The following is a word for word transcript of my interview with Ms Deborah Lee Johnson on 11th December 2006.

You played Martha Koener in Rounding First , the mother of young Joe Koerner, and it must have been a a really challenging role for you . Thank you so much for talking to your fans about what it was like . Firstly, may I ask how long you have been in acting professionally?

Deborah : Well, I started acting in High School, and that was in Texas . My father was in the Air Force, and so I just happened to be living there when I was in High School. Professionally, I came to New York after college and shortly thereafter I auditioned for the Ensemble Studio Theatre and became a member.
It's a great place to work , it has a lot of reputable actors and playwrights and you can write things and perform them and they give you a stage to act on, and it's a very useful thing . I'm in Los Angeles now but most of my acting career has been in New York. The first acting job I had was in a Woody Allen movie called Stardust Memories . I had a few lines, I played a fan of Woody Allen's.

How did you get into acting in the first place?

Deborah : My mother was a big fan of actors in movies, and she took me to see Gone With The Wind when I was four years old . She instilled in me the importance of actors and movies, she made me feel that they were important things to know about., and so it was an interest of mine from a very young age. I was reading books about Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland when I was 10 years old <laughs> , it was kind of a precocious thing , but you know, it was just something that I was interested in. The first play I ever did was Oklahoma . My mother had a Broadway recording of the musical with Celeste Holm singing the part of Addo Annie , " I Cain't Say No " and so, in the High School I went to in Texas , they were having auditions for Oklahoma . I wasn't in the chorus , I wasn't a singer, but I went to the auditions and I imitated Celest Holm singing the song, and I got the part , and I pretty much kept acting after that.

That's amazing, considering you were only 4 years old when you had to see a film that was at least 3 hours long !

Deborah : It was 4 hours long ! <laughs>

What are your memories of that ?

Deborah : <laughs> One of the memories that I had of that was that I ate a candy called " Chuckles" <laughs> But other than that, I remember Clark Gable standing at the bottom of the staircase, and when Vivien Leigh looked down at him… I remember this look that he gave her. I mean, it's just flashes , just images of things, but I remember being very young and fairly obsessed with Clark Gable , you know. He was dead, and I thought he was like … <laughs> you know, Clark Gable was the best thing going . My mother just had this really strong love for old movies, and so before I ever studied acting, before I even went to college and studied acting, because I majored in acting in college , I really had a good sense of the history of film. It was like I had done research on it from childhood.

Has your mother seen any of the projects that you've been in , and what does she think of that now that her daughter is a real actress.

Deborah : Oh yes …. She knew it was a hard life to pursue, but she's always been supportive of it . She saw me do a play , I remember, in college , that she still talks about, it was called Fieffer's People , it was a monologue put together by Jules Fieffer , and one of them which I did was about this girl who wanted her independence, but she wasn't quite ready for it , so she would leave the house during the day , and then she'd sneak back home and sleep there at night., but it was like she had run away from home, except that she had one foot in and one foot out , and somehow that had really got to my mother , and she believed it….she believed that I was somebody else and I think she was taken by that . I did some directing when I was in college, I designed sets , I was very active in the theatre , and she saw that I had abilities that I had to pursue and she was supportive .

I hear that in between projects you raise or you train dogs ?

Deborah : I don't raise them, I train them … I live in New York , and you really need to live in a rural area to raise them . I had had a Dalmatian that I was very close to , but he died sort of abruptly , fairly young and I was not ready to get another dog, but I had a big hole in my life. I've always had dogs in my life , I trained my first dog when I was nine just by feel . I had done pretty well with my Dalmatian, so I went to the ASPCA , and I trained under a trainer there, I assisted her for a year , just volunteering . She was very, very good. After a year of that, I printed a card and I just started getting work , I'd go to dog runs and I got work that way. I got one client, and they recommended me to someone else and etc . There are a lot of dogs in New York in a concentrated area. I live in between Central Part and Riverside Park, so two large parks on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and so there are a lot of potential clients, and I just enjoyed it. It was a good balance with the acting , because dogs are so accepting and non-judgmental .and they don't care what you look like <laughs> and they are very loving, you know , and it was good because acting , no matter how much you love it and no matter how good you are at it, you're going to be rejected a good deal , and that can get to you, and you have to have a pretty strong foundation and I feel that working with the dogs really helped give that to me.

