Ana Gasteyer

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0:57My mother just said to me on the phone we're rooting for you for the Tonys even though we don't think it's going to go your way. That's exactly the kind of thing my parents would say too. And I was like well I'm not going to disappoint you there.

1:12Well Anna Gasteyer welcome to One Night Stand. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to have you here. This is my favourite One Night Stand I've had in 35 years. I'm very honoured for that title. you've had a busy few weeks with your Tony sort of efforts how's it all been going it's super busy and it's super um fulfilling and I I'm doing I'm doing a job that synthesizes all the things I love which is comedy and musical theater and theater and staying home in New York and um I love the discipline I love the rigor and I've been doing this for 25 years and I got nominated for a Tony which is just a cool little moment of saying like oh yeah I guess what was on the right path you know totally um so it's been really fulfilling i love that yeah i mean not a lot of downtime no i'm sure the tricky funny thing about you know i usually when you're doing film and television you're you do the project and then you plug the project and they're sort of press mode and regular mode but when you're in theater you're you're sort of talking about what you're doing all day and then you go and do it all day every night so it is sort of like having um two two days in a day yeah yeah that's interesting that's a lot of pressure as well I mean I'm too tired to care but yeah I love that I did get to see both of my children for about 22 seconds this morning so that was excellent yeah um have you always been a big reader yeah um I will though credit my extremely prolific prolifically reading daughter prolifically is that a word my daughter Frances who's 23 she'll be 24 is is a voracious reader she's a writer and a playwright in her own right and I will say that her consumption of books has influenced mine considerably she has great taste and um and my mother is a a ceramic artist and is you know in her 80s and is an audible consumer like at it so we have we have a Libby account and we have an audible account and so we're all sort of connected through books a lot you know yeah with your daughter is there anything that you've read when she was younger to like read along with her yeah well I was a big I that was a big part of my connection to them as a mom of course I um reading to them was probably one of my favorite things to do so we of course we did the whole Harry Potter series and um my favorite childhood book is a book called A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and I think I've probably reread that book it's interesting because you read it as one sort of stories like a you know princess lucky lucky girl kind of story and then as you get older you realize that it's such a story about manifestation and about um the power of positive thinking and there's so many little um moments in that book where you know she visualizes or sort of chooses the more half full option on things and is rewarded by the universe for it um it's really cool she's really in control of her own narrative even though she's the most dejected destitute child in the story oh i love that yeah it's really magical are you a manifesting person i'm not like i'm not very woo woo like presenting but i do believe a lot of that stuff like my my son is um a cross-country runner and there's a lot of uh i read a lot of sports psychology because i'm super interested in the the crossover between athletics and performance which are very very similar um there's a lot of studies that show when you smile when you're racing you race a better end race smiling actually like shoots off signals yeah to the brain i'm playing a villain so that's more problematic so i don't really smile during my show i try to smile backstage more but um yeah i think that we do have a lot of i do think our thoughts have a lot of power i agree i think that um that especially in a really complicated very sad world right now at times um dialing into what and social media in particular i think is such a destructive force with um the algorithms addiction to negative negative emotions negative thoughts it really you anyone can feel it you start scrolling that's the argument for reading that's coming back more and more you start scrolling and you just you you're you're you're i call it like scratching the scab like it's like you're like picking at a scab that's the reason they call it doom scrolling yeah so putting that away and dialing or either like following puppies which most of us now do and people falling which my other sad vice um is is if reading 20 minutes before bed is such a game changer and also just the neuroscience like all those i don't know if you follow all that stuff too but all the all the studies that show like the way that we synthesize story and um you know learn about our brain like our brains rewire from reading i loved i got um i'm still listening to it but peak performance the book one of the books that nearly made the cut for the final one it's great on all that stuff isn't it amazing it's amazing yeah and it's so interesting and i'm i like definitely have that kind of british skepticism about a lot of those things yeah but then i'm like when the data like who cares like if this who cares how the sausage gets made if it gets you where you need to go and at the end of the day like you've got to get up and hope hope is like i'm a i love theater right i love you know i just saw every brilliant thing i don't know if you saw with dan radcliffe and like it's such a beautiful play and yeah it is so true that it's just hope is our defining um uh option like as human beings whatever it is like if if we can create a sense of hope and optimism there's a lot that can happen yeah i agree and i'm a comedian so like my whole it's actually funny the role that i'm playing i play the villain i play the bad guy in schmigadoon which is always fun because it's much more fun to play the bad guys you know um as everyone knows miss minchin versus the princess but um it is it was at the same time important to me that the care i played a bad guy two broadway seasons in a row because i did queen aggravate last year and once upon a mattress and i play the bad mildred layton and i do like to play bad guys that believe that their rationale is has purpose yeah that it's it's it's not just meanness for mean sake they definitely think they're holding up a standard or whatever love for their sun protection whatever the motivation is but i did get to have i'd get a redemptive arc and once upon a mattress yeah i mean in um schmigadoon yeah you really do i get a redemptive arc in schmigadoon where i get to kind of see the light that maybe maybe thinking about things differently and and uh allowing for a future and through change is it's really nice it's a tiny moment but it makes all the difference no it does make all the difference and it's impactful and you also get a hint of the why of why you know that i think yeah with the daughter and that yeah it's fascinating right yeah i thought it was really interesting why people button up yes exactly um talking of social media i'm obsessed with um september l davis oh yes i'm aware of her yeah she's um do you think she'll be showing up to the tonys in any way i think she would like to i think my understanding is that she's petitioning to be in the in memoriam right now that's what i'm here somewhat of a i think there might be a change.org petition on her pf she has a really rabid fan base yeah which as her perceived enemy i've been on the wrong side of sometimes but um you know the media loves a loves a feud and that's been fed i think she's an enormously talented broadway actress and you know i think she's burned some bridges and i think she might need to make some amends but um i wish her the best great well i'm excited to see where the change.org petition goes um okay well let's get into the books I thought we could start with shy by Mary Rogers which is oh so good isn't it delicious and they're like little asides with the fact checking so funny I love the way it's constructed because Jesse Green you know who was the longtime theater critic at the New York Times and clearly a beloved um a lover of the American theater the tradition of American theater fabulous women and this just like incredible dynasty of musical theater talent.

