WHO PLAYS LIZA MINELLI IN HALSTON HOW TO
WHO PLAYS LIZA MINELLI IN HALSTON FULL

There’s a physical resemblance, although I’d never really noticed it until we started working on it as much, but it is pretty uncanny sometimes. But the more I was auditioning and the more we were working on the pieces, I just really felt. But I don’t know that I ever felt like a kindred connection with her before. I’m in a musical theater world, she is our queen. How did stepping into Liza’s shoes change the way you thought of her as a woman or as a performer?

WHO PLAYS LIZA MINELLI IN HALSTON HOW TO

So I think being on television with “Smash” taught me to conserve smartly and theater taught me how to show up at any moment when it’s time to roll and for a long amount of time. You have to know to show up every time it starts like you would on stage, but then you have to know when to conserve when the show is about your arm or the people behind you. The “Bonjour, Paris” number that we do in Versailles was a 14-hour day. You have to be able to perform and perform and perform and perform. I think my theater background actually prepped me better for both of those projects because of the stamina.

Did your experience on “Smash” aid in preparation for the musical numbers? Dan and I would send each other clips of it and we had a really good time talking about doing jokes this way or that way. So, what was really fun to do was to try to calibrate where we were in her life in this fictional meeting that they have - what year she would be in, who was she married to, who is she sleeping with, what was she wearing, how is her relationship with her family, how many times has she done this number? We really dug into where she would be if we dropped her into this moment, and we got to play around with her not being perfectly polished with the number. But what’s great about what we do in the show is of “Liza With a Z” is years earlier than the special. He knew more than any of us so he was the right person to bounce things off of.

What were the discussions like about how much of your “Liza With a Z” performance needed to match what is so easily watched online now?ĭan Minahan, the director and the showrunner, has basically had this show as a dream for 25 years, so it was so easy to just take a warm bath in his direction.

WHO PLAYS LIZA MINELLI IN HALSTON FULL

But it was a room full of 100-plus people and my very first thing, so it was nerve-wracking. This was a great entrance for me because I am a performer and I know how to turn it on when it’s time to a do a number. “Liza With a Z” is so well-documented, it was actually such a great thing for me to start with, whereas actually the scene work where I had to think about how she would be in a moment without knowing how she really was was a little more complicated. I will live and breathe and sleep Liza.” And then I did get it and every morning was consuming her: reading about her, studying it, walking like her, doing all the things that I could do to get in that mindset. I remember meditating on it and being like, “If I get this part…,” like when you wager with God that “if you get me out of this I’ll donate to the church.” So I was saying, “If I get this part, I will do nothing but this part for the next two months. My first scene that you see me in was the first thing we shot of mine. Was that actually the first thing you shot for the show? How did you prepare? Meeting this show’s version of Liza Minnelli through such an iconic song as “Liza With a Z” is bold. Here, Rodriguez talks with Variety about her research process for the role, her “Liza With a Z” introduction scene and whether working on “Smash” helped prepare her to sing on this show. When things are going wrong in his life, or things are going wrong in her life, they find each other through every decade, through every era, through every trial, and usually it’s in one of their homes, quietly, just the two of them.” “What I love about the relationship that I got to have on the show was that her and Halston got to be ride or dies,” Rodriguez says, “and that my interactions with him were always emotional.

While fans of both the eponymous fashion designer and the actor-dancer-singer may know about their public escapades at Studio 54, where they were photographed together many times, their behind-closed-doors bond is something Rodriguez was most excited to explore within the series.

Who plays liza minelli in halston