Ellen Gray: Norristown's Maria Bello stars in new show, 'Prime Suspect'

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. - Maria Bello needs her gun. And her hat. And her trench coat.

Over and over, she strides to her desk, picks up each in turn and heads off, only to return to begin again.

What kind of gun? I ask between takes during an afternoon of filming last month on Universal Studios' Stage 29.

"A plastic one," she says, grinning as she shows me. "We have a real one for close-ups."

She thinks it's a Glock.

After she walks off, a crew member approaches and whispers, "It's a Sig. It's not a Glock."

Later, he'll bring over the real thing so I can read the model: P229 Elite, Sig Sauer.

When I mention this to Bello, she'll be unfazed. "I don't know anything about guns."

Which is why they call it acting.

It's enough that her character knows a lot about guns, an expertise demonstrated in the very first episode of NBC's "Prime Suspect," the cop drama in which Norristown's Bello, 44, portrays an Americanized, adrenalized version of Lynda La Plante's groundbreaking Scotland Yard detective Jane Tennison, a role first played by Helen Mirren two decades ago.

Bello's Jane is a New York police detective named Timoney, the surname a nod to former Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney, who got his start with the New York Police Department, where he was an academy classmate of the show's technical adviser, Mike Sheehan, himself a former NYPD detective.

Jane Timoney is a bit more athletic than Jane Tennison, suggested Kirk Acevedo ("Oz," "Band of Brothers"), one of her co-stars.

"Maria, you believe she can take care of herself, you know what I mean? She's scrappy and she sells it," said Acevedo, calling her "a guy's girl in the best sense."

The two Janes do share an uncompromising attitude and a bluntness that's sometimes at odds with their ambitions, and some of their demons overlap.

But what the two projects, divided by an ocean and time, have most in common is their stars: beautiful women who care too much about their work to let being beautiful get in their way.

Executive producer Alexandra Cunningham, who, along with executive producer and director Peter Berg ("Friday Night Lights") developed "Prime Suspect" for NBC, describes Bello as "without vanity," estimating that she takes "20 minutes in hair and makeup on the set."

On the afternoon I'm there, the "Prime Suspect" cast and crew is in the midst of a week in which they're working simultaneously on the series' second and third episodes as well as reshoots of the Sept. 22 pilot.