Legend of course has it that you came on board Rounding First only 24 hours before filming started . What really happened ?

Deborah : Well, filming had already started for other people, but Jim ( Fleigner ) , the writer-director of Rounding First, asked my friend John Michael Bolger who was in the film , if he knew an actress who could play the part of Martha , and so John had said yes , he did know of someone. We had seen each other about a month before and had dinner , and he knew that I was working with dogs and that I hadn't acted in anything in about a year, really . The agent that I had worked with before had gone out of the business and I had taken a break, it was the first break I had taken in a long time. The people I knew in the business had said that sometimes that's good to get a fresh perspective. So it wasn't that I thought, "No more acting in my life " , but I knew that I needed something else to give me something on a regular basis in terms spirit wise and finances . So John told Jim that he knew somebody, and for four days, he tried to remember my telephone number , in Allentown , Pennsylvania , because I wasn't listed. He told me a funny story about that…. He was in a cornfield , saying to someone, " Ok, try this number…. " and they would go back and try it, and he was like very close , just a couple of numbers off , but they were reversed and he couldn't get it. Finally, he located this agent of mine who had gone out of business, he ran a Pottery Studio in John's neighbourhood where he lived in Hell's Kitchen in New York , so John called him up and asked if he had my number , and he told him about the circumstances about a part in a movie, so Al my former agent went back to his old agency where his rolodex still was, got my number, called John back and gave him my number. They called me at about 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon on a Monday, I think it was, and I didn't even have an agent at that time , so John's agent said that she would negotiate the contract for me . I was very skeptical about the whole thing, and I'm like , come on, how real is this ? They haven't seen me, they haven't read me, and they hadn't even seen my picture. John's agent said a very funny line to me, she said, " Unless you have two heads, you have the part. " <laughs> So they went totally with John's recommendation, and it was funny, because I happen to look a good deal like Soren , playing my son . Soren's mother kept saying to me "You look more like his mother than I do ! " …. It was a strange thing, but that's pretty much what happened. They wouldn't let me come the next day , it was like, " If you're going to be in this, you've got to come tonight." , and I had work and dogs and I had to do some shuffling to just leave town and go away for 2 weeks.

Was it very difficult to get into character at such short notice ?

Deborah : I wouldn't say easy ….but fortunately I've always been good at cold reading , which means, here's the script, read it, read it out loud, audition right now without reading the material . It's liberating, in a way , to take on a rolethat way. Well, first of all, John had all the faith in the world in me , he's a smart guy, and he knew that I had a certain emotional quality or whatever that I could bring to that role . I saw that in the role, I've had enough experience , I knew people who had been in that position, that I could bring something to it. There's something liberating to be in that position because you don't have time to torture yourself over this choice or that choice , you just make your choices and you do it. Jim had such a strong sense of what he wanted, that it really helped, because if he told me that that was exactly what he wanted, then I took him for face value and kept going. So it wasn't like, oh , this is some huge thing that I had aspire to, and maybe in a week or two , I'd be there. I just trusted in John , Jim , the script and the process and I went with it.

What did you like about your character Martha Koerner ?

Deborah : Well, I liked that she loved her kids, and was willing to do pretty much anything to protect her kids. She was very protective of them. I could totally relate to that. It wasn't the easiest character, because she's not the most sympathetic, but I don't really see her as being mean-spirited. I see her as frustrated , she's been pretty much squashed in her relationship with her husband, he hasn't given her much emotionally on any level for a long time, she's emotionally abused, really, and I think that comes out in the way she deals with her son and everyone else around her, but I think her intentions are good, and so I didn't have trouble in that way. Martha seems unsympathetic, everyone wants to be liked on some level, but not everyone can just be happy all the time. Martha was written very realistically; there's a truthfulness about that situation, and so that made it not as difficult as you might think it would be to work on them.

