Debra Messing on Will & Grace, Jewish identity and finding her voice after October 7

There’s something delicious about walking into a restaurant with someone famous. The maître d’ circles, cutlery rests, conversation softens. No one wants to stare, but everyone wants to look. The Mark hotel in Manhattan is far too discreet for rubbernecking. Its Upper East Side clientele are fluent in fame, but then she appears.

Wrapped in a white coat on a freezing New York afternoon, heads turn. Is that…? The red hair gives her away. It always has.For an entire generation, Debra Messing is Grace Adler – the witty, romantic, neurotic, stylish interior designer who lived with Will.

Will & Grace dominated American television from 1998 to 2006 before being resurrected in 2017 for a further three seasons. In that time, it shook up culture by normalising gay identity through Will, played by Eric McCormack and, crucially, thanks to Debra, placing a secular Jewish woman at the centre of primetime.

“When the pilot is written, they have no idea where the characters are gonna go. So then …” she says, warming to the memory, “I said, ‘Adler, can I assume she’s Jewish?’ And they were like, ‘Sure.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I want her to be really Jewish. I want her to go to Camp Ramah. I want all the references.’”

The “Ramah” reference was lost on me, although I’ve since learned it is the network of Conservative Jewish summer camps that are still part of the American Jewish childhood experience. What Debra wanted was for Jewish viewers to recognise Grace instantly but for her to never be reduced to a stereotype for wider audiences. So there was cultural shorthand and the larger-than-life presence of Grace’s very Jewish mother, Bobbi Adler, played by the late Debbie Reynolds.

“The only thing we never did that I asked for was to have Jack hiding under the Passover table trying to get the afikomen.”

She laughs, still faintly disappointed – although in the early 2000s when Will & Grace was at its height, Debra could not have predicted that she would one day become one of the most outspoken activists for her faith.

Moving between film and television – Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending, Along Came Polly with Ben Stiller and Steven Spielberg’s Smash, the theatre lovers’ obsession – the Rhode Island-raised actress was defined by wit and red-carpet glamour. Not by the fact that, as the granddaughter of Eastern European Jews, she was one of three Jewish children in her school.

“I learned that difference could draw attention. Once, when my grandfather was visiting, a swastika was carved into his car. I didn’t even know what it meant. And my mother was like, ‘Get in the house.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s happening?’ And then the car disappeared, and nothing was said about it.”

As a teenager, she straightened her naturally curly red hair and told classmates she was “sick” when she stayed home for Yom Kippur. “I learned it’s safer to be quiet.”

Sitting among the restaurant’s polished diners, it was almost impossible not to want to shout: “Are you hearing this?” That Debra is so much more than Will’s Grace has become undeniable since October 7.

“I woke up that morning and, like everyone else, started seeing the images,” she says. “And I recognised very quickly it was an actual massacre.”

She had assumed the response would be universal condemnation. “I was convinced the entire world would voice their horror at the actions of Hamas. Instead, the next day – the very next day – they were celebrating on the streets. In New York. By the Sydney Opera House. I mean, all over the world. It stopped me in my tracks. It made me nauseous. And it made me realise in that moment, ‘Oh, they hate us.’”

For someone raised in the post-Holocaust promise of “never again” it was destabilising.“I don’t think that people in my generation understood that we were living in the golden era as Jews. We had assimilated. We were succeeding. We knew there was prejudice against us, but it felt like it was fringe. And that whole thing blew up in my face on October 8.”

What followed was what she calls “a second horror.”  “I felt abandoned, misunderstood and maligned. What cut deepest was the silence. People I thought were my friends did not reach out and say, ‘Are you okay?’ From that my immediate instinct was to defend us.”

Watching events on the news around the clock, she told herself that once the hostages began to return, something would shift. “I remember thinking, ‘It’s going to get better.’ Obviously, it didn’t. It got worse.”

Debra recounts that story in October 8, the documentary directed by Wendy Sachs, which examines what happened in the immediate aftermath of October 7 — not only in Israel, but on Western streets and university campuses — tracing the speed with which outrage turned into division.

For a woman whose own red hair has been her signature, the images of the red-headed Bibas children Ariel and Kfir and their mother Shiri felt painfully intimate. When their coffins emerged from Gaza, she was devastated. There are tears in her blue eyes. In that moment, she was speaking not as an actress but as a mother. Her son, Roman, now 21, is growing up in what she describes as an unstable world.

“Our children have had the most damaging childhood,” she says, listing the years of school shootings, Covid and now antisemitism on campuses. “If you’re Jewish… being threatened and isolated. As a mother, I’m so profoundly pained. Thank God my son has been at his school and things have been okay.”

Debra has worked on every Democratic presidential campaign since 2004 and was one of Hillary Clinton’s most visible celebrity supporters in 2016. Now, she says, “I feel like I am party-less.” She still believes in democracy and liberal values, but something has fractured.

“For the first time, we are seeing people say, ‘I will not work with that person because of their beliefs as a citizen’ versus ‘I’m not going to work with that person because of behaviour on a set.’”

The industry – her industry – feels precarious. “I honestly don’t understand what the future is for our industry. We had the actors’ strike, the writers’ strike… and, essentially, once that happened, people started not working.”

Six weeks after October 7, Debra travelled to Israel. “I thought I understood what the feeling of safety was, prior,” she says. “But when I went there and I saw my people, and I saw the diversity…
I was like, ‘Oh…’ and, for the first time, I finally felt safe.”

She beams as she describes Tel Aviv’s energy, the desert in the south and speaking to a Bedouin man about his family. The visit had a profound impact and she is exploring dual citizenship. Yet even the language surrounding Israel now troubles her.

“At one point I wanted to get rid of the term Zionism,” she says. “Zionism was about the cry and the journey towards decolonization of our land — and it’s been accomplished.… in a way, it’s almost saying that we’re not accepting success in the first place. And the fact that they’ve turned it into the equivalent of Nazi, as a slur… it’s unbearable.”

Raised secular, she has also been exploring her faith since October 7.           “I realised I don’t know that much about my history and so I started to study. I started to do Shabbat and light candles.” And she has continued
to speak out. “I was fortifying a new boldness, a new acceptance of who I am. And for the first time in my entire life, being openly proud and protective.”

That boldness has seen her publicly challenge voices she once stood alongside, including Susan Sarandon over remarks that she felt minimised antisemitism. The exchange went viral and with it came abuse.

“I have a little bit of experience with the invisible hatred that can happen online,” she says, recalling the hostility she faced during the 2016  US election. “But this is on a whole other planet of hate.”

She describes waking up to it, going to bed with it. Being called a “Zio baby killer”. Is she afraid? She considers the question. Fear,
she suggests, is not the right word. “What shocks me most is how quickly mainstream positions have been recast as extreme.”

And yet she continues to show up. Recently, she appeared at the Light, Letters and Love evening at Carnegie Hall – a gathering of Jewish artists reading letters from the 3,000 about Israel. Debra also appeared in the London version of show and she is not retreating; on the contrary, her career keeps moving, most recently to starring opposite Robert De Niro as his wife in Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights.

She has also been working on a series set in a temple. Will it be made? She is realistic.“It has to be greenlit. The studios have to see it and say, ‘Yes, we want to tell these stories’. I’m waiting to hear if that will happen.We need more Jewish stories that are not about dead Jews. We need to see dancing and singing and joy and Shabbat tables.”

As she stands to leave, there are looks. Some still see Grace. But today, it’s not the red hair that defines her. It is the refusal to lower her voice.

watch October 8 https://www.amazon.co.uk/October-8-Wendy-Sachs/dp/B0GHZMKF3J