9:16I mean, it's the fact that even her son, Adam Gettle, is this amazing composer, as you know, who wrote Light in the Piazza and other things. I read the book sort of as like in conversation between the two of them. It's not even like footnotes. It's almost like he's just like, by the way, this is what you meant. I was born in the wrong era. I really wish I had been born to really thrive in the late 50s in New York City. Yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I started reading it because I was in Once Upon a Mattress. Yes, of course. I actually started reading it before that. And then I put it down because I got busy.

9:49And then once I got cast in and she does, she covers the creative process of how she made Once Upon a Mattress. So that was super compelling to me. But I've recommended it to about 100 people. Yeah, it's really special. And it's so, I mean, there's something about the arc of publishing, saying that they can publish once you're dead, that I think is a really like sort of interesting kind of model. She's very candid. yeah she's very um i also just find it i don't know if you do but like i don't read that many memoirs but what i do about an interesting personality like the the the common threads we always think things are because maybe people had more decorum or there was more sort of proper presentation but looking back and saying like well basically every guy was gay in the 50s in new york anyway even if it was like there were morality laws like people are just people that's That's what's so cool.

10:40Or like, you know, I was also really moved by, I don't know if you dialed in on the, that even, I just reread that chapter on Larry Hart after I saw Blue Moon, the movie that Ethan Hawke was in. You know, again, he was the original collaborator with Rogers and Hart before Rogers and Hammerstein and was a terrible alcoholic and probably in the closet and you know sort of tragic life but he wrote My Funny Valentine like the music that they wrote together was extraordinary so just hearing her sort of like childhood reminiscences of that and then of course the huge tragedies that she sustained as a mother and you know just an amazing person Turn It Up Storm has zero sugar and 200 milligrams of caffeine so you can turn that workout up a notch.

