Alfre Woodard, who played Lafayette’s mama on True Blood, talks about her new NBC series, “State of Affairs” and playing the president of the United States.
“I was on camera yesterday and I wanted to make a gesture and my polish was all cracked. And I had to tuck my fingers under, I don’t really care about nails. I’m an old hippie. But the president has to have nice nails. A woman president’s going to have to be coiffed all the time. That’s the first thing they’ll be on about. Hillary’s hair. They have been forever. Rather than how weighty her friggin’ brain is.”
Woodard plays Constance Payton, a former senator from California whose son, Aaron (Mark Tallman), was murdered by terrorists in Kabul. She is not a pacifist — the direct opposite of Woodard, a lifelong progressive Democrat who has was appointed to President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2009.
“Constance came up as a military brat and she served [in the Air Force] in the first Gulf War. And she wasn’t in a skirt at a desk,” says Woodard, 62. “She was going in to pull people out who’d been injured behind the front. She believes in the order of the military.”
“State of Affairs” stars Katherine Heigl as Charleston Tucker, the fiancee of Payton’s son and a CIA analyst who daily briefs the president on the top 10 threats to the nation’s security.
“Rather than being a procedural, our show is about the people who have the tough decision about what really is a threat to the homeland.”
Read more about State of Affairs at: nypost.com
