May / June 2006:

Robin Weigert

Profile by Benyamin Cohen | Photo by Grove Pashley



When you find out she's Jewish, you do a double take. Truth is, when you find out she's beautiful you do a double take as well. Because, as fans of actress Robin Weigert can attest to, in her starring turn as Calamity Jane on HBO's Deadwood (which finally returns to the airwaves this month) she looks anything but. "I remember playing around in front of a mirror, cramming a hat on my head and kind of finding the way she is physically and vocally," recalls Weigert of when she first donned the rugged cowboy getup. "I also remember thinking to myself, 'Boy, that's a lot. And it's not necessarily attractive.'"

For anyone who's had the pleasure of seeing her in said costume, you know that the bedraggled, boozed up, expletive laden Old West character Weigert portrays looks nothing like the photograph you're currently staring at of a shy and diminutive classically trained theater actress.

And Weigert will be the first to admit that the role of Calamity Jane was tricky to cast. "It would be easy to go in the obvious direction, but then it would flatten out," she says. "I think you need someone who's actually a softie in real life and then force that chick, whoever she may be, to sort of slam it home with the other side of it. I think they were kind of looking for that contradiction, and it was my good fortune."

Good fortune is an understatement. When Deadwood first premiered, the critics couldn't heap enough praise on it (trust us, it's better than the Sopranos) and Weigert received an Emmy nomination right out of the gate. And the accolades haven't stopped. Earlier this year she was a recipient of Hollywood Life magazine's Breakthrough of the Year award.

The Washington, D.C. native, who is single, eventually traded in life on the upper East Side for the West Coast where the show films on an intricate set that takes up three city blocks. And now, with the third season of Deadwood about to begin, the 31-year-old Weigert can finally start to relax. "I can just say that out of my own experience, when I got out of school, nothing was happening for me. It felt very much like treading water, and I was wasting my life. I just think that the thing to know when you're starting out is, every so often you go through that, it ends, you start to work, and your life gets better."



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