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11:43This summer, serve up the cookout classics, Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard, or loaded Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Mayer and Heinz. And she wrote Freaky Friday. That part blew my mind as well. I know. I love looking at a whole life and thinking, I really like getting older. I just do. I think it's so cool to look back and be like, a whole bunch of stuff ends up getting stitched together. Exactly. You have no control over it. I mean, you might have some, but just keep trying to make stuff because eventually it all makes sense.

12:18Exactly. And I love the idea of that diversification of her just being like, I'm going to take a swing. I'm going to try and do something. Yeah, I'm going to write stories. First, she started writing songs for children because she was a woman and they were like, well, you have to just write children's songs. And they turned out to be very very clever and then she wrote essentially adult summer camp shows which turned into once upon a mattress which was a hit broadway musical which then has like it's one of the most produced musicals in american high schools that's right um and then wrote freaky friday i mean she's amazing completely amazing i thought the the portrayal of the relationship with her parents is really sort of i mean it's it's she handles it with such humor and such grace but these moments where she's saying that they keep saying to her we love you but we don't like you I'm like it's so brutal and she does it in a way that's so funny at the same time I mean my mother just said to me on the phone we're rooting for you for the Tonys even though we don't think it's going to go your way that's exactly the kind of thing my parents would say too and I was like yeah well I'm not going to disappoint you there but yeah I mean makes you what you are I know my parents were like that even when I was little would never they'd be like it's unlikely but sure yeah I remember saying because I found out that you could um study drama at Yale and I was like oh I'm gonna try to go to Yale because then I can study drama and I can go to a really good college my dad said well you'd be hard-pressed to get in there so you know it was a different time did you have fun at Northwestern loved it yeah it was the again Mary Rogers style I don't know how I got well I do know how I got in I sang my way in I sang into the voice school um I was a proper like voice major yeah and I got rejected everywhere else it was the hardest school I applied to I got in I dropped out of music within a year because I met the comedy people and it changed my life wow I met so many I had no idea I'd never even visited I just went because it was the school I got into that's amazing why do you think Chicago does have such a big like comedy scene and i mean it's not even just chicago it's 19th i i actually last year i just know this like chicago because we had i went to the improv group at the college was very beloved and a lot of like now established yeah steph meyers julia louis drivers like established comedic alumni or in this show called the meow show so i went to the reunion but the reunion i found out it was started the same year as the groundlings which was my theater company in Los Angeles and Saturday Night Live was 1975 so I think it was more probably political interesting and cultural that there was probably a time and place for um parody and social criticism necessary and satire yeah that's my guess and improv was a very you know radical form of performance at the time and creative process yeah so um I think I just found those people and I was like I like these people so then I went out to LA and and tried you know worked my way into the groundlings i love that yeah i saw in an interview that julia louis-dreyfus said that she babysat you and her sister when so her little sister was she was a bit older than us and her little sister was my best friend oh yeah do you remember her babysitting you what was she like as a babysitter um she hated us she was she would just ignore us yeah because she was like high school she was like cool yeah we were like i i you know we were in like sixth grade or something okay yeah so you're just like the annoying little sister knocking around i mean we were we were i had just found a report card about my friend amy her little sister who was a very funny person um where the english teacher said um anna and amy would be better suited not trying to spend so much time imitating laurel and hardy and i remember being like who are laurel and hardy that's amazing i know that's brilliant and then that same english teacher in high school also wrote a personal just about me saying Anna should not spend so much time with rehearsing and a bit more time on her schoolwork.

