Emmanuel Itier: Paul, how do you approach playing what we can only assume to be the devil?  And secondly, how can you possibly make a series commitment, given the insane career you have back at home, writing and directing and producing on television, stage and…

Paul Gross: To the first part of your question, there are many different kinds of devils, and I’m sort of the Eastwick devil.  We’ll unfold that as it goes, and I think you’ll come to see that my powers really are limitless.  And that goes to address the second part of your question:  I can do almost anything now, including the big schedule at home.  No…it actually is working out really well, and it seems to be balancing out.

EI: When you do take on a project, you tend to do, like, everything, including craft services, and here you’re just acting.

PG: I know.  This has been the most fantastic holiday.  I don’t work in every scene; I don’t work every day, so I’m running around L.A. and learning how to surf.  I’m not very good at it, by the way.  I’ve had a couple of lessons, and I’ve had a surfboard almost split my head in two.  But other than that, I really enjoy the sport, so this show is affording me a lot of holiday time. No…it’s really great to really just get to concentrate on acting, and I get to act with terrific people and work on material that Maggie has created that’s really challenging and a lot of fun to do. It’s a great project.

EI: Rebecca, Steve McPherson basically said you went from the delivery room to the set.  How quick did it happen?  Can you tell us how you got ready?

Rebecca Romijn: I was about eight weeks out, and I had the babies with me the entire time we were shooting the pilot, which was great because I never had this anxious feeling of “I’ve got to get home.”  I was nursing them, so every three hours we had to stop and take that break.

PG: That had a code name – Zydeco…

RR: Which turned into the inside joke on the crew.  The crew members would be like, “I gotta go outside to zydeco myself.”  But I have a little bit of a hard time looking at myself in the pilot because I’m like, “That lady just had two babies.”  I mean, for my own vanity purposes. But anyway, it’s hard now because they’re not with me on set all the time, but luckily my husband is taking a little bit of time off to take care of them. They’re on set here and there, but not all the time.

EI: Why ”zydeco”?

RR: I don’t know.  Our first AD came up with it.  I was fine with “nursing.”

PG: I think it was really just to shield the male sensibility…

RR: I guess so.

EI: For the showrunner, did ABC say to you, “Can you make this like Desperate Housewives with magic?  Was that ever a part of the concept?

MF: Not at all. Obviously, we wanted to appeal to a similar audience, and it’s a show about women.  It’s a show about empowerment. It’s a show about friendship.  But we feel like it’s very different from Desperate Housewives, and ABC wanted us to be conscious of not trying to copycat or do things they had done.  We are definitely our own world, our own universe.  It’s a very unique show that hopefully will appeal to the same people, because that’s a good show.

RR: And if we could have any of their success…

MF: Hell yeah, bring it on.

EI: Does Paul’s character go through sort of a makeover?  Because he has the ’80s hair in the beginning… [Laughs]

Jaime Ray Newman: I want to hear the answer to that.

RR: That’s a favorite topic of conversation.

PG: Oh my God.  What’s wrong with my hair?

EI: Nothing now.

PG: If you knew the…

MF: The amount of meetings about the hair that we had…

PG: The tonnage of hours devoted to discussing my hair…

MF: Poor guy.

PG: It would stun an ox at a hundred paces.

MF: But we found the sweet spot.

PG: No, the thing is, when we shot the pilot, I couldn’t cut my hair because I was going to do a feature and it had to be longer.  Then, I don’t know how it got all puffed up like that, and I remember stepping out of the trailer saying, “I think this looks kind of retarded.”

LP: Car salesman…  He looks like a televangelist.

MF: The hair is not the best.  But when you look at it now, it’s just perfect.

PG: Now it’s okay, but since we started shooting, I’ve had 15 haircuts.  Little incremental steps.

MF: And odd producers stand around him with each haircut going, “Oh, I like that one.”

PG: “Can you cut that bit?”

EI: Can you talk about how it’s going to be different from the film [Witches of Eastwick] and what we know of that world?

MF: The movie, first of all, is a very iconic movie.  It takes place in the ’80s. It’s very much of that time, and we feel like this version is contemporary.  It’s about problems that people are dealing with today, and the characters are very different.  In the movie, the magic is sort of ephemeral.  You don’t really understand where it’s coming from or what it’s about, and in this version, each of the women has a very specific power that she’s dealing with that sort of reflects back on her life’s journey and her problems. It’s a very different world but, hopefully, evocative of the same sense of fun and sex and all that good stuff.

EI: Paul, in regards to the George Miller movie in the ’80s, Jack Nicholson gave a very eccentric performance.  I’m wondering if you’re familiar with it — whether it has informed your own sort of interpretation of the role, or whether you’re just going to completely block that from your mind and bring your own personality to this.

PG: I am familiar with it, but Jack Nicholson is like Mount Rushmore.  You can’t really…

Sara Rue: Climb him? [Laughs]

RR: He looks like George Washington?

