Marcia Gay Harden recalls Angels in America backstage fight over her wig: 'I was pulling it and I was sobbing'

Sometimes creative disagreements lead to literally having your wig snatched. 

Marcia Gay Harden recalled a bizarre incident backstage during Angels in America in the early 1990s when she and director George C. Wolfe battled over her character's hairdo. "I had a wig," she recalled in an episode of Dinner's on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson. "It was beautiful, long, brown, kind of curly hair. Because I had the idea of this pioneer woman, and it was a character I was playing. And George said, 'We can't see you.'"

Harden thought that obscuring herself would somehow help with maintaining the illusion of her character. "I said, 'Well, you don't want to f---ing see me. You want to see her. And the hair is making you see her. And I am not taking it off. I am not taking it off,'" she remembered. "I had to perform one night with that in my brain. But I kept it on."

The conflict persisted across multiple performances of the seminal play. "The next night, 'You have to take it off. We cannot see you,'" she recalled Wolfe repeating. "And it did end up in a wrestling match and I was sobbing. He was pulling it and I was pulling it and I was sobbing. 'No, you can't have it.'"

Harden admitted that she probably threw a fit during the fight. "I probably even ended up like going, 'No, I'm ugly, I'm ugly,'" she said. "Ripping it off and having a tanty and screaming that, 'I'm ugly, I'm ugly,' horrible snot, she's, I'm just like, punishing myself."

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The actress was afraid to play her character without the wig. "It was so scary and awful and I was so vulnerable, but it was the right thing to do," she said. "Whenever you're hiding, you have to come out of hiding and it's the right thing to do, right?"

Harden portrayed Harper Pitt, a drug-addicted Mormon housewife who discovers that her husband is gay, in the original Broadway cast of Angels in America in 1993. The actress said that she tried out for the two-part play in a vulnerable emotional state. 

"I went to the audition, I had just broken up again with my born-again bagpiping boyfriend," she explained on the podcast. "And I was a mess. Cut to: I'm in an audition for Angels in America. So I go into there, one of those little stupid-ass audition rooms. It's Tony [Kushner] and George over there, and as I start doing the scenes, I burst into that kind of snot dripping on the floor."

Harden believes that her genuine agony helped her secure the role. "I think what they saw that they liked was that Harper was in pain, was in deep, deep pain," she said. "It wasn't the drugs. The drugs were to get her out of pain. You don't play the drugs, you play the pain of betrayal and being gaslit and all that stuff. They don't tell you that story because they're probably embarrassed about that little pile of snot that was on the floor."

Listen to the full conversation between Harden and Jesse Tyler Ferguson above.