On the Couch with Hope Davis

Still—if audiences had failed to notice her before, Davis has become somewhat unavoidable in 2009. In In Treatment, her character is on screen every moment of her individual episodes, allowing for Davis and Gabriel Byrne (who plays her therapist) to foment chemistry, argue with each other, and create an addictive dialogue throughout her seven-episode arc. As Davis says, “People feel so strongly about the show because they feel like they are going through therapy with Mia when they watch it. She’s ended up alone, and she’s so abusive, and so manipulative. And that’s the easy stuff to act, the scenes that are so engrossing, and so complex. It’s so much easier than something vapid.”

“When nobody really takes care of you. You can end up extremely damaged. Thank God, my real life doesn't resemble that at all.”

Davis was so taken with In Treatment’s first season (based on an Israeli series with the same concept) that she actually chatted her way into her role in season two. “I haven’t watched a lot of TV in the last three years because I have small kids, but I happened to see this and was immediately addicted to it in a way that I had not been before. Really had to tear myself away. And then when I heard that my friend Warren Leight was running the show now, and in New York—I just told him, ‘Oh my God. I love this show.””

Davis felt the same way about Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, which she had a hunch about from the minute she read it. “I have no idea how the script came to me because I haven’t been on stage in so long, but I couldn’t wait to do it,” she says (this comes from a woman who spent her childhood putting on backyard shows with her friend, Mira Sorvino). Davis’ character happens to have the show’s most dramatic moment—she plays a WASP-y corporate mother, whose son has hit another boy on a Brooklyn playground—and as the parents meet to discuss their children’s actions, Davis’ character becomes nauseous and vomits right onto the stage with fanfare. One night this month, her vomit shooter failed to go off, a fact that Davis still finds funny. “It was a showstopper to be sure. It was kind of like if in Waiting for Godot, Godot suddenly walked on stage. We were unprepared as to how to go on.”

But they did go on—and Davis will continue spewing through the end of the year. Carnage has been so successful—with Tonys for best actress (Harden, though Davis was nominated), best play, and best director, the run has been extended beyond what even Davis thought possible. “I’m just glad I work with such consummate professionals on it,” she says. “Everybody is really alive on stage, and so when one of us gets tired, somebody else raises the bar and we’re forced to kind of lift it again.”

She does say that appearing in Carnage every night, a show about how evil adults can be to one another, has made her think deeply about the play’s message and her own values. “For me the most intriguing part of the play is when we speak about Africa versus Western society, and we just pride ourselves that we should be more advanced and more evolved because we have so much privilege here, and yet obviously the message in the play is—the last line of the play is, “What do we know?” And we don't know anything at all. We think we’re different, and we think we should be able to handle things better. But in fact, we’re all the same.”

Rachel Syme is culture editor of The Daily Beast.