What about the other weird character?
In Dublin during the week Peter MacNicol, who plays the nervy John Cage in Ally McBeal, looked noticeably younger in casual clothes and out of those stiff suits he wears on the show. "We wear so much make-up on that show," he says, "that I look like some sort of 17th-century roue, or one of those prancing courtiers in Joseph Andrews. Anyhow, truth be told, I don't wear suits well. Someone told me once that it looked like I had the coat-hanger in it. I think it's something about my posture. I don't stand up straight and I never look good. Greg Germann [who plays Richard Fish] always looks good. At one point I considered actually stealing his discarded wardrobe, but I don't know if that would help one little bit."
An actor with a strong background in theatre, he was bemused when he was offered the role of John Cage in the television show, the latest from the prolific writer and producer, David E. Kelley, after Chicago Hope and The Practice.
"When I was first handed the script there was no sense that I was going to be continuing as anything other than an occasional visitor to the show," MacNicol says. "The character was very hazily defined. In fact, he seemed to me to be a Xerox of the Fish character - a jet-setting, vain, shallow, money-minded attorney. I think the original actor they had mind for that role was Charlie Sheen.
"Then, when I took it over, in the spirit of trying to make the character mine, I steered it in a certain way - towards the eccentric. David observes what the actor brings and responds in kind. It's two jazz musicians laying down licks. That's how it all happens. And if you don't give David anything, you don't get anything."
Peter MacNicol had worked with Kelley before, when he played Alan Birch, a lawyer who represents the hospital in the first two seasons of Kelley's medical drama series, Chicago Hope. Kelley writes all the scripts for Ally McBeal while continuing to work on The Practice and Chicago Hope.
"It's entirely unheard of in the whole history of television for one man to be writing three shows at the same time," says MacNicol. "You really do have to summon up someone as prodigious as Dickens to find a proper analogy for the torrent and quality of words poured out by him - and to a deadline.
"The surprising thing is that David works bankers' hours. He starts at nine and he's home by six. I don't think he writes anything on weekends, that's all family time, as far as I know. The best episode we ever had on Chicago Hope - an episode called Quarantine which, I think, won the Peabody award - he wrote that in just two-and-a-half days."
Given that Ally McBeal operates on so many levels of weirdness, I suggest to MacNicol that there must be many days on the set when the cast ask: "Do we really have to do this?". It happens all the time, he says. "The first time that I had to dance in that unisex bathroom, I was so profoundly embarrassed. Of course, there's a temptation to get blindingly drunk just to get through it all. But then you have the rest of the day's work ahead of you, so I couldn't rely on that! That's only one of the times I was embarrassed. One of the worst was where I had to do all this picking my nose on camera, which is something I would never do even in private.
"Then there was having to sing a little bit of a song from The Music Man in the show about Ally's 30th birthday. That's the first time I've sung in public. I was just terrified. David mentioned that he was either going to have my character give Ally a bit of a song or a bit of a poem as a little birthday offering. I was very much pushing for the poem, but it was not to be."
Born in Texas, Peter MacNicol made his movie debut in the 1982 Disney fantasy, Dragonslayer. "That could have been a wonderful experience, filming in these fairytale lands like the Isle of Skye and working with Sir Ralph Richardson. It had all the indications of being special, and there's a lot I like about it - I don't think that dragon has been bettered. The beasts in movies nowadays don't seem to have any screen presence, do they? They're more cartoon-like."
Next came what he considers his breakthrough screen acting role, when he played the young aspirant writer, Stingo, opposite Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline in Alan J. Pakula's film of William Styron's Sophie's Choice. "Well, Meryl really wasn't the name then that she is now, and Kevin and I were just Broadway actors," he says. "Kevin was doing The Pirates of Penzance at the time and I was doing Crimes of the Heart just a block away from him. It was wonderful because we all felt like equals, three people of the stage, and that made a big difference, not to be traipsing about on tiptoe worried about comporting yourself around a star.
"If there was a feeling of deference it was towards Alan Pakula, who did seem very much like a star after all those great films he produced, like To Kill a Mockingbird, which is one of my favourite films, and all those movies he directed such as All the President's Men. Alan was a wonderful, gentle man. That whole production was kissed by magic."
MacNicol's respect for actors who work in theatre is evident throughout our conversation, and crops up again when he discusses his co-stars on Ally McBeal. "I've been in a lot of casts over the years," he says, "and this is a particularly interesting and gifted bunch of people I'm working with. I don't think they all get the credit they deserve. You hear a lot about David, and deservedly so, and a tremendous amount about Calista, and again deservedly so, but the whole bunch are wonderfully talented and extremely experienced. Greg and I and Jane, we've been in theatre all our life. All of that counts and has a place on that show. All those years of experience.
"When it comes right down to it, yes, there are the words on the page, but then it's what you're going to do with it. And those directors we're working with, I tell you, they're not helping. They're jobbed in, and a lot of the time they don't know the show at all. They don't know who we are. It's kind of shocking really."
MacNicol himself directed three episodes of Ally McBeal in the current season. "That was not pleasant," he says. "David does not tend to write me out of those episodes when I'm directing - which would be the humane thing to do. In fact, I found myself more or less the A-story in one of the episodes I directed. It's just enormously hard. I don't have any of those big-budget luxuries like video playback to watch the scenes I'm in as I'm directing them, so I'm very much flying blind.
"But the other actors are all so good. All they need is a nudge here and a nudge there. It's just a case of gently moving them about. That cast needs very little direction. They know what they're on about. These characters are second nature to them at this stage. Sometimes it's just a case of restoring confidence, you know. Or giving one of them an obstacle that might challenge and delight them. I've tried to stage scenes in a novel way. In the last episode I directed, I chose to play an office meeting within three tall plants, just as a way of shaking it all up."
He is dismissive of all the media attention paid to the cast, their weight and their temperaments. "I've gained about 17 lbs and nobody gives a damn," he laughs. "But nobody in the cast cares about all that coverage. You just get on with what you're doing. I think that's what life has become for anyone who reaches a certain level of celebrity. There's such curiosity and pressure."
As for the stories of Lucy Liu hitting Bill Murray on the set of Charlie's Angels, he says: "I should find out about that. Lucy has such slender wrists I can't imagine that happening. She is an amazing person, very talented. She always reminds me of a kind of human equivalent of a summer programme at college - you walk into her dressing room and she's doing a watercolour or a poem or a short story. She's the most exotic of creatures."