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"   Debra Messing at BAM last night. Photo: Getty Images  At last night&amp;#039;s gala celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, we spotted Debra Messing and Will Chase. The real-life couple play estranged lovers on ABC&amp;#039;s new hit show, Smash. The series, which chronicles the making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, is packed with A-list stars including Uma Thurman, who made her TV debut this week. Smash was just picked up for a second season, but Messing&amp;#039;s looking forward to stuffing her few months of free time with adventures and good deeds.  ELLE:  There&amp;#039;s barely a month left of Smash&amp;#039;s first season! How do you feel? DM: It has been such an adventure. It&amp;#039;s required 90% of the cast to relocate from Los Angeles, so there&amp;#039;s been a great amount of emotional investment put into the show. I believed in it from the first moment I read the pilot. I still feel incredibly blessed and grateful to be a part of that show and that world. I feel like there are just a lot more stories to tell. I&amp;#039;m so thrilled that we&amp;#039;re going to have another season ahead of us. ELLE: What&amp;#039;s going to happen in the next season?DM: I don&amp;#039;t know, that&amp;#039;s the brilliance of it. Every week we would be called together as a full cast to read the next week&amp;#039;s script, and every week inevitably I would exclaim in the middle of the reading, &amp;quot;Oh, my God, are you kidding me,&amp;quot; because there would be some revelation that was completely unexpected, and everyone would laugh, and it became like a running joke. That&amp;#039;s kind of one of the wonderful things about television, the thing that makes television terrifying.  It&amp;#039;s something that Uma Thurman and I spoke about because it was the first time she had done television. She was like when you&amp;#039;re in a film, it&amp;#039;s a finite thing, it&amp;#039;s a two-hour story, you know how it ends, and you can craft your character, you have all the information. In television you only have the information that&amp;#039;s been given to you so far, and at any moment your character can become something completely opposite from what you thought it was. That requires a completely different kind of muscle, and I think it&amp;#039;s exciting. ELLE: What are you up to now that season one has wrapped?DM: I&amp;#039;m a global ambassador for YouthAIDS, a non-governmental organization under the umbrella of Population Services International. AIDS has been something that I have been focused on for a very long time. The last trip I made was to Zimbabwe. My next trip is in May and I&amp;#039;ll be going to Zambia. When I went to Africa it was an epiphany for me, it changed me. I&amp;#039;m going for twelve days. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a8858/why-tv-terrifies-debra-messing-uma-thurman-40894/>