Mary Stuart Masterson Responds To This Challenge

She dosn't do television often, but when she does, she seeks big challenges.

Film actress Mary Stuart Masterson found one in "Black and Blue" (9 p.m. Wednesday, KIRO-TV), a new CBS version of Anna Quindlen's ("One True Thing") best seller that was one of Oprah Winfrey's selections for her book club.

Reminiscent of "Sleeping With the Enemy," the story traces the plight of a woman who is abused by her husband (Anthony LaPaglia), a New York City police officer.

Fearing that the escalating force of his assaults will eventually result in her death, she leaves everyone and everything else behind to flee with her young son (Will Rothhaar) to Florida, where she invents new identities for the two of them. She even finds new love with a man (Sam Robards) unaware of her past, but her spouse is determined to find her, no matter how long that takes.

"I did come home with a number of bruises, I have to admit," says Masterson of making the movie, "but more than that, the challenge was not to make this a typically exploitive battered-woman story. We wanted to make it as grounded and real as possible, so that it would be that much more horrifying. If the attacker is depicted as a total monster, you think, `Oh, that can't happen to me.'

"There's very little screen time to establish the relationship between the husband and the wife," Masterson adds, "so we tried to make it seem that they really, really love each other, and Anthony was terrific at that. It's why these two people have stayed together all this time. She's not only a victim, then, she's an active part of the situation through whatever it is that she's doing."

Masterson believes that sets "Black and Blue" apart from many other films about domestic violence: "If you look at a story on the surface and don't really get to feel it for yourself, that distances you from it. The only way to be really effective, and make people aware of this kind of issue, is to do it honestly. There are no political reasons I did this movie. I just liked the book and the characters, so I thought, `Oh, boy. Here we go.' "

The amount and extent of physical content Masterson and LaPaglia have in "Black and Blue" is something they decided for themselves. "The script didn't really have any of that," the actress says. "When we got in there, Anthony and the director (Paul Shapiro) and I all said, `Isn't something missing?' There were lots of conversations with the writer and the network about how to depict that kind of violence so it's not gratuitous, but true. I'm proud of the way it came out, because I believe it."

It involved careful choreography so that Masterson wouldn't get too roughed up. "We acted it out in beats," she explains, "just as you would with a scene on the stage. `This happens, then that happens.' It had to be that way, rather than just a bunch of random moves. If it's motivated emotionally, the scene also has that kind of weight, instead of just looking like acrobatics. I'd rather not see something like that at all than to see it looking fake."

That partly comes from Masterson's own sense of calling the shots. Her father - Peter Masterson - is a noted stage and screen director, and she has been trying to mount a project as a writer-director for several years.