What was your greatest challenge playing Martha Koerner ?

Deborah : Well, again, it would be like not much preparation, especially for the emotional scenes in the courtroom. You're working on a low budget film that you haven't really prepared for, there's not a lot of film to do take after take after take , and so you have to have the goods at the moment , or not. <laughs> There's not a lot of room for error, so I would say that was the challenge. It was sort of ahead of me, and I knew it was coming, but then again, I had so little time that I couldn't get too worried about what was going to happen. I had to trust in God that the whole thing was going to unfold , and go with it.

Well, you had some pretty intense scenes. What one them was off camera , the off camera shouting argument between Martha and her husband John , was that scripted in any way ?

Deborah : No, that was just the two of us, knowing what the situation was, we set the scene, Soren was in the bathroom.

It went on for quite a while, was it all adlibbed ?

Deborah : Oh, yes.

How did all three of you feel ? It wasn't a prerecorded thing, it was real time, off camera ?

Deborah : We were standing in the middle of the living room. We filmed the dining room scene, which of course gives you a preparation in a way , because there is a lot of intensity going on there. Then for the shouting scene, we filmed it simultaneously. They're filming Soren in the bathroom, and we're shouting , so that gave him something to work on . It was just us adlibbing. We knew enough of the characters at that point to know what the situation was, and it was one take. We didn't do it over and over , we just made it up , Jim just audio recorded it , and that was that. We just did it once.

That really makes that scene more intense for me , as a filmgoer, knowing that it was done live and in one take. How did you feel at the end of that really emotionally intense scene ? Did any of it affect you ?

Deborah : I remember I cried , when I stepped outside the set It was a lot of pressure and tension and emotion. I remember also that I had a couple of days off after that, and I was in that moment questioning everything I was doing in terms of , like you know, it was going by fast . Most people had a couple of weeks to know they were playing this part , to work on the script etc, and I was just going along, and I remember I had a moment that day, right after that, where I thought, am I filling this , am I doing this, is it valid , is it going to stand out that I didn't prepare , everybody else did… I had some doubts, I had some worries, you know.

How did Jim prepare you all for that particular scene, that day ? Was there something that he did to run you through it ?

Deborah : No , I think we just knew the situation, because we had done the dining room scene. We knew that we had a son that we were lying about, who was in jail , we had a son whose best friend was, , well, pretty much our worst enemy was his best friend's father . There was a lot of heaviness,
and we just went with the situation. Michael is a pro so he made it easy to trust the situation too.

Now that you've mentioned Michael , he's a three time emmy award winner for this soap opera ALL MY CHILDREN , what was it like working with him ?

Deborah : He's a wonderful person, very giving to other actors. I remember that he was right there for me. I did worry, am I going to have this, when I need it, kind of thing, in terms of abilities , and he was very, very supportive, he was just great ! You know, you don't have to worry about Michael, he knows what he's doing . You can only be as good as the people you work with, so that of course helped too . He is an Emmy award winning actor but he was was humble. He had done a lot of Soap Opera work, but he hadn't done a lot of movie work , so he wasn't like , oh I'm a star and I'm above all of you. He wasn't like that at all , he was like a regular joe. He's was a great guy.

You played husband and wife. Was it easy getting into that role at such short notice.

Deborah : Yeah , I think so . That is the nature of acting, you just have to throw yourself in. Even in big movies , you may have time with the role yourself, but you're still going to end up on a set playing someone's wife, or mother, and you're just meeting them for the first time. That's just the way it is. There's no rehearsal time, well maybe you rehearse a couple of times, and then you film it. And even in big budget films, Warner Brothers, whatever, that's the way it is.. In theatre, it's great, you rehearse for weeks and you really build on something, but in a film there isn't the same luxury of rehearsing like there is in a play. Time is money on a film set.

You've worked with so many directors, in theatre , in tv, in movies, how was Jim Fleigner as a director ?