EI: He probably doesn’t have the issues with hair that you do.  I think you probably have better hair.

PG: And a little bit more of it, maybe, than… You know, Jack is Jack, and that’s that performance, in the same sense that the film is of its time, as Maggie said, and this is a different thing, and I’m actually a slightly different devil, so…yeah, you can’t climb Jack.

EI: For Maggie: Veronica Cartwright — what has this woman done? She’s puking up cherries in the film, and now you’ve had her eaten by ants.

MF: I just want to torture her, for some reason.  She’s a different character in this version, but for some reason, I love to hear her scream.  She just has the world’s best scream.

JRN: She really does.

MF: I had to have ants attack her.

EI: How did you talk her into this?  It can’t have been a good experience the first time.

MF: She had a great time on the movie, and I think she’s having an even better time on this. She’s just a barrel of monkeys.  I love her.

EI: Tell us what you’re using for Eastwick.  Do you use some outside scenes in a real town or…?

MF: We have a town.  It’s on the Warner Bros. lot and it looks like a real town, yeah.

EI: Does it take much to dress it up to look unusual like Eastwick does?

MF: We have the world’s best production designer.  Her name is Maria Caso.  She did Deadwood. She’s incredible.  She is an artist. I can’t say enough good things about her.  She transformed that town.  It was the town they shot Gilmore Girls in on the lot, and it now looks completely different, all due to her magic.

EI: For the actresses: there’s a certain amount of wish fulfillment in being able to play witches, particularly if they’re good witches.  Are there some things where you just, in a way, would like to have some powers like that?  What do you find fun about being a witch?

RR: I think it would be a little bit of a double-edged sword, and I certainly wouldn’t be burdened with a psychic sense.  I think it would affect the way I lived my day-to-day life.  She can control the elements.  That wouldn’t be bad to have.

JRN: It’s a little bit of a responsibility, though.  I don’t know if I’d want that responsibility either.  I guess once Kat figures out how to harness that, then that might be fun.  But it’s a little out of control right now.

LP: Jamie has the most dynamic power visually — to see people get struck by lightning and whatnot. She’s the coolest. But I would have to say that, as actors, it’s so much fun to get to play witches because you get to have this sense of make-believe and fantasy every day going into work, and that part is thrilling. We get to play, so we’re having a blast.

EI: Miss Rue, can you talk a little bit about your character?  Are you a rival witch?  Are you like Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched?  [Laughs]

SR: That is an awesome comparison. My character is sort of the nay-sayer for the show. I’m the fact-checker at the newspaper, and I’m very into facts and figures and things being real. I’m not all about magic.  I like things to remain the same, but I sort of compare it to Veronica’s character in the movie.  She was a major religious fanatic, and there’s not that element, but there is sort of this anti-the-unknown with my character that’s really interesting. I’m really enjoying playing her.  It’s been fun.  I think that maybe I, too, will have certain powers in the future, so I’m looking forward to that.  I don’t know.  You have to drill Maggie about that one.

EI: Maggie, can I ask about the overall structure of the show?  In the first season, how far are we going and exploring their powers? And what’s the five-year plan?

MF: We do have a five-year plan, although I think ABC will kill me if I reveal what it is. The one-year plan in the writers’ room that we talk about a lot is Season 1: the theme is really empowerment.  It’s the women discovering who they are and coming into their power and learning to embrace it and control it. It’s also about seduction.  It’s about Darryl coming in and seducing the women, seducing the town, and the fun of discovery, I think, is what Season 1 is all about.

EI: I don’t know if this was maybe just me reading into Veronica Cartwright being in this and the stuff at the end where they discover a couple things about Darryl, but is this supposed to be sort of like “Eastwick: The Next Generation,” or is it divorced from the book and the film more than that?

MF: I like to have winks to both the book and the movie, even though this is kind of a different world, but we sort of wink to the fact that Darryl may have been in Eastwick 20 years ago in the ’80s…

JRN: His hair certainly was. [Laughs]

MF: Maybe there were other witches there at the time, and maybe Veronica Cartwright was one of them, so we definitely want to play with nods to the movie, but this is its own world. Perhaps one of the other witches in the ’80s was Cybill Shepherd, who will be making an appearance in multiple upcoming episodes.

EI: Miss Newman, could you talk a little bit about your character?  Of the three ladies up there, we got so much story about her because of the husband and being a caregiver and a mom.  There’s a lot there to play with.

JRN: The nice thing is Maggie kind of handed me a character that was…I didn’t have to really do the research on my own, like, “What was she like in high school?”  You handed that to me.  So she got pregnant when she was 18 and married her high school sweetheart and never had girlfriends, really never got the opportunity to figure herself out and to develop herself as a woman.  She went from being a kid to being a mom, so it was really fun to play a character who’s in such transition, who literally, in the pilot episode — her entire life is totally shaken and she’s very much in denial of it and loves stasis, loves things to stay the same, loves safety and security.  And then this guy comes along and shakes up everything.  So it’s really fun to play.

