Debra Messing was born into a Jewish family in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on August 15, 1968. When she was three she moved with her parents and her older brother, Brett, to a quiet town outside Providence, Rhode Island. Her father, Brian Messing, is a sales executive for a jewelry manufacturer; her mother, Sandy Messing, has worked as a professional singer, banker, travel agent, and real estate agent. As a youngster Messing took lessons in dance, singing, and acting. “I remember watching the television show Fame and wanting to dance on top of a taxi,” Messing told Jennifer Kasle Furmaniak for Cosmopolitan (February 2001).
She recalled to Roz Brooks for Complete Woman (September 1999), “I was always singing and dancing for my mother when I wasn’t glued to the television watching I Love Lucy or the Carol Burnett Show.” While Messing’s parents encouraged her dream of becoming an actress, they also urged her to get a liberal-arts education before deciding on acting as a career. Heeding their advice, she attended Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. During her junior year she studied theater at the prestigious British European Studio Group of London program, in England, an experience that fueled her desire to act.
After graduating summa cum laude from Brandeis, in 1990, with a bachelor’s degree in theater arts, Messing gained admission to the elite Graduate Acting Program at New York University (NYU), which accepts only about 15 new students annually. Three years later she earned a master’s degree in fine arts from NYU. Later in 1993 Messing won praise for her acting in the pre-Broadway workshop production of Tony Kushner’s much-lauded play Angels in America: Perestroika. Before long she broke into television, playing the part of Dana Abandando – the conniving sister of one of the main characters – in three episodes of the award-winning television series NYPD Blue; those installments aired in late 1994 and early 1995.
In 1995 Messing made her film debut, in the director Alfonso Arau’s love story A Walk in the Clouds, in which she had a small role as the wife of a World War II veteran (Keanu Reeves). This exposure led the Fox network to make her the co-star of the television sitcom Ned and Stacey; the series, about a young man and a young woman who marry for reasons other than love after knowing each other for only a week, lasted for two seasons (1995-1997). “I had no idea what I was doing,” Messing told David Martindale for Biography (May 2001). “I was thrown into the fire and learning on my feet in front of millions of viewers. I hardly even remember the first six months, because I was just terrified. I feel so much more at home [acting in a prime-time show] now.”
Messing appeared as Jerry Seinfeld’s date in two episodes of the hit television show Seinfeld: “The Wait Out,” in 1996, and “The Yada Yada,” in 1997. The actress turned down a starring role in another television sitcom to appear in Donald Margulies’s two-character play Collected Stories, which opened at the Manhattan Theater Club, an Off-Broadway venue, in 1997. messing portrayed the protégé – and, ultimately, literary betrayer – of a famous short-story writer (Maria Tucci). Speaking of her rejection of the TV role in favor of acting on the stage, she told Furmaniak, “One was going to afford me money and fame.
The other would take me back to the reason I became an actor – the theater…. It was the most important decision I’ve ever made in my professional life. It was about risk taking and not looking back.” But Messing also acknowledged to Brooks, “I love the theater, but if I wanted to pay my bills, I had to be open to film and television.”In 1998 Messing had a lead role as the bioanthropologist Sloan Parker on ABCs dramatic science-fiction television series Prey, about a vicious new species of humans, spawned by global warming, who are determined to kill off all other humans. Although the show developed something of a cult following, Prey was cancelled after one season.
Meanwhile, Messing’s agent had approached the actress with the pilot script for the television show Will & Grace, in which a heterosexual woman lives with a gay man who is also her best friend. Feeling tired after her stint on Prey, Messing was inclined to take some time off, but the pilot for Will & Grace intrigued her. In a conversation with Ian Williams for P.O.V. (November 1999), Messing described the visit to her apartment by the producers of Will & Grace one night; armed with a bottle of vodka and some limes, they tried to persuade her to join the show, which would pose a professional risk for everyone involved, because Will was to be depicted as openly gay. “
I had to be assured by the producers that the very first priority, always, would be to make people laugh,” Messing said to Williams. “Not to be critical. Not to proselytize. To make people laugh. And now, much to my shock, there hasn’t been a right-wing revolt or picketing or exposes about how we’re ruining America. Because the show is funny first.”Messing met her future husband, Daniel Zelman, an actor and screenwriter, on their first day as graduate students at NYU. “He was different from anyone I’d been interested in before. I’m so right out on the table. But he was quiet and introspective. I couldn’t stop wondering about him,” Messing recalled in an article that appeared on Entertainment Tonight (February 12, 2002, on-line).
She and Zelman, who were married on September 3, 2000, live in Los Angeles. “Debra and her husband still basically live like they did when they were acting students,” Eric McCormack told Josh Rottenberg for InStyle (March 2002). “You go to their house, and they’re watching TV on a nine-year-old couch, and the place is still barely furnished. She still loves going to McDonald’s at midnight.” One of Messing’s long-term goals is to move back to New York with her husband and start a family.