16:15Turns out he was wrong. Yeah literally I love that. Bob Thomason. I'll never forget. I'm a Taurus. The best revenge. One thing that I think that Shai does really well is also kind of gets at the weight of being like the child of somebody like so successful and I wonder how because you know you've mentioned that your daughter is a playwright and that she wants to sort of is breaking into this industry as well how do you manage that as a mom I mean I wish I mean I was just thinking about how Mary the song that I actually sang in mattress sensitivity it's written in five four time it's written in a very unusual time signature and she says in the book that it was the only song her father ever complimented her on which because I or maybe not that he only song it complimented he was like I never could have written that song i will say i don't i'm not always aware of my the the i try to be aware of the bigness of all of it of my personality and my career but um my daughter has a what is the coolest thing about parenting is that you you think you're gonna pass on all of these things right and sometimes they're all the wrong things they're like your workaholism or like something that you don't like about yourself you know what i mean like that you are petty about grievances yeah about bob thomason from high school um and you think you're you know you're just handing off the good things but the beauty of it is and and she'll be mad at me for saying this on on whatever medium this is in public she has a gift for writing that i do not have i write i write by necessity because I have to because I'm a writer performer and I collaborate well with people and I like writing comedy people characters and things she um she won the Young Arts Prize for playwriting she was an honoree for her fiction she writes beautiful plays she has always from very very little like three or four understood how to tell a story and um it's not a skill I have and it's the coolest thing yeah she's a wonderful piano player she could give one shit about playing the piano like her like it used to drive me crazy because she has touch which is very hard right like in piano my son slams on the keys she like can play the piano and it used to drive me insane my husband said you can't teach passion like you can't make somebody be passionate about something they're not into even though i'd be like why is she not practicing more she's so good you know but the writing she just does she does it on her own she has ideas she comes home with ideas she's like you know and writing's a hard life I mean it's not like she has to be a writer she doesn't want to she's a wonderful actress she's a lot of things but it's very cool to um watch somebody outside of yourself just come onto the planet with a thing that that you didn't plan for you know and I think that must have been how my folks felt about me as this i mean i just i found these old recordings my dad just sent of me singing annie get your gun in seventh grade when i was the lead and it was an audio cassette i just had it transferred over and i'm like they must have been like who is this you know like they're not performers they're not you know yeah that's brilliant question i'm really tired so i'm just no totally i think it's just it's so interesting isn't it because i think i have a lot of empathy for sort of to the children who get caught up in like the nephra baby discourse because i also just think like if it's what you enjoy and what you and you even know that that's a path that is a viable job I think it's really hard to just be like no actually I want to go and well Andrea Martin I remember when I was Francis was a baby I was nursing her and somebody was you know some we were in rehearsal for something and somebody was like I hope my kids don't go into theater you know some bitter and she was like why it's so fun exactly I wish my kids would do this yeah what we do for a living is it was such a nice way of looking at it like it's it's very hard and i understand i think parents want to protect their children from the painful parts of things yeah and look she's 24 like my elder you know oldest one and i can't make i can't give her her career like she would have to she has to get things if she wants them so i agree with you about the nepo baby and again the internet will probably come for me but i don't know you don't get mad at somebody whose dad is a dermatologist who wants to be a dermatologist like I understand that the advantage is frustrating if you've had to make your own way yeah but no matter what you've got to get called back yeah you've got to keep and this is something you know I see with lots of young people like that thing that what makes the difference between actors who work and who don't I swear to you or any creative fulfillment any job is that when you hear no back to little princess you see a positive in it so my early and I got rejected all the time I didn't look like anybody who was on television in the 1990s I was not blonde I was not blue-eyed and believe it or not like we have a joke like ethnic in the 90s like I was like now I look probably patrician but I was like the weird you know friend you know and I just never thought I would be entitled to those roles I they didn't exist yeah so every callback I would get I would think wow I got called back something must be going right and the only person who knew that is you totally I agree you know so I can't make my kids do that they're gonna have to figure that out and that may just be like luckily she's really my daughter's really good at a lot of things she's substitute teaching she really enjoys that she's you know she has a lot of like things she's good at and like you know she's a linguist in school so I mean we'll see what happens but I love that and one I just was also interested I think the idea of the book really captures how memory is this sort of like quite pliable thing and like I have two sisters and we are always like catching each other out with our memories and then then fact checking it and we are always trying to be like work out who's right have you ever had a moment where you've like had a really clear memory of someone and then someone's like no no that's not how it happened 100 and my brother and i have such hilariously different takes on our childhood and it's fun we just i mean now that we're older and you know we might like see one another's point of view a little bit more but yeah it's it's it's it is great and she's so again it's interesting that it's a memoir because you feel like you're reading the brain of a 20 year old in a lot of ways i completely agree which is a gift yes yes and it's also there's and this is kind of a theme in Long Island Compromise as well, that there's such a like darkness, but also so much levity.

