeps in touch with audience response through the fan-run website niptuckforum.com.

“Roma has really great stuff to do that you wouldn’t expect,” said Murphy, referring to upcoming complications in the Julia and Olivia story arc. “Everybody this year is very torn by who they were and who they should be.”

Part dark comedy, part melodrama, Nip/Tuck‘s story lines may sound like they’ve been ripped from the tabloids, but watch closely and the series’ attentiveness to the fragile and sometimes bizarre connections between people begin to seem like an up-to-the-minute version of an especially dark Tennessee Williams play.

The actors have absorbed Murphy’s dark vision. “I always thought that Liz, being the grounded one, would find true love,” Maffia reflected. “And then I thought, ‘What am I thinking? This is a Ryan Murphy show. True love is not going to look like what true love looks like to me.'” The series has received accolades from GLAAD for its consistent record representing LGBT characters, but Nip/Tuck is less a show about LGBT characters than it is a fertile ground for investigating individual transformations – surgical, sexual and otherwise. “Queer” might be the best term to describe the lesbian presence on the show, since its depiction of alternative sexualities doesn’t always fit neatly into stable sexual identities.

In Season 2, for example, a prospective patient asks the doctors of McNamara/Troy to give him breast implants so that he can better empathize with his wife, who has undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer. The operation becomes unexpectedly problematic when the wife’s attraction to her husband’s new breasts raises lesbian desires she thought she had buried.

The show has not limited itself to positive portrayals of lesbians. In keeping with the black comedy that runs through the series, some lesbian characters have veered quite close to stereotype. For instance, in Season 4, a desperate character named James (Jacqueline Bisset) is introduced who meets all the criteria of the sophisticated and predatory lesbian villain.

James runs a high-end escort service as a cover for an organ-napping business. Her behavior is often manipulative and cruel, her actions criminal and exploitative. James is also caught in that most clichéd of circumstances: suffering a sad, unrequited love for one of the straight female escorts in her service.

Still, James is sexy in the way that only actress Jacqueline Bisset can be, and there’s certainly pleasure to be had in that. One can appreciate James as a sly portrayal of a lesbian type in keeping with the show’s over-the-top themes, or one can see her as a nasty throwback to earlier images of lesbians in pop culture.

This season’s upcoming story line concerning the relationship between Julia and Olivia is likely to have lesbians debating the pros and cons of Nip/Tuck‘s representation of bisexual women as well.

Earlier this year, alleged spoilers for episodes dealing with Julia and Olivia’s relationship surfaced on the web, leading to speculation about whether the series would sensationalize their relationship. According to Joely Richardson, who also made time to talk with AfterEllen.com on the set, the rumors are a mischaracterization, although Olivia and Julia are indeed kidnapped during the course of events.

The day of our interview, I spent a good chunk of the morning sandwiched between producer Jennifer Salt and director Charles Haid, marveling at the steep angles of Joely Richardson’s cheekbones, before I was called down from those vertiginous heights to talk with her. When we spoke, she had wrapped up her scenes for the week and was getting ready to catch a plane for London.

While watching her act, it’s easy to forget that Richardson is British. Her American accent is light and credible, without any forced harshness. Richardson said that she views Julia’s relationship with Olivia, who works as a doctor of Chinese medicine, as a healing one. “Her relationship with Olivia is very different from anything she’s ever experienced,” Richardson explained.

“Julia’s relationship with Christian and Sean is very categorized, very male-dominated,” she said. The competition between Dr. Christian Troy and Dr. Sean MacNamara for Julia’s love and attention is a major aspect of the show. “Julia, so far, for her part, has let herself be dominated by these men for basically all her life.”

Richardson continued: “Obviously there’s lots of talk of her sexuality. Is she bisexual? Is she gay?” Richardson offered a tentative answer. “She – from what I can read in the scripts – she doesn’t know. Her main thing is, ‘I don’t want to be put in a box. Why do we all have to categorize it?'”

Regarding the emotionally fraught scene in which Julia and Olivia are kidnapped, Richardson said: “Portia is just excellent to act with, or beside or whatever. She’s a real actor’s actor or actress’s actress. She’s just really giving. She’s very present in a scene whether she’s on-camera or off-camera. So if you’re going to do a scene like that, she’s a very good person to do it with.” Further discussion with the show’s representatives about the Olivia and Julia story line indicated there will be many twists and turns in the plot that have deeper ramifications for the characters than what has been suggested online.

Despite the tensions over Julia’s sexuality, she begins the season on a happier note than she has in the past. In fact, all of the characters have been given a chance at starting over. After four years set in Miami, Nip/Tuck has switched its location to Los Angeles. In the premiere episode, McNamara/Troy has relocated to Beverly Hills.

Maffia said she sees the new location as a natural choice. “If they had to go someplace else to establish themselves as doctors of plastic surgery, why not Hollywood?” Maffia said. “It’s like, if I’m hungry, let’s go to the banquet.”

FX has ordered a longer season for Nip/Tuck this year, with 22 episodes scheduled to air. As Maffia said of the upcoming year, “It’s going to be interesting to explore and see what really reveals itself.”

While I was on set, I toured the new, expanded set designs, including the posh L.A. offices and sparkling O.R. of McNamara/Troy. My favorite piece of set décor, however, was a prop left over from an earlier season: a sign that reads “Gender Reassignment Unit.” It was hanging on the wall just outside Ryan Murphy’s office, an enduring reminder of the show’s decidedly queer sensibilities.

Season 5 of Nip/Tuck begins on Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 10:00 p.m. ET on FX.

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