Interview: Catching Up with Courtney Thorne-Smith

Courtney Thorne-Smith is no stranger to comedy. While she may have had her big break starring as Allison Parker on nighttime soap “Melrose Place,” she really honed her acting chops on shows like “Ally McBeal” and “According to Jim.” For the past few years, she’s co-starred on the CBS hit comedy “Two and a Half Men,” playing Jon Cryer’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, Lyndsey Mackelroy. I spoke with Courtney recently about being on a headline-making sitcom, and how the cast and crew are leading up to the show’s ninth season finale on May 14.

Celebrity Extra: You’ve been working pretty much nonstop in Hollywood since 1986, and when “According to Jim” ended after eight seasons, I thought you would take a little breather from series television. What made you decide to jump back in with “Two and a Half Men”?

Courtney Thorne-Smith: It wasn’t really jumping back in — it was sort of like I put my little tiny toe in. The first season I was on, I did only two episodes, and then I did about 10 last year and about 10 this year, so it’s nice. When [my son] Jack complains about me working I say: “Sweetie, I work 10 weeks a year and most of those are half-days. So you really don’t get to complain.” This schedule is ideal for being a mom. I get to go to work and be this absolutely insane character and do these crazy things that I’ve never gotten the chance to do before, and then I come home and make Play-Doh and cookies.

CE: Tell me about your character, Lyndsey, and her relationship with Alan, played by Jon Cryer.

CTS: I said to somebody the other day who was asking me about Alan and Lyndsey, “I love their relationship so much because of their honesty.” They are two people who look at each other and say, “Seriously, we’re just not going to do any better.” They’re settling, and I just love the honesty. They’ve said it to each other several times: “Really? Do we have options? We’ll just stay together. Why not?” That just makes me laugh.

I also love the scene earlier in the season when Lyndsey is dating a younger man but decides she wants to be with Alan. She tells him: “I want to be with you because you’ll never leave me for a younger woman because you can’t get one.” But it was said with this joy and this love. How great is it? We don’t have any options, so let’s just be together.

CE: How did you feel about coming onto this established hit sitcom? Were you anxious, excited, scared?

CTS: Oh, terrified. When I signed on, it was only for two episodes. But I’ve known Jon for a long time, and I’ve been a fan of his too — he’s just the greatest guy. I thought, worst-case scenario, I get to watch Jon do his magic for a few weeks and then go on with my life. But I’m still on — and I’m lucky because I get to go in and work, and then I get to come home and be a mom. It’s been the most surprisingly wonderful career opportunity I’ve ever had.

CE: How was the transition from Charlie Sheen to Ashton Kutcher?

CTS: It was surprisingly smooth. Everybody wondered, “What’s going to happen?” The writers wrote a really good character for Ashton that he just stepped right into. The cast, crew and writers are all so solid that all they had to do was add another character to the mix. People miss Charlie as a person because he’s wonderful and funny and smart and sweet, but they got Ashton, so it’s a win/win. All the people here are such extraordinary pros that it was pretty seamless.

Interview Outtakes, Part 4

Most of the time when I am conducting an interview with a soap star, I have more interview material than space for printing the interview. Here are some blurbs from stars that did not make it to the print version of the interview, but were too good not to publish.


Marla Sokoloff: I had to look something up on YouTube the other day, and some of my earlier acting jobs came up. I saw something I had done on “Step by Step,” and I must have been 12. It was so strange, because I don’t even remember too many of those experiences. But I was a huge fan of “Full House” before I was on it, like most kids in the sixth and seventh grade. When I got on it, I thought I’d be the coolest kid in school, but it actually backfired on me and I got made fun of.

Jonathan Jackson (Lucky Spencer, “General Hospital”) on playing Kyle Reese in “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”: That was really fun and that was a cool show. I liked the “Terminator” movies growing up, so it was pretty cool to be on the show. In terms of being that iconic character, when you go into something like that, you don’t overthink that you are playing a character that is so loved already. You just go into it and try to put your own thing into it with a sense of respect for the original thing, but not too much that it makes you gun shy.