22:55Like in how she's able to thread the needle on that, I think is so skill. I was so impressed by Long Island Compromise for that reason. I mean, there's so, and how I took this family therapy class in college, like a psychology class or whatever. And I don't remember anything about it, except for this one thing, which I always have thought about, which relates to both things that we were just talking about. in a family i remember it was like a model idea in like a clinical discourse that a family's a mobile right like a calder think about and that all actions good and bad impact everybody that you would like pull like a car accident like would float over here in a different way or like somebody becomes famous so you know like so i feel like long island compromise um she does such an incredible balancing act of that like within those ecosystems how one one event can kind of do it and she also manages to capture the sort of hilarity and lunacy of an era and a regional like it's very American totally um the idea of being like a scion but also like the pressures of that but also the the sort of everyone's perspective on the isolation of being a Jewish American family but also being a super successful family and an immigrant family like there's so many different ways to sort of spin the story and I loved it I read it twice oh really yeah I really loved it wow did you first read it when it came out and then yeah and then I re-recommended it to Frances and then yeah to you and and yeah I just I found it and she's just a very lively writer I don't know how to put it I know and she's a journalist yeah she is she writes profiles Yeah, which is really interesting, too, because I also just love it when people try on different suits and they fit well.

24:44Yes, I agree. And when they adopted her first novel, Fleischmann is in Trouble, she was a showrunner, which, you know, they don't often let the novelist do that. No. And she did a great job. It was really good with Claire Danes. Yeah, she's really an impressive writer. Tell me what else you loved about that book. What sort of most drew you in? I mean, this is where I'm bad because I'm just going to – I'm like – in my family, I'm known for the vibe check. And then Frances, my daughter, is always the one that's like – when we're watching the movie, she's like, remember? Because he was the dentist and he was like – Well, first of all, I thought she captured Hollywood culture obscenely well.

25:25Like I've thought about that far too often. And she goes places that are like very ugly. yeah um but i've thought about it yeah and it's dark again like you said dark comedy um and yeah the hollywood stuff is very good it's so good so good and it's so funny and she really like pulls you along through the world and sort of i think she like you say she brings the sort of like glamour but also the sort of like ugly underbelly yeah and self-hate and how we hurt hurt ourselves in reaction to things yeah what did you like the best I so I read it I was looking at my phone in the summer of 2024 and I just had all these pictures of me like sort of reading it in my parents back garden and so I was trying to remember how I felt when I read it and I think I just I remember not liking a lot of the like almost all the characters but also feeling so propulsed forward which I think is such a skill to write something where you maybe don't even in that moment feel like you like it it's hard to know how to root for but you can't put it down but I did feel like the it was the system overall the family system sort of the connective tissue that wins the story in a weird way and that um I think it I feel like I've read a lot of these books lately like Nathan Hill's books have you read those like the Knicks and um there's a wellness that book that he read last year that they're really interesting like vin character vignettes which this could have fallen into but i feel like the final the funeral sequences and the sort of like wrap up the actual mystery part of it is um really expertly crafted it's so well crafted yeah you know i gobbled it up so fast yeah so that you so that you don't you're not just sort of wading through really sad chapters about crazy people yeah totally yeah i can't wait to see if they adapt it i know i'm curious yeah do you ever read things with the goal of like being in an adaptation i would like nothing more than to adapt shy oh really yeah but they're um because i think it would make a fantastic series yeah i mean also because i am just like a new york i just like i said i want to live like in the you know yeah russian tea room like you know what i mean like I'm there's this part of me that just when I go to Carnegie Hall or I go like there's the you know the Carlisle I play the car like there's a lot of that life that Mrs.

