CAREER SWING: Eric Mabius stars as a “detective” based in Dead Letter Office on Signed, Sealed, Delivered on Hallmark Channel.

Eric Mabius went home again — and got a new TV series

By Luaine Lee

Eric Mabius is one actor who claims you CAN go home again. In fact, he and his wife did just that. After his popular series, Ugly Betty, was cancelled, Mabius admits he was heartbroken.

The father of two sons, five and seven, says, “I just focused on my boys. And I brushed myself off and picked myself up. And the big key to the evolution of feeling content is getting rid of everything. We sold everything in California and moved back to Massachusetts.”

Contrary to popular belief, that didn’t destroy his career. In fact. it vitalised it. Mabius is starring in the Hallmark Channel’s spritely original series, Signed, Sealed, Delivered, in which he plays the chief of postal detectives in the Dead Letter Office.

The team’s mission is to return errant mail to its intended recipients, sometimes years later. A missing missive can make all the difference. As it turns out, a cancelled show can too.

“I didn’t want (to live) the Catch 22,” says Mabius over lunch at a hotel restaurant here in Pasadena, California. “I have to work to pay for this big house. My kids don’t need a big house. They just need to be with their dad and their mom, that’s part of turning your focus outward as opposed to inward — and it’s not about your ego.”

He’d already debilitated his ego when he helped with the birth of his first child. “It’s one thing to be married to someone, but to be related to someone by blood and to help bring them into the world ... if you haven’t done it, it sounds trite. But when that happens you live for someone else, fully and completely — having someone else who’s absolutely dependent upon you for the first time ever in your life. It’s brought all the most wonderful things in my life.”

While ego is an important part of most actors’ personae, Mabius has tried to keep his at bay. “You spend your life in an inward way as an actor but when you have children you’re forced to turn your attention outward, so it makes you more complete as a person, that’s inevitable,” he says. “Besides all the other responsibility that comes with that, you become more fully human.”

When he and his wife, a ceramicist, pulled up stakes and moved east, they bought a small farm situated behind a larger horse ranch. “I cleared almost two acres,” he says proudly, “milled the wood at a friend’s mill, had the wood mill build a 36-ft woodshed, got nine cords up before the fall came, and took raw earth, and tilled 25 tractor buckets of horse manure from the horse farm. And my wife and I grew anything we wanted to. That was the first season. I’m good with my hands and love getting dirty, and that’s what we do with the boys every day. Nothing makes me happier.”

But it wasn’t always that way. While a struggling actor he waited tables and lived with a roommate in a $700 two-bedroom apartment. “For the longest time when people asked me what I did — especially when I first moved to LA — for quite a while I would say that I was a janitor just to see their responses. Because EVERYONE said they were an actor. Everyone exists in such a state of ‘want’ here. Most of them aren’t sure what they want, but they’re in this state of want,” he says.

“I was raised in western Massachusetts and I like to think my head is screwed on straight, and I appreciate the outdoors and things that are real. Fortunately I had that foundation when I came out (to LA) Christmas of 1995 with the bags on my back.”

He’d scored nicely early on when he costarred in two independent films that were roundly praised at the Sundance Film Festival, Welcome to the Dollhouse and I Shot Andy Warhol.

He trekked to LA with his girlfriend with no intention of staying. “We were visiting her mother in Santa Monica and I said, ‘Let’s just not go back.’ I remember the coldest winter we’d had in New York in 20 years. My car was snowed in on the street for two weeks because I couldn’t get it out. I just stayed. I thought, ‘Oh, I can do this. Maybe I can.’”

Scores of pilots followed. Most were not picked up, but Mabius kept trying. He eventually landed a slew of guest spots, costarred in The L Word, The OC, Ugly Betty and made the series, Outcasts, in South Africa for British television.

But everything up to now has led to Signed, Sealed, Delivered, he says, a show he sees as a positive rendering in an often-negative landscape.

Mabius, 43, is a perfectionist about his work and impatient with those who aren’t. “It’s a constant work-in-progress the way you imagine a scene,” he says.

“When you go to act, it’s perfect in your mind’s eye and you always spend time trying to get to that. That’s the job. But it’s frustrating because it’s never done. It’s the thesis and antithesis. And what goes out is this third ‘other’ thing.” — MCT

 

Kate Moss playing strict sister off-screen

Model Kate Moss has reportedly prepared rules so that her sister can focus on her exams. Kate has been helping her younger sister Lottie for her General Certificate of Secondary Education tests and she has been making sure her younger sibling is staying focused, reports femalefirst.co.uk. An insider told The Sun newspaper: “Kate can’t help with the Maths and Chemistry because she says she’s rubbish at it, but she’s given Lottie the ultimate exam advice and told her no boys and no sneaking out of the house until the tests are over.”

Kate wants Lottie to focus on her “education” before thinking about following in her footsteps with a full-time modelling career — and she’s been checking in on her every day to make sure she’s staying on track. The source added: “She always told Lottie that education is crucial. Kate wants her to finish school and then decide how much modelling she wants to do.” — IANS

 

Ryan Reynolds’ tryst with cold after sunny honeymoon

Actor Ryan Reynolds and his wife Blake Lively had to move into a tiny “roadside hotel” in Canada and deal with a cold wave after a honeymoon in Africa in 2012. This was because Reynolds had to film his new movie The Captive in the cold region. It was challenging for the actor, who married Lively in September 2012, to shoot the film in freezing temperatures in Ontario, Canada immediately after soaking up the sun in Africa, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

Speaking at a press conference for the movie at the Cannes International Film Festival, Reynolds said: “I dragged my wife from our honeymoon in Africa and landed her in Ontario, Canada, when it was -40 degrees.”

The actor, who was previously married to actress Scarlett Johansson for three years until 2011, revealed that they moved into “this little roadside hotel where we stayed for a month. That was the biggest challenge”. But he admitted that Lively was a good sport, adding: “Ironically, she coped with it far better than I did.” — IANS

 

Kidman not upset with Grace reviews at Cannes

Actress Nicole Kidman seems undaunted by the mixed reaction to her film Grace of Monaco when it opened the Cannes International Film Festival 2014. The movie, in which Kidman plays Grace Kelly, opened the movie gala. She shrugged off the reactions, saying most of her films cause controversy, reports femalefirst.co.uk. “Most films I do ruffle feathers. I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that hasn’t had some sort of controversy, that just seems to be where I’m at. And even when I think I’m doing something safe, it isn’t,” said the 46-year-old. The movie, directed by Olivier Dahan follows the story of Kelly as she goes from Hollywood star to royalty. Grace of Monaco is the second film for the actress this year after she starred in The Railway Man with Colin Firth released April 11. — IANS