Different role offers perfect ‘Fix’ for Robin Tunney

LOS ANGELES — Robin Tunney faced an age-old problem in Hollywood after her seven-year run on “The Mentalist” ended. All the roles she was offered had her playing another police officer.

“Everyone wants you to do the same thing again,” Tunney said. “They are like ‘Can you be a cop?’ I kept telling them I didn’t want to carry a gun again, and I didn’t want to have to handcuff people. Let me tell you, handcuffing people is a pain in the B-U-T-T.”

She stuck to her proverbial guns and landed the role of Maya Travis in the ABC drama “The Fix.” Tunney trades a badge for the courtroom, playing the Los Angeles district attorney who suffered a public defeat years earlier when she prosecuted an A-list movie star for double murder. The loss had such an impact that Travis left the practice of law for a quieter life in the country. That life is disrupted when the same celebrity becomes the main suspect in another murder.

If the scenario sounds familiar, one of the executive producers and writers of the show is Marcia Clark. After Clark lost the O.J. Simpson murder case, she made a career switch from lawyer to writer.

Playing Travis gave Tunney a chance to get away from the world of cops and provided a good acting opportunity.

“This is a character who is in her 40s and yet still very vital,” Tunney said. “That’s very hard to find. That’s a testament to the fact the show is being written by women.”

She continued, “The first time I met with the producers, I told them that there are so many strong female characters on television who are tough as nails, they get business done. I said, ‘How about if she is as emotional as well behind closed doors?’ They never really show that side of a woman. It is as if you want a woman to be strong, they have to show her as detached.”

It was easy for Tunney to take on the role of an attorney because she sees a lot of similarities between acting and practicing law. In the case of “The Fix,” Tunney had a direct pipeline into the legal world through Clark. She was able to pick her brain about nervous ticks, superstitions and how she dealt with being nervous. Tunney took the tidbits and created a history for her character that was different than Clark’s to make sure she wasn’t just doing an impersonation.

Tunney’s philosophy is that nobody knows the story better than the writer, but nobody knows the character better than the actor. All the insight Tunney has for acting comes from her years of working on TV and in films. Her big break came in 1995 with “Empire Records.” Other credits include “The Craft,” “Prison Break,” “House M.D.,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Robot Chicken.”

Rounding out the cast of “The Fix” are Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Severen “Sevvy” Johnson, Scott Cohen as Ezra Wolf, Adam Rayner as Matthew Collier, Merrin Dungey as CJ Emerson, Breckin Meyer as Alan Wiest, Marc Blucas as River “Riv” Allgood, Mouzam Makkar as Loni Kampoor and Alex Saxon as Gabriel Johnson.