27:56Maisel kind of vibe that would be so fun just to live in but um also the authenticity and also just the she's just an amazing person and again I I'm probably more negative secretly and so I think I think the optimism is is just is just infectious and contagious yeah I agree and I've always wanted it to be that those ideas of those sort of magnanimous women that like collected sort of children and husbands and friends and yeah sang around the piano there's just something so powerful to me about that I've always had a piano as soon as I could afford one I don't play the piano I just sing but I've I've always felt like you don't have it's not a real apartment until you have a piano so I have a piano everywhere I live so yeah wow and because my secret party tip is it's like the cheapest easiest way to have a great party people think of it as a very fancy thing but you can actually hire a piano player for like way less than you could pay you know a caterer or a bartender that's so smart and then you can have someone playing the piano for two hours and people walk into your party and they're like the piano is playing expedia and visit scotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in scotland the sweep of wild coast lines, quiet locks and untamed landscapes.

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29:57Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash platinum. That's lovely. It's so fun. Did you, when you, for the years that you worked on SNL, how did you stay connected to your musical side? Because like it seems like such an all-encompassing experience. SNL? Yeah yeah it was more just at that time uh something in my suitcase. Yes. Yeah my trick bag. Yeah and luckily like there are lots of comedians tend to be pretty musical people. So Will Ferrell's dad's a professional musician. Maya's mom was Minnie Ripperton. Her dad's a music producer. Um James Anderson was a Broadway singer. Paula Pelt was a trained musical theater person.

30:33So a lot of us just sort of made made musicy things together um kenan's very funny yeah totally talk to me about doing snl 50 with will farrell incredible so it was so much fun speaking of that and i was it was so it made me so happy because there were sort of two nights you know there was the music night and then there was the regular night and you know understandably they were like focused on the night which was the 50th so you know early on there had been whisperings i kind of they were like it's a music thing they'll probably call you to do like this that or the other which they did and um it ended up being Bobby and Marty in Radio City Music Hall which after Lauryn Hill it was hilarious and we were so it was such a joy machine because the characters are so fun to write Paula Pell is one of my favorite comedians on earth and to work with her and write with her is nothing ever short of like a gift from the universe and we I just went up to her place upstate and we wrote for you know hung around drank wine and wrote um for a couple of days and then we didn't know what it was going to evolve into because all things snl evolve as they're happening but then the fact that it was bobby and marty in radio city was making me and will so happy because we were first of all dressed as them backstage with like chris martin and like you know jack like it was ridiculous like it was like the hippest people the you know nirvana was reuniting it was ridiculous and we're dressed as these like middle school music teachers with like dopey you know and um and then the fact that they just would have been we wrote it sort of with the intention of like they couldn't believe they were at radio city yeah you know just own owning the situation so it was so fun oh did you ever hear from any of the like the doachis or the kendrick about like what the perception was not Kendrick but um won't that be hilarious um it we did really well by the way obviously and people did yeah people of course responded and things like don't she didn't respond either actually now that you say that maybe she did somewhere I mean it literally got like a billion hits it went everywhere it was crazy it was so funny because I mean SNL is such a sort of gap as a British person because you sort of know it but when I moved here I was suddenly like oh this is like an institution in a way and so I don't I didn't that's why I don't work in London yeah we have to change this I know you've got to go to well they've got SNL in London now as well yeah I I know.

32:52It's exciting. It's interesting seeing how it's doing. Yeah, my friend Humphrey writes for them. Oh, really? And is he enjoying it? Yeah. Yeah, it's doing well, I think. Yeah. So we're going to get you on the West End in London. Yeah, that's the plan. We're manifesting it. We're little princessing it. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. But no, I thought the Bobby and Marty was so, so good. Thank you. It was iconic. Well, maybe next we can talk about The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts. Oh, this is a real downer. Sorry, I had to throw in something. smarty. It's amazing though. I loved it. I loved it.

