sigourney weaver

Have you noticed lately that the new faces cropping up on TV series in starring roles are often actors you've never seen before -- or if you have, it was in a supporting role of a feature or a foreign TV show? Think about it, Lee Pace as the Pie Man on Pushing Daisies, Jonny Lee Miller on Eli Stone, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in New Amsterdam, Michelle Ryan in Bionic Woman, all of these leads are relatively new faces. That's one way to cast series. Another is for big stars to take to TV, if not for the first time, than for a return.

In an interesting article at IGN.com, blogger Travis Fickett points out that there used to be a line of demarcation between the worlds of acting: film actors vs. television actors. But nowadays the stars are going back and forth a lot more fluidly.

%Gallery-18004%

Judd Apatow, who will forever be a hero to many TV viewers who loved the too short-lived NBC series Freaks and Geeks, is saying goodbye to television. But not before one final shot with the soon-to-be-released feature film The TV Set.

The movie stars David Duchovny as a series creator who butts heads with various studio executives (including Sigourney Weaver) who just don't get what he's trying to do with his TV show. And, yes, it's a version of what Apatow and The TV Set director Jake Kasdan went through when they worked on Freaks and Geeks.

No, the former X-Files star isn't broke and having a yard sale, The TV Set is a new film starring David Duchovny as a TV writer. It follows the ups and downs of a writer in Hollywood, from pilot pitch to filming. The movie also stars Sigourney Weaver, Justine Bateman, and Ioan Gruffudd.

This is the type of movie I'm definitely going to see, because I'm a writer and have an interest in how Hollywood works, but I can also nod in agreement when the article says "Yup, it's the kind of inside Hollywood dark comedy that Middle America loves." Heh.

In the 1988 feature film Gorillas in the Mist, Sigourney Weaver played Dian Fossey, the real-life scientist and conservationist who came to Africa to study mountain gorillas and try to save them. Tonight at 8 p.m. EST (and again at 11 p.m.) Animal Planet is airing Gorillas Revisited, in which Weaver will return to the gorillas she once spent so much time with, to see if they remember her. Well, that's what the commercial claims, anyway. I assume she'll be hanging out with the real gorillas and not the fake ones Rick Baker created for the movie. That wouldn't be quite as impressive if you ask me.