What has Mary McCormack been doing since “In Plain Sight” ended?
—Sandy Onowa, Las Cruces, New Mexico
Mary McCormack, 44, reunited with the cast of “The West Wing” — she played Deputy National Security Advisor Kate Harper — in 2012, to film “Walk and Talk the Vote,” a video encouraging U.S. citizens to mark their ballots completely, even the nonpartisan sections. The video helped to get her sister Bridget, a former professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, elected as a judge to the Michigan State Supreme Court.
Now, for fall 2013, McCormack is back on TV, starring as Caroline Yoder on “Welcome to the Family,” a comedy about Caroline and her husband Dan, who were looking forward to being empty nesters, when they discover that their college-bound teenage daughter is pregnant by a secret boyfriend, whose family is no more accepting of the relationship than they are.
After the grind of working on an hour drama for five years, McCormack was looking to do a comedy, with its more family-friendly filming schedule.
“I looked at everything,” the Plainfield, New Jersey-born actress says. “I just liked [creator] Mike Sikowitz’s writing the most. It just felt like the jokes came out of character. It felt intelligent. It felt fresh. I love doing comedy. I haven’t done as much of it, but I love it and was excited about that.”
The break between “In Plain Sight” and “Welcome to the Family” also gave McCormack a chance for some mom time. Married to director/producer Michael Morris, the couple has three daughters.
“On ‘The West Wing,’ I was pregnant with my first daughter, and they hid the pregnancy,” she recalls. “I was huge, but they hid it behind desks, but my head was huge. I had another daughter between seasons on ‘In Plain Sight.’ So then I had two. And, then, I had my last daughter on ‘In Plain Sight,’ but we just wrote it in. So I was doing 16‑hour days, 7 months pregnant, running through the hills of New Mexico, just craziness. So on this, we’ll see.”