33:25My friend Jill recommended it. She's my second big writing reader. She's also a writer. She's my first writing partner from Northwestern. She's a comedy writer and a memoirist in her own right and a short story writer and just a wonderful writer. And she reads at the pace of my daughter. The two of them are my go-to for recommendations. And it came, you know, sort of post-election reflection as a lot of us did at the various phases we've gone through in the last 10 years. I have a number of books that I think, and plays actually, I thought, I think Sweat by Lynn Nottage also really talks about what happens in America in a very kind of effective way.

34:00The loss of the American dream and sort of how we've become so tribalized. And obviously there's been a lot of like American cultural reflection on forgotten people and people who are not seen and taken care of culturally. and jill i don't really remember remember why it came up but um the the rural rural urban divide is actually huge you know um in america and i wanted what i was so struck by i i'm not a very religious person and i'm very suspicious of deep fundamentalism in any religion um i'm pro spirituality and faith and hope but um the thing that really moved me about forgotten girls so it's it's a really well written i thought social analysis of uh from the point of view of somebody who was raised in rural arkansas um who got out yeah for lack of a better way of putting it um who came to new york and was educated and had sort of and and her best friend who grew up with you know very similar intellect very similar um potential and was was taken by um so many of the scourges of of economic um disaster and in those parts of the country where there's very little job opportunity and there's a lot a lot a lot of drug addiction from the sort of collusion of the opiate crisis and the lack of educational opportunity, the family tie stuff that's really legitimate and hard for people to navigate.

35:50And with things as practical as like poor internet access in poor and rural parts of the country, where people actually can't like get online education because they literally cannot get on the internet. Like some of those things are such overt deterrents to, you know, if you want to stay in arkansas which is a totally worthwhile and meaningful thing to do so you can stay close to your family but also get your education the opportunities become more and more and more challenging and as we know that that is um what sort of strengthens this divide which has really become hard to navigate um and the thing that i think the sort of like really secret kind of divisive and difficult part is the role that really intense fundamental christianity plays and telling girls what they are supposed to be capable of, opportunities to them.

36:41So to me, it made me think, I guess. And it made me think about, it's so easy to sort of go like, oh, look at those hicks and be dismissive. And I've read about the opiate crisis. I've read a number of books that I'm sure you've read, that everybody's read. I've read about Forgotten America and Flyover Country. but I really hadn't thought about the real obstacles facing some of those young women and it moved me in a very profound way so I just wanted to talk about it here because it is Bustle and it is a female forward platform but also I just think there's work to be done I agree in a lot of different ways yeah it makes it so human that's the thing I thought is that you you hear people talking about these like cultural trends that have made that have left America where it is now and then when you see them with a name on them and with like parents who have gone through these but it makes it so you can't look away yeah you can't look away in the way that it's easy to and it feels like an abstract idea yeah I've honestly I had Demon Copperhead as the first one I'm sure you have covered that many times and that book did a really good job in the sense she's such a fantastic writer um kingsolver but that initially i think that made made the sort of story of um addiction a specifically rural addiction very meaningful to people but this is a real story about real people in real arkansas um right now and girls which i also think is nice it's just it's a it's truly a demographic that's just like at the bottom of the pecking order i know did you ever have that feeling growing up of wanting to like get out of where you'd grown up or i grew up with so much opportunity yeah i mean i grew up in in a city in washington dc we weren't like loaded yeah but my parents i mean especially now that i look at it like they they spent all their additional resources on arts outreach yeah we were given opportunities and again there were a lot of things with city free city orchestra i was in city orchestra I was you know I was in choir I did you know all the things that um I had I had a lot of access to things like that um so like I said it wasn't like hyper fancy silver spoon even though but I grew up in DC yeah so it was just we had the arts everywhere and um I also grew up in a family I went to a white house yeah I grew up in a family my mother's parents were immigrants my father's parents settled here a long long time ago or 1800s but my grandmother was the first she was in the teacher's college at the University of Nebraska and she was the first woman to petition the dean to finish her education after she got married.