Betty White (Ann, “The Bold and the Beautiful”) on receiving the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, which will be presented this January: I cannot tell you what a thrill this is. When they called me I thought: “Well, they’ve made some kind of mistake. They must mean another Betty White.” I am just beside myself. I can’t believe it, and I can’t be coy about it. I am just thrilled to pieces.

Jay Kenneth Johnson (Philip Kiriakis, “Days of Our Lives”): I like that the writers have been integrating a lot of the characters. It’s smart writing to mix it up. It’s a small town, considering there are three places that we go. I mean, you’re bound to run into someone you know at the Brady Pub, right? And, at the Kiriakis mansion, I think we have at least 20 people living there.

Courtney Thorne-Smith: I am very prompt. Right after I had Jack, I’d missed a phone interview. It had never happened before in my life. In the beginning, after you have a child, there’s just no room for it. Usually on a day where I know I have an interview, it is constantly in my mind, but it’s all gone, because you’re thinking about changing the baby, keeping the baby from crying, keeping the baby from crying, keeping the baby from crying. It supersedes everything.

Don Diamont (Bill Spencer, “BB”): When you have a character like Bill, one who you want to be a romantic leading man, and he is that cutthroat, that makes it challenging. It makes the relationship that much more dynamic, and I think the writers are doing an incredible job with this, Whether Katie wants to admit it or not, she is enthralled by this guy, and the way that he wields his power and his influence. There is that place in her where she wishes she could be more like him.

Interview: Catching Up With Courtney Thorne-Smith

Courtney Thorne-Smith (pictured left, photos courtesy Lifetime Television) is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Allison Parker on the popular nighttime soap opera Melrose Place from 1992 to 1997. She then honed her comedic chops on the ABC sitcom According to Jim from 2001 to 2009. Now she is starring in an original Lifetime Television movie called Sorority Wars, playing Lutie Snow, a woman who desperately wants her college freshman daughter, Katie, to join the sorority she co-founded, the Delta house.

Courtney was excited to try something new with Jim ending its eight-year run. She reveals: “Doing Sorority Wars was really fun — it has a lot of good stories within the movie. When I first read it, I thought it was sort of a lark, but once I started working on it, I started noticing all the stories about friendship, the mother-daughter relationship and being true to yourself. I thought, ‘Wow, it’s actually really good.’ I was really impressed the more I got into it.”

Playing the mom to a college-age daughter was a new challenge for Courtney, and she was more than happy to take it on. “I played the young ingénue for so long, and when you’re the ingénue, you are the grounding, normal person in a sea of crazies. With Lutie — well, “crazy” is a strong word — she is really neurotic, and she lives in the past.

“She is still so involved with her sorority; it’s like she thinks she is still in the sorority. It’s the most important thing in her life besides her daughter. She’s really tightly wound, and I liked that I’d really got to play a character. It was so much fun for me.”

Was it difficult for Courtney to tap into a part of herself to be able to empathize with Lutie’s obsession with her old sorority and her daughter’s future place in it? “It was hard until I realized that Lutie wanted this to be something that she shared with her daughter. Her sorority was where she felt most important and the fact that if her daughter didn’t make that same choice, then what would they share?

“Lutie never created anything else for herself in later life. She feels rejected when her daughter doesn’t want what she has to offer — and it’s heartbreaking when you think about it that way.”

Courtney enjoyed acting with her co-star, Lucy Hale, who plays her daughter, Katie. Lucy is best known for her role on the critically acclaimed and now-defunct comedy-drama “Privileged.” Courtney gushes: “She is so solid. I kept telling her, ‘Don’t worry about getting another series; you’re going to be a movie star!’ Her work is very honest. And she’s so smart. She’s going to go far — mark my words!”

While Courtney did have fun on the set, it also was a sort of learning experience for her. “What I learned from Lutie is that you really have to keep your life going, keep it on a forward path. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to give everything to my son, because I do, but you need to have a full life. It doesn’t help you to get stuck in the past.

“It’s like, what if I were still wearing my Melrose Place baseball cap and asking people to call me Allison? It wouldn’t work. I’ve moved on. Even though with the new Melrose Place, it’s HARD to move on. You just have to move on and keep your life going in a positive direction.”

You can see for yourself that Courtney Thorne-Smith has moved on in her new movie, Sorority Wars, which premieres Oct. 17 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the Lifetime Television network.