Interview: Willie Garson juggling new “White Collar” series with second “Sex and the City” flick

When I saw Willie Garson sitting on a stage with the rest of the cast of the new USA series White Collar at the Television Critics Association Press Tour this week, my first thought was: “There’s Stanford!”

Yes, Garson is best known for his role as Carrie Bradshaw’s gay sidekick Stanford Blatch on HBO’s Sex and the City series and last summer’s movie. But he’s quite different from Stanford which I did not know since I was not aware of his work on such shows as NYPD Blue and John in Cincinatti.

So I go and ask him a boneheaded question:  How important it is for him to be playing such a different kind of role from Stanford.?

“It’s interesting,” he began. “These kinds of questions come up, I think, more often than they should. What people forget in the age of reality television is that there are people who are actually actors who do this for a living.” Certainly when I was on NYPD Blue that was very different than when I was on Sex and the City. My next show, John From Cincinatti was very different from it. It’s all just different. I like to make everything different. You can, if you want, you can typecast yourself. And believe me, every flamboyant character on television, that script was on my desk for quite awhile. You can take those roles, I just like to make everything different. It’s why I became an actor when I was a little kid.”

I get the point.

But it’s not like he’s left Standford behind with filming of the second Sex and the City movie currently underway in New York City where White Collar is also shot.

“Thank God this show came about in New York and I’m such a New York fixture,” he said. “To be doing both at the same time  is beyond comprehension. It’s an embarrassment of riches. I literally, this Monday, am working on both of them – all day. I go back and forth all day between the two sets.”

If the second SATC movie is as successful as the first, no doubt there will be more installments planned for Carrie Bradshaw and friends.

“It’s the fans,” he said of the franchise continuing. “We had no idea and God bless [the fans]. We made it for them. We all did rather well from the series and it was like, ‘Do we really need to?’ But the people who made the series popular wanted it so that kind of dictated the film. What do they deserve to see after sticking with us for so long? Now we’re going to give them more because they repaid us a billion times over with the success of the first movie.”

“I think people are going to love it, It’s fantastic,” he said of the second film. “I literally just read it two nights ago.”