It took John Mahoney about 10 minutes into his role as Walter, an embattled CEO on HBO’s “In Treatment,” for you to forget that this actor once played Martin Crane, the kindly family patriarch he portrayed for 11 years on the NBC comedy “Frazier.” Upon entering the Brooklyn brownstone office of Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne), he’s talking on his phone and absentmindedly hands the psychiatrist his briefcase, as if he were a bellhop. Disappointed that there’s no place to hang his expensive overcoat, he folds it like a blanket and makes a home for it on the sofa where patients usually sit. He sits in a chair instead.
“Walter sizes up the situation right from the start and thinks, I’m not going to be put in that subservient position,” says Mahoney.
Mahoney plays a high-powered corporate kingpin whose company is making headlines for the contaminated baby formula it distributes to poor countries. The resulting stress has driven Walter to Dr. Weston’s office for a quick fix. Of course, there is no such thing. Walter doesn’t quite understand the gradual, confessional nature of the therapeutic process. He sees it as just another results-oriented transaction.
The actor’s take on the character — an important man who sense that he is approaching irrelevance — has given “In Treatment” its dramatic center. Dr. Weston has three other revolving clients — a bitter blonde lawyer (Hope Davis), a student suffering from lymphoma (Alison Pill) and a young boy grappling with his parents’ divorce (Aaron Shaw)–but when Walter shows up for his session, viewers know something’s going to happen.
At the end of the first session, Walter seized his chest and collapsed on the floor of Dr. Paul Brooklyn brownstone office. It wasn’t a cardiac arrest. Turns out that Walter’s been suffering from panic attacks since he was a child. In the second, viewers learned Walter’s history. His college junior daughter, Natalie, is in Rwanda working at a rape center. His elder brother died when Walter was a young boy. As his professional life implodes, Walter’s personal problems gather force and knock him out, literally, from under his feet.
Walter’s such a mess that Mahoney, 68, confesses, “I sort of broke down early on. The director and the show runner said they didn’t want something emotional so soon. Because that’s coming up. I had to pull back, dig in and not go to pieces so early.”
Such is the intimate nature of “In Treatment” that each half-hour is like a one-act play with two characters. It’s not surprising that the cast is largely composed of theater actors. In addition to Byrne, a Tony winner for “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” and Mahoney, this season features Davis and Dianne Wiest as Paul’s therapist, Gina. To film his seven episodes of “In Treatment,” Mahoney was flying to New York on Sunday afternoons from Chicago, where he was doing Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” and back again. He only missed one Tuesday night performance.
“Gabriel made sure I shot all my stuff first,” Mahoney says. “The kindest, most considerate person I’d ever worked with.” Byrne also read 20 pages of the McPherson play into a tape recorder so that Mahoney and company could improve their Dublin accents.
Even though he knows enough about therapy from acting on “In Treatment” to deal with his own issues, Mahoney, who lives in Oak Park, Illinois (he’s lived in Chicago for 40 years), says he’s never been in analysis. “Not that I don’t need it,” he says with a laugh. “I’m a chronic insomniac. I’ve never had the time. I’d love to try to find out what causes the insomnia.”
The actor, who is much slimmer than he was in his “Frasier” days, had a serious medical scare two years ago when doctors found a benign cyst on his pancreas. They removed his spleen and part of his pancreas. “I was fed intravenously for 12 weeks. Every day I took a bag of nutrients for 15 hours,” he says. “I immediately became a diabetic, because the pancreas manufactures insulin. I suppose I ended up being in really good condition. I used to love my Jameson’s, but I can’t drink alcohol. I lost well over 30 pounds. I’d love to put more weight back on.”
In the four years that “Frasier” has been off the air, Mahoney has been offered several television pilots, but he prefers to work on stage. “At my age I don’t want uproot myself again for five years,” he says.
The English-born Mahoney remains tight with the “Frazier” cast. When he’s working in Los Angeles, he catches up with his former co-stars Peri Gilpin, Jane Leeves and Kelsey Grammer. He saw a lot of David Hyde Pierce when they both working in New York on two different plays a few years ago.
“The hard about leaving the show was leaving those guys,” he says. ” It was like emigrating from England. I thought nothing ever could be that bad again. I was so homesick. I missed my parents. I knew I’d rarely see them again.”
As for Walter’s future on “In Treatment,” Mahoney says, “Things start to look up for him. He doesn’t walk out of there a new man or anything. He’s got hell to go through with it. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”
IN TREATMENT
Monday, 9:30 p.m., HBO