What Does Maura Tierney Look for in a Role?

She’s starred on ER, Rescue Me and The Good Wife. Now Maura Tierney, 51, has an Emmy nomination for her role as cheated-on wife Helen Solloway on Showtime’s The Affair. The series’ second season has just been released on DVD.

The season two finale was a stunner—Helen isn’t as saintly as we first thought.
I think the fun and the challenge of season three will be figuring out how this saintly person, who is more flawed than anybody thought, will deal with this giant lie. In the previous seasons, the other characters were the deceivers. Now Helen has lied in a big way.

You’re involved with the Lindbergh Foundation’s Air Shepherd Initiative to stop elephant and rhino poaching.

Animal rights activism is the point. But there’s a very real human cost as well. If you can stop the demand for these horns, it’s not just the animals that get saved but the human lives that are at risk as well.

You’re going back to Broadway in The Whirligig.

We’ll start rehearsals next April. I play the mom. It’s a really beautiful ensemble piece about choices. It’s like my show. No one has an affair, but it’s about choices we make with our friends, choices we make with our partners, our husbands, choices we make as parents. It’s a really great play.

What do you look for when picking a role?

I’m very happy with my TV show. When it comes to theater, I think sometimes women my age can get put in a little bit of a box in terms of outlook or perspective. What I look for in theater, I really like new work and I really like the concept of age not necessarily being a defining aspect of who you are or how you act.