EI: You say the show is about female empowerment, but the power the women have is supernatural power, which women don’t have, and they’ve fallen into the thrall of a powerful man.  So what is this about actual female empowerment?

MF: I see it as an metaphor.  The empowerment that the women experience, obviously, is supernatural.  We don’t feel that in our day-to-day lives, but, for example, with the Joanna character, who can hypnotize people, that’s really about her not having a voice or standing up for herself and learning that, once she stands up for herself, she’s able to get things that she didn’t realize she could get. It’s the same with all of them.  It’s about learning who they really are and embracing who they really are, and the magic is a metaphor. With the Darryl character, he’s not this powerful man who comes in and makes them over.  We’ll discover that he needs them more than they need him and that, in fact, he wants to harness their power.  It’s not really about him bestowing something upon them or about what he can get out of them, because they are so powerful.

LP: A lot of what we have fun playing with is finding ways to ground these magical stories into real life.  A lot of times, I think people need an excuse or a reason to come into their own power and their own confidence. Maybe it’s Darryl or maybe he just gives them the sort of whisper and the nudge.  Also their friendship — they find a camaraderie and they find a kindred thing between them, and it gives them the courage to be what they need to be and to relate to one another. They’re all at very specific turning points in their lives, so is it this magic, or is it something they’ve always possessed all along?

EI: Maggie, is there a certain amount of convention-tweaking when you have an actress who looks like Lindsay — just put her hair up and then put on glasses and suddenly she becomes plain?  And Lindsay, if you want to talk about how horrifying it was for those days you had to be on set playing that…?

LP: I love it.  First of all, this character is more like me than any other character I’ve played, so it’s actually quite freeing to come to work and sort of let it all hang out.  She’s a nerd and she’s awkward, and I adore every cell of her. The glasses and the bun, I know, seemed like quite a cliché, but it’s sort of that wink and nod to the superhero look, and I find that charming.

EI: Rebecca, have you seen the original film, and what role are you really associated with?  Cher’s role?

RR: I play Cher.  Bragging rights.  Yeah, I love that movie; as a kid, I probably saw it at least four times, but I haven’t seen it recently. When I asked Maggie, right before we started, if I should re-watch it, she specifically said, “Not necessarily — this is going to be our fresh take on the on the movie and the story.”  So that’s what it is.

EI: Where was this in production when John Updike died, and had there been any communication with him before his death or since?

MF: I never spoke to him.  I’m sure he was aware of it when he died.  We knew we were picked up to make the pilot.  We didn’t have a cast yet.  We were just hiring David Nutter, the director.  I think he got hired the day that John Updike died. I was pretty sad.  But I’m sure he knew that it was going on, and he had just come out with that book last year — the sequel.

EI: Rebecca, given your role on Ugly Betty, how much of a relief is it to just be playing a character who is your own sex?

RR: Like Lindsay, this character is probably the closest character to myself in real life that I’ve ever played as well, and it’s nice just to play a woman again, after trannies and mutants — it’s refreshing.

EI: Paul, following on the earlier discussion of all the work you’ve done back home, unless I’m mistaken, the urge to come down and do a U.S. network series is something you’ve resisted until now.  Can you talk about the timing of this?  Is there something about this show specifically, or something about where your schedule was in Canada that persuaded you to come down and do this?

PG: It was a combination of things.  I didn’t have another project that was actually on the go, and it wasn’t as though I was particularly resisting coming here.  I just always was doing something, so it wasn’t “I will never come to Los Angeles” or something.  I just was always busy.  And I didn’t happen to be busy, and then I read the script and I thought it was, in general, just fantastic. I loved the Updike novel and I liked the film, so I thought this would actually be a terrific show. The material is very rich, and there are lots of places to go, and these characters are all wonderful. I thought Maggie did a wonderful job in producing the next stage of evolution of the Eastwick story.  Also, I thought, “Who wouldn’t want to do this?”  I know everything, I can run the world, and I get to work with amazingly beautiful women, so it seemed like the perfect thing to do.  Also, when I read it, I thought, “I have absolutely no idea how to play this.”  And that usually is a good indication that it’s something I should try to do, so it was just a combination of those things.

EI: Ms. Friedman, is there anything about writing a show where most of your main characters are women that allows you to do something as a writer you don’t normally get to do?

MF: I tend to write about women. Maybe because I am a woman — I don’t know, but I love it.  We actually have an amazing staff of, I think, six women and three men, which is kind of fun.  We have them outnumbered.  But I love writing about the female experience.  I certainly identify very strongly with it, and we can go a lot of places — stories that don’t often get told, because a lot of stories are not about women. That being said, I think the show will appeal to men, hopefully.  I think we have, in Darryl, a male fantasy character — men would like to be like that. And we have, in the women, I think, very beautiful, seductive, funny characters, so hopefully it appeals to both genders.