Normally, actors aren't particularly thrilled about being done up in heavy makeup to portray an alien.
But for Kristin Davis, appearing in an "Alien Nation" TV movie earlier this season was a pleasant respite in the midst of the year she spent on "Melrose Place.""I was thrilled," Davis said in a recent telephone interview. "After being on `Melrose' for half a season, I was so excited not to have to have my hair rolled and primped. I was like, oh babe, let me be an alien."
It's harder to be gorgeous all day than it is being made up as an alien. That only takes an hour and a half.
"You just sit down and four people go to work on you," Davis said.
As to which was weirder - being an alien or being in the midst of all that glossy angst - she said they were "equally weird."
Davis' latest role, in tonight's NBC TV-movie "The Ultimate Lie," sounds sort of weird itself - not to mention sort of sexy and sleazy.
"The truth of the matter is it really kind of isn't, which I'm hesitant to say because people like that stuff and tune in to see it," Davis said with a laugh.
"The Ultimate Lie" casts Davis as the daughter in a seemingly perfect family - her father (Michael Murphy) is a law-school dean, her mother (Blair Brown) appears to be the perfect wife and mother, and her brother (George Eads) is the up-and-coming yuppie type.
But it turns out that Dad secretly employs the services of call girls - and, to his surprise, one night the girl turns out to be his daughter.
"It's about the dynamics in this family and how they got to be the way they are," Davis said. "It ends up being about each member of the family finding out the truth about themselves and the whole family goes into chaos and then, at the end, there's a redemption."
But Davis readily admits that had the movie been pitched to her in the same salacious way NBC is advertising it, she would have turned it down. As a matter of fact, her agent sent her the script without describing the plot at all.
"I got very excited . . . but then I thought, `You know, let's not get excited now because it's probably Danielle Steel because that's what most of our (`Melrose') cast members are continually turning down," she said. "So I opened the script with no preconceived notions, and knew from the first five pages that it was just really unusual - it's not a true story. It explores some of the dynamics in the American family.
"But if they had told me the plot line, I would have said, `No way!' " she said with a laugh.
Of course, even after spending a year on "Melrose" she still finds the fact that she got a part on the show somewhat surprising.
"When `Melrose' happened, it certainly was shocking," Davis said. "I mean, I never expected I'd be on something like `Melrose.' Ever. . . . I just never thought I'd be on like a babe show.
"I did kind of have to sit down and say, `Wow! How did this happen?' "
Now, Davis is just thrilled that she's being offered projects, and she attributes her marketability to the year she spent as Brooke Armstrong on "Melrose."
"It's just really different," she said. "Before `Melrose,' I was doing guest-star stuff and I was doing commercials and, basically, I was really thrilled whenever I got a job. . . . Now, I pass on scripts more frequently. If I go in, because I've been on the air for a year, there's a greater chance that I'll get it. So I don't even want to go in if it doesn't interest me."
Although "Melrose" could often be a "weird" experience, she said she loved working on the series as the manipulative, then mean, then down-on-her-luck, then dead, then ghostly Brooke.
"Brooke and I went from A to Z. There were many different stages of her," Davis said. "In the beginning, she was great. She was on the top of her world. And she was manipulative, but in a really fun way for me to play.
"Then, when we went back this year, we kind of took a turn. She started not getting what she wanted all the time. She got a little more mean, which was fun."
"Once her Dad died, we basically went on a downward spiral. Which really wasn't that much fun, to tell you the truth. It was difficult. . . . I just felt very bad for Brooke and I wanted her to fight back. But she loved Billy."
Brooke's death didn't come as a surprise, but - on the other hand - Davis said that much of what happens on "Melrose" is rather less than tightly scripted.
"We kind of made it up as we went along," she said. "When I first got hired, I was only supposed to do 10 (episodes), and they were going to kill me in the blast (at the end of last season). But then they changed their mind. And then they weren't going to have (Brooke and Billy) get married. And then they changed their minds, and said, `No, we are.' So we never knew what was happening way in advance."
"But they were really wonderful to me in terms of they would tell me as soon as they figured it out. And they would let me in on it and run it by me. I knew for a pretty long while that she was going to die. We didn't know exactly how."
(Eventually, a drunken Brooke drowned in the pool.)
In many shows, death would mark the end of an actor's run. But on a show like "Melrose," anything is possible.
"I'm done, definitely, for now," Davis said. "I'm about to probably do something else. . . . It's not a slammed-shut door, but for right now I'm free to do other things.
"But they don't always know. They've got two more seasons to do, so we'll see."
Right now, Davis is cautiously optimistic about an hourlong drama pilot for this fall. It's "too early to talk about it - but it's really good," she said with a laugh.