Who she is: "I'm an asshole!" Leslie Hope said with an apologetic laugh after telephoning a few minutes late for her interview with Back Stage West. The actor can be forgiven. First, she wasn't all that late. Second, she was running behind because she decided to bring coffee to the cast and crew of her new show, Line of Fire, on her day off. And third, Hope went out of her way to send an apology note for her tardiness the next day—something one wouldn't expect from a close friend, let alone the star of a hit TV show.
How you know her: Hope has been acting professionally since age 17 and has appeared in films such as Talk Radio and on the television show Knots Landing. But it wasn't until recently that mass audiences discovered her. As the wife of Kiefer Sutherland's federal agent on the runaway hit 24, Hope landed the role of a lifetime. Her Teri Bauer was a wonderfully complex creation rarely seen on film or television—a betrayed wife whose strength and smarts helped her face off against kidnappers, terrorists, and double agents. Her death at the end of the first season was one of the more shocking television moments in recent years, the repercussions of which can still be felt on the show, now into its third season. "It really is something I consider one of the highlights of my career, without a doubt," Hope noted, adding she hadn't anticipated the critical and fan reaction the show would evoke. "I don't think any of us had an idea that the show was going to go as big as it did. I certainly didn't. I'm cynical and I've been kicking around for a while, so even when we started to hear rumblings that it was good, I didn't believe it. In fact, it was right about the time I was settling in, thinking the show was going to run forever, that I got killed."
Hope insisted that there were no hard feelings about her dismissal and that things ultimately worked out best for the show and for herself. "There was sort of a joke because the producer came to the set to talk to me and was walking away with his arm around me in that way that people do when they're about to tell you bad news," she recalled. "As a joke, I said to everybody, 'See you all, I'm about to get fired.' And he just sort of made that sigh, and I realized, Oh, I really am!"
Into the 'Fire': Hope will next be seen in filmmaker Rod Lurie's (The Candidate) new series Line of Fire as Lisa Cohen, the head of the Richmond office of the FBI. "Her personal life is crumbling around her, and her professional life is exemplary," explained Hope. "It's about the sort of collision of those two worlds. The show itself is about the mob versus the FBI, basically, and how we're tangled together and both keenly aware of who the other is. It's like an elaborate sort of dance or chess game between these two worlds."
Hope had auditioned for another role when Lurie suggested she read for Lisa. "She was originally scripted as older, so it was a running gag that I must have been looking rough," joked Hope. "But I think, in Rod's mind anyway, it was more about a sense of somebody who at least on the surface seems in control of things and can run this group of people." Hope is excited to be stepping back into the fray of weekly TV, and although 24 is a hard act to follow, the opportunity to work with Lurie is equally appealing. "To be back on a television show of this caliber makes me feel grateful and lucky," she enthused. "It's been a really high-class problem situation to go from 24 to working with Rod Lurie."
Rebel with a cause: Hope claimed to have gotten involved in acting as a way of rebelling against the grand plan laid out for her. "I was in a university prep school in Canada, and the way that particular place worked was, you chose at a very young age what you were going to do with the rest of your life. Mine was law," she recalled. "And I think partly out of teenage rebellion I picked the thing that was the furthest from it. Completely by coincidence, this movie shot at my school, and I was cast in it. If that movie hadn't ended up at my school, there's no other way my career would have set off on that path."
That film, Ups & Downs, brought her to the American film market, where she met director John Cassavetes, who asked her to read for him. "I was so green that he handed me the script and I just read everything out loud," recalled the actor. "'Exterior night, Scene One.' I read everything on the page—the directions for the actors, everything." Cassavetes was so charmed by Hope that he wrote a small part for her in his film Love Streams. After shooting her scenes, Hope was so enchanted by the director that she stayed on to work crew for the rest of the shoot. "I just wanted to be around him and making movies like that with that kind of people," she said. "I felt like he was giving me a gift by letting me stay. I worked with [Cassavetes' widow] Gena Rowlands recently in a movie and told her that whether I was conscious of it or not, I think I spent the rest of my career trying to find an experience like that again because it was so significant to me to work that way. At the time, I really had no idea how lucky I was. And I've spent a long time looking to find it again."
Playing hard: Hope has faced many challenges in her career, from working with Oliver Stone in Talk Radio ("There's no question that he's challenging, but it was a great experience") to having to act in some difficult scenes. Her character on 24, for example, was kidnapped, raped, and shot, and at one point she suffered from amnesia—all in one day. The amnesia storyline was particularly challenging for Hope. "When that first came down the pipe, I can remember going to [producer/director] Stephen Hopkins and trying to be polite, saying, 'I'm a little concerned about this amnesia storyline.' He looked right at me and said, 'You should be,'" Hope recalled. "But I have to say at the time, there was a certain relief in having that plot point because it let me dump seven previous episodes of emotional baggage, and I could start over again. On a real basic level it was a bit of a relief to me. To this day, people still give me grief about it, and I have to sometimes remind them I didn't actually write that story. I was just hired to play it."
Up next: The actor is hoping to direct a film based on a play that was originally written for her when she was actively running her theatre company, The Wilton Project. "It just better suits me and my personality," said Hope of directing. "It was something that I always wanted to do even when I first came here when I was 18. I was very aware that my path into the industry would probably be as an actress and not in production, that I could learn a lot that way. And I did."
Asked whether she had any advice on making it in such a competitive industry, Hope replied, "I don't know so much about making it, because I think of myself as a working actor who's always got my eye on what's going to be the next job. I've been acting for 22 years, and I think there's something to be said for simply staying in the game. All this time later I look around and I think, If somebody's still standing after all this time, then maybe they have something to offer. As difficult as it is, you have to stick it out."
A perfect example was the 24 job, which came when she was close to leaving acting altogether. "I happened to be in town the day they were doing the final casting session. I was the bottom of the barrel they were scraping. They'd seen everybody else. I don't know that I believe in fate, but I'm certainly beginning to believe in luck."