INTERVIEW: ‘Satisfaction’ star Katherine LaNasa on her new provocative role

Katherine LaNasa, starring as Adriana on USA’s new series Satisfaction, is an alumna of hit movies (The Campaign and Jayne Mansfield’s Car) and hit TV shows (Longmire, Two and a Half Men, Big Love). Her new role is a departure for the leading lady. Adriana is a character who makes her living as the head of a high-end escort service. In the pilot, she tricks the main character, Matt Passmore’s Neil Truman, into a sexual encounter. He was thinking she was a client; instead, she was testing him out for a possible position on the payroll.

Satisfaction, airing 10 p.m. Thursdays, is a post-modern look at the institution of marriage. What happens when a couple grows apart and needs “satisfaction” elsewhere? What happens when a job supplies money but no happiness? What happens when a teenage daughter rebels at school? What happens when extramarital affairs — tied to this escort network — become common knowledge?

“I think that [Adriana’s] definitely — probably the most complicated person I’ve played,” LaNasa, a New Orleans native, said recently on a group call with journalists. “I think she’s definitely a deviant. I think we typically would think of someone working as a pimp as someone that’s desperate, and I don’t view her like that.”

Instead, LaNasa finds Adriana to be a person who is probably well bred, someone who was likely on the tennis team at some Ivy League college. In the series, she certainly exudes wealth and connections, appearing at fashionable parties and disrupting Neil’s business prospects.

“And I think of her as someone that is so smart that she’s bored and sort of gets off on manipulating people and situations,” said LaNasa, adding that she built the character around a “sketchy idea” of infamous madam Heidi Fleiss.

Most of LaNasa’s scenes in Satisfaction are with Passmore, mostly because she’s an intrusion into his “normal” life with his wife, daughter and hedge-fund job.

“It’s funny, we’re total opposites,” LaNasa said of Passmore. “Neil could talk forever about acting, and I don’t like to talk about acting at all. I just don’t like to talk about it. I like to be sort of sketchy and visceral and not really know exactly what I’m going to do. I just don’t like to think about it too much. So it’s interesting that we’re really, really different like that, but we have such a great time. And I’m so impressed with him every time I see him. … And then just these like looks that he gives are so filled with so much. I just adore him. We have an interesting relationship.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Satisfaction airs 10 p.m. Thursdays on USA. Click here for more information.