Melrose Place's Michael Rady On Heather Locklear and His Melrose Murder Fantasy

While everyone else on Melrose Place plots and preens, Michael Rady's role is simply to be the nice guy. As fumbling filmmaker Jonah Miller, Rady lends Melrose a qualified and compelling optimism, a necessary counterpoint to Katie Cassidy's deep brood and Ashlee Simpson-Wentz's perpetual po-face. In fact, Rady's screen presence is so calming that when he breaks Alexis Bledel's Greek-American heart in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, we blithely approve.

Shortly after the CW ordered additional Melrose scripts, Movieline talked with the 28-year-old Rady about being broke in New York, his first table-reads with Heather Locklear, and Jonah's foreseeable (and perhaps homicidal) future.

Your character Jonah on Melrose Place is an aspiring filmmaker who has to make Hollywood connections. As someone who's breaking out in this industry, do you relate to him?

Oh my God, absolutely. You never know what hurdles you'll have to jump on any day, and I think it's cool to see Jonah go through that. And it's fun going through that with him, tackling it. It's a little different than I tackled my hurdles. He has a different approach to challenges. The part of Jonah that's probably the most like me, is that he loves doing the work or the craft, and the schmoozing is not what's he good at. It's not what comes easiest to him. That's definitely like my life. I love going to work every day, but when I have to go to an event, but when I have to -- God forbid -- meet a huge executive at a movie shoot or something [laughs], I tend to kind of let my preconceived notions turn into fear, and I get awkward and quiet.

So that's been a learning curve, the schmoozing world that is L.A. I just like to talk to people. I don't know how to bridge the gap between getting to know someone and then schmoozing and sort of working contacts and business connections. I can't seem to think of a story, but they always seem to turn out awkward. Like, when I think, "I have to go meet this person tonight," it's just overwhelming sometimes.

Don't you think Hollywood types actually prefer the slightly reticent, polite type of actor?

Oh, God. I don't even know. I'm so far from that perspective. Thankfully, sometimes when I meet some of the bigger names, I have no idea who I'm meeting. I'm so not savvy with names in this town. That's where Jonah is; he's very savvy with names and with the business. I'm just so not savvy. I'll come out of an audition or something, and I'll call my buddies, and I'll say, "Yeah! Really went well! I read for Jerry Zaks," who is this huge Broadway producer/director. And they'll just yell, "What?! You read for who?! He's done so many things!" And I'll say, "What? Who?" So, that's a huge help to me, not knowing that stuff and not psyching myself out.

Who's the most intimidating, recognizable "name" you've met?

Oh God, Les Moonves from CBS Paramount. No one meets Les Moonves. He lives somewhere on a mountaintop in a castle. He just passes on his influence, his thumbs up or thumbs down, and you just hear about him a lot. When I went in to meet him, I was -- oh, I was kind of lame. It was just, "Uh, hi." "How are you?" "Nice to meet you." And I think I walked away. And grabbed a drink. [Laughs.] That was actually for up-fronts in New York for Melrose Place. But I think I could be better today. I'd be better now. I'd be alright. I'd talk myself down from it. "He's a real person! He's just like you! Who knows, maybe he's... just a normal person."

Your first film was a biggie, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. How did that come about?

I had started doing theater in high school, and while I was doing that, I got my manager. And I was commuting to New York through high school and college for about seven years auditioning, and then once I graduated college -- a couple months after I got with my agency -- just one day I was going out of a bunch of auditions. I think I had five others that day in New York, and one of them was for this movie Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. And I don't know how I did it.

Still, that's a major role to land right off the bat. Did you have to learn any biz skills quickly?

From my side, nothing felt like it happened quickly. After Sisterhood, I spent a year broke and poor in New York City not working, traveling back to bar-tend in Philadelphia on the weekends. Little by little, once I came out to California and Sisterhood came out, I had a couple recurring guest-star roles. So I guess, and it's ironic, but I had to quickly learn to have patience.

You attended Catholic prep school for awhile. Did you nervously reflect upon that when taking one of those guest star roles in Sleeper Cell, where you had an explicit gay sex scene?

I have to say, I'm Jesuit-educated, and they aren't typical Catholics. They're sort of the bad boys of the church. They have a whole different sort of outlook on Catholicism and what it means to be a modern Catholic. It wasn't even an issue for me.

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