John Benjamin Hickey juggles stage role, TV show

NEW YORK – Despite these recessionary times, John Benjamin Hickey has managed to land not just one great job, but two.

The character actor is starring on Broadway as an AIDS-stricken journalist in a much-praised revival of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart" and playing Laura Linney's troubled brother on Showtime's "The Big C."

The only snag: He has to do them at the same time.

One is live theater eight times a week in Times Square, while the TV show requires that he spend three or four days a week filming 25 miles northeast of the city in Stamford, Conn., for the second season of the acclaimed series. He laughs at his luck, what he calls an "embarrassment of riches."

"It could not have been a more insane confluence of events," he says over lunch at a Greenwich Village cafe near his home during one of his few empty afternoons. "The timing couldn't have been better and it couldn't have been worse."

He has juggled both with some success. Hickey, in his fifth Broadway show, has earned his first Tony Award nomination as best featured actor in a play. Next month, he competes against Mackenzie Crook of "Jerusalem," Billy Crudup in "Arcadia," Arian Moayed of "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" and Yul Vazquez in "The Motherf---- With the Hat."

His two jobs have turned the laid-back Hickey into someone who memorizes railroad timetables and calculates traffic patterns. He's also found himself among the crowds sprinting through Times Square to make it to the theater on time.

Once, he almost missed a performance. To make the evening curtain at 8 p.m., he likes to grab a train in Connecticut no later than 6:15 p.m. One recent night, he was forced to take one that left closer to 6:30 p.m. Then it was 15 minutes late — and he still had a 45-minute commute.

How did this man — who describes himself as "a hothouse flower" with a delicate stomach and a "mild Presbyterian boy from Plano, Texas" — handle such a nerve-jangling commute?

"The only thing I did was I got my script of `The Normal Heart' out and just started reading it. I could barely concentrate on it, but just looking at the words helped me get to the place I needed to be figuratively and the train got me there literally."

The Metro-North Railroad train pulled into Grand Central Terminal at 7:38 p.m., leaving him just 22 minutes to go from the east side of the city to Times Square. Avoiding the crowded streets, he jumped into the subway. Then he ran.

"I made the curtain by five minutes," he says with a smile. "It adds a certain amount of drama."

Hickey, who turns 48 next month, credits all kinds of people — from the stage manager to his understudy to the Teamsters who give him a ride to Stamford — for the ability to do both projects. "It's been a lot of people bending over backwards to help make the impossible possible. I have so many people to thank."

The Tony nomination has helped, too. The cast, crew and producers of "The Big C" are trying to accommodate Hickey's whacky schedule even more now that they have a better idea what he's been up to down in New York.

"It was a little like having a beautiful wife and a beautiful mistress," he says. "Your wife doesn't want to hear a word about how hot your mistress is, and vice versa. I felt like I was leading this double life."

The stage role takes a lot out of him emotionally, too. Hickey plays a man dying of AIDS, which he researched by asking doctors and hospice workers, as well as merely remembering the toll the diseases has taken. "Doing the homework for this mainly required just staring up at my ceiling at night and thinking about the people I've lost," he says.

Daryl Roth, the Tony-winning producer, says helping Hickey with his odd schedule was the least she could do for an actor who gives the show much of its compassion, falling in love on stage at the beginning and later struggling with death.

"He is such an accessible actor because I think he just bares his heart and his soul in his performances. He does that in a way that sneaks up on you. It's not with bravado — it's just who he is. He just opens up and lets you see his emotions."

Hickey, a graduate of The Juilliard School, made his Broadway debut in 1995 when "Love! Valour! Compassion!" transferred from off-Broadway. He also appeared in "Cabaret" opposite Natasha Richardson, "The Crucible" with Linney and Liam Neeson, and "Mary Stuart" with Janet McTeer.

"I've always felt lucky — blessed — to have the career I've had. I really love being a character actor. I love being a journeyman," he says. "It's always been sort of going where the work was."

His film roles range from "The Ice Storm" to "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen." On TV, he seems to have gravitated toward cop shows — "Law & Order," "Law & Order: Los Angeles," "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "NYPD Blue."

"When I'm clean-shaven and bathed, I look like a lawyer," he explains.

Hickey never expected to be doing two jobs at the same time this spring. He signed up to do just a one-night benefit reading of "The Normal Heart" in October and that went so well that it snowballed into a full-blown production.

Fearful that he couldn't do both the TV show and the play, he sought advice from Linney, a friend for 25 years, ever since he was a year ahead of her at Juilliard. She urged him to try to juggle the two juicy parts.

It also helped that she is executive producer of the TV show: "The only advice I give to acting students is, `Be nice to your underclassmen. You never know who might be in a position to help you get a job one day,'" Hickey says.

On Broadway, he has also found an old friend — Joe Mantello, best known as the director of Broadway shows such as "Wicked," "Take Me Out" and "Assassins." In "The Normal Heart," Mantello goes back to his roots as an actor, playing the central character Ned Weeks and the lover of Hickey's character. Mantello has directed Hickey in five plays and they've known each other for at least two decades

The play, Hickey says, has struck a chord with today's audiences even though it was written in the mid-1980s. It details the emergence of AIDS and how a group of activists fought for help from an apathetic public, though the play's theme of resistance transcends the disease.

If the play ever becomes too heavy, Hickey can always find solace in his other job, filming the second season of "The Big C," though that also deals with a horrific disease.

On the show, he plays a wickedly funny eco-warrior who suffers from mental illness, yet there's plenty of dark humor. "There's this lightness to the world that I love — a comic lightness, which doing that in a show about cancer is very challenging," he says.

A bit of that humor comes out when Hickey is asked what he's learned by holding down both the play and TV show. It turns out it's not always easy to find people willing to commiserate over his crazy schedule.

"Nobody wants to hear an actor complain about too much work — especially other actors," he says with a smile.