Will & Grace’s Debra Messing graces Us with a few of her factoids. Read on to learn 25 things about the actress.
1. I’m scared of the ocean.
2. My happy place is Africa.
3. I took a circus class in graduate school and learned how to do the trapeze.
4. I want to study photography.
5. I grew up in rural Rhode Island and ran next door to watch horses giving birth.
6. If I wasn’t an actress, I would be a litigator.
7. My mother was a teenage recording artist. She was part of an all-girls quartet called the Brooktones and recorded next to Carole King.
8. I had never seen an eyelash curler until I moved to Los Angeles when I was 25 years old.
9. I don’t know what my natural hair color is! It was always changing.
10. I was a cheerleader in junior high school. I was bad.
11. My brother ran for state representative when he was at Brown University. I knocked on doors across the state.
12. My second happiest place is at a Broadway musical.
13. My dream is to be a guest jewelry editor at a national fashion magazine.
14. My favorite color is red.
15. My son Roman, 14 [with ex Daniel Zelman, 51], is named after my theater professor from NYU, who passed away from AIDS. He’s why I got into advocacy and activism to eradicate AIDS.
16. I grew up an avid skier.
17. My favorite flower is a white orchid because I’m allergic to everything else.
18. I love gadgets, but my energy makes them malfunction. My IT expert confirmed that it’s a rare but real thing, and it’s the bane of my existence.
19. My father was VP of a jewelry manufacturing company. One summer, I worked the line doing piecework, just like the I Love Lucy episode when she’s on the assembly line with chocolate. I was fired after a month.
20. I much prefer being sent a big balloon bouquet than a bottle of champagne.
21. After my second year of graduate school, I came home to make money for school. I got a job as a cocktail waitress and fell down a flight of stairs, broke my ankle and spent the rest of the summer on the couch. I watched every minute of the Anita Hill hearings.
22. I wanted to do the Peace Corps if I didn’t get into graduate school.
23. I have an obsession with notebooks and broad-tipped fountain pens.
24. I took pole-dancing lessons for my role as an aquatic Vegas showgirl in the [2007] film Lucky You. I was in a mermaid outfit in an 18-foot water tank filled with sharks and manta rays. My character lip-synched and “danced” under water. Oh, and I was breastfeeding.
25. I think that people who run dog rescues are living angels on earth.
Will & Grace returns to NBC Thursday January 31 at 9:30 p.m. ET.