Deborah : He was very good, because there was the limited time, low budget , etcetera , he wrote it , he was producing it, he directed it. He knew what he wanted , it was very helpful to me specifically, because I was coming on with little time, so I knew when I had gotten it right, because we moved on, he really knew what he wanted and he was very good at communicating it . I trusted him . He had a vision.

We all owe John Michael Bolger a lot for getting you into Rounding First , have you acted with him before ?

Deborah : No, I hadn't acted with him before. I'd seen his acting, we were friends, , we had a mutual friend, it's how we originally met , and so we'd known each other for several years, but no, we hadn't acted together. He directed me once, in a reading at the Actor's Studio , that was as close a professional relationship as we've ever had.

And how about the three young lead actors, in particular Soren Fulton, who played your onscreen son ? What was it like working with them ?

Deborah : The three of them were so much fun. I got very close to Sam . And Soren , from the moment I got there, he and his mother , she's a wonderful woman, she's really raised him up to be such a gentleman, he's very polite, so when I got there, they were like, how can we help you, and the two of us rehearsed in their room that first night. I got there late at night, and the next day , we were filming a baseball scene, I didn't have any lines thankfully, but the next day we had the scene in the car when I'm taking him to camp , and so we rehearsed that scene in their room , they were just, how can we help you, they were wonderful . He's very serious, and very professional , Soren , he's great. The three of them had a lot of fun together, you could tell . By the time I'd got there, they had bonded, it was like they were really friends . I was very impressed with them, they were very good young actors.

And Sam ? You singled him out.

Deborah : Oh, we just had a rapport, I'm not sure why . He's very funny, and I got kind of close to his grandmother who was on the set with him a lot of the time, nothing particular that I can remember, but we just bonded . He had seen a movie that I had done called " Nothing But Trouble" , and it was like one of his favourite movies that he had seen fourteen times, and so he was like " You were in THAT movie ! " , he was very impressed with that. He has such a great spirit , really, really funny guy … he's changed so much since the filming , he's really grown up ! I saw pictures of him recently, I hardly recognize him. He's shot up taller , he's lost weight , he's like a young man. He's gone from a boy to a young man . But we've talked on the phone since the shooting , we've kept in touch.

Well, Deborah , from what I hear , you do quite a few interesting dialects, including British, French, Russian , Southern U.S and Texan . Did you change your accent for Rounding First , or was that your natural accent ?

Deborah : No I didn't change it.

And what accent would that be ?

Deborah : I don't know <laughs> I remember once going to a speech teacher at Columbia in New York , and he had me read something, and he taped it. And afterwards, he came into the room and said " WHERE are you from !? " and I said, well, my father is in the Air Force so I've lived in England, Georgia, Nebraska Texas , New York ….and he actually got some of all those things . I'd moved from England to Nebraska at the age of 11 and that was a big culture shock. When we lived in England , from 9 to 11, that's when I saw some incredible theatre, that's when I really solidified the love for acting , when acting really became very important to me. I would imitate commercials on TV, and characters from plays my Mother would take me to see or just neighbors who lived next door and I think the accent thing, living abroad definitely affected that. I did a lot of looping work in New York, where you add voices in the background of movies, sometimes you play children, sometimes you have accents , I did some audiobooks , where I'd have to have different accents , theatre too , it would come up, where you play a Russian , or whatever. I've always been told that I could look German , French , Russian , so it's been helpful to have that ability.

Do you have any interesting anecdotes about the filming of Rounding First ?

Deborah : Let's see …. The only thing that came to mind when I thought about this was …. Michael , of course, everyone in town knew Michael, I mean, he's like a star , right ? And so , we were going into the courtroom , and the security was a little heavy , and there was a woman security guard , and she said " Who are you ? I just can't let you in here . " We had a costume and makeup on and everything , but that was not valid, she was just doing her job . But she saw Michael and she was like " Ohhhhhhh…. " and she like totally changed her demeanor . So it was good to know Michael because all of a sudden we were given the red carpet going <laughs > into the courthouse.