Grace Hanadarko, a lapsed Catholic, mates like a minx, smokes like a Vatican chimney, spews obscenities, and is on a first-name basis with Jack Daniel's.
All that before breakfast.
So naturally, when Holly Hunter read the script for TNT's audacious new drama, Saving Grace, "I certainly didn't want anyone else to play her."
The diminutive Hunter, 49, who's made an Oscar-winning career portraying strong, complicated women, has landed a doozy for her first series.
Saving Grace (Monday, 10 p.m.) opens with Grace, an Oklahoma City detective, burning the sheets with her married partner, Ham Dewey (Shield alum Kenneth Johnson).
Afterward, she flashes the guy next door. Later, while on the job, she cold-cocks an obnoxious stranger. Twice.
"Holly can do damage," says 6-foot-1 Johnson, 43. "If she gets me in a wrist maneuver, I guarantee I'm going down. It hurts like a mother."
Hunter labels her passionate lifestyle as "white-heat living." We call it "All About Id."
"Grace is inebriated by the chaos of being alive. She gets off on it," says Hunter, also a producer. " . . . She is very elemental - she is driven by her desires and the fulfillment of those desires."
At the same time, the unmarried Grace is surrounded by those for whom such wild impulsivity is not a virtue.
"They live by codes - social codes, moral codes, ethical codes, religious codes," Hunter says. "This is somebody living by her own code. This is the 'Code of Grace.' "
Enter Grace's code-breaker, a nondenominational, tobacco-spitting, twang-talking angel named Earl (Deadwood's Leon Rippy).
Before you start flapping the wings on your remote, creator Nancy Miller (The Closer, The Profiler) wants to make clear that Grace is not a cable remake of Touched by an Angel.
"You say angel and people roll their eyes," she says. "In my mind, this is not a religious show. It's about a woman trying to find something to believe in other than the pain in her life."
With good film roles scarce for women in their 40s, they're turning to the small screen. Like Glenn Close in FX's forthcoming Damages and Kyra Sedgwick in TNT's smash The Closer, Hunter was drawn to cable.
"Cable has taken a giant step toward being iconoclastic," she says. "It has defined itself as a seeker of human behavior that's not judged or encased in moral standing."
To Hunter, Earl's role is to persuade Grace to recognize a higher force than herself, a god with a lower-case g. "He doesn't care if it's Muhammad or Allah or Jesus or the Virgin Mary," she says.