39:26So my family was very educated I'm very biased towards the power of education and I loved my education I feel grateful for it I feel under educated even as an educated person I know there's a lot I don't know I know that there's other ways to do that I know that there's now a different trend I know that there are people who are I'm I understand like if you are really good at like want to be an electrician and you come from a family that's really good at that like you should do that you know I don't have like a judgment about it but um I I always knew that that was not even it wasn't even an option it was like you were going to go to college it didn't matter sort of how or where but it was not an option no i was the same for me my dad's from birmingham and his mom had was very very bright and so she was born 1919 and so in 1930 when she took the 11 plus which is the test that they all take she passed it so well that the head teacher from the school came down and was like please can she like come to the secondary school but you had to pay money and so they were like no she's going to work and so and then I remember when she came to my graduation when I graduated from Oxford and she I just I remember I mean I was so thrilled that she was there and because it had always been presented to me of like of course you're gonna go yeah I wondered if it must have felt almost weird as well because she would talk about that experience of not having been able to go and even to secondary school basically I know it's crazy I know and I get it like school's not for everybody no but that's also where books are so amazing yeah I'm I don't know if you're like my algorithm feeds me all these readers I don't know like it's so satisfying yeah and there are they're just like people from all you know who just talk about books that they love yeah and I do feel like we're having a little bit of a like we are happy book resurgence yeah anyway um I thought also that book is so interesting on the sort of power of mentorship because she talks a lot about how important that that is to keep people going and I was curious who have been big mentors for you in your career oh I life I didn't think that was where that was sorry no I was thinking about how basic mentorship is like and we forget these things um it's a to me it was a good reminder so here she grows up in rural Arkansas I don't remember why but she applied to Barnard and she got in but she couldn't afford to go yeah and she picked up a landline and called and how hard a thing that is to think to do and how mentorship includes things like ask yes it's okay don't be embarrassed I always say to my children like I try to model this if I don't know a vocabulary word in a conversation I try to just simply say what does that mean yes because I think we feel like we're supposed to be like smart and present and all this and there is nothing wrong with not knowing yes you know and anyway so i i i often i've done i often think the best mentorship is some of that most basic stuff like my daughter will say like should i text and say thank you for that opportunity and just being like absolutely everybody likes a thank you you know or it doesn't have to be thirsty it doesn't have to be i think sometimes it feels rehearsed but sometimes you can just say like hey that was really interesting and thank you for taking the time you know or whatever um so for me mentors have been um that's a great question and I'm stumped I have I've had I think in the arts it's so assumed that you're gonna fail that um I had a few random people along the way of course teachers always teachers some that were mean but the ones that were like i the one that wrote my recommendation for northwestern was my my drama my like director in high school and i asked him and my drama teacher he was a very quiet reserved guy and i was really intimidated by him but when he handed me my sealed you weren't allowed to open it was sealed in the old days recommendation they would give it to you with a seal and then you would mail it off he said said I really think that you should do this for a living I think you could do this for a living and that meaning acting and even though technically I was applying to the music school but I think he thought I was applying as an actress and um just having those moments of that you know and then my my voice teacher said to my mother hilariously at my graduation party I think she should I think she'll work in musical theater and my mother said musical theater um uh she was horrified but But those moments, those people who just sort of go, I think that you might actually be good at this, you know.

44:20And there was actually a woman who worked in administration, Fiona Valentine. And she was British at Northwestern. And I'd done like a student film. I'd never thought about working in film and television ever. But I'd done like my friends, like, you know, shows and movies. And she said, she was like, you should work in film and television. You're very good on camera. Again, like, I was like, oh, okay. yeah and then somebody said hey do you want to move to LA and I did I love because Fiona Valentine had said that I should yeah but also there's like such a I mean obviously it goes all like this and everything but from that some you know that teacher saying I think you should do this to work to Tony nomination it's just like it's amazing isn't it yeah it's amazing it is and then I have sort of a council of elders a number of director Broadway directors and and a few just trusted trusted trusted friends that i call about every job and i'll sort of like survey a sampling to say like what do we think and i mean big jobs like shemigadoo yeah and do they ever disagree or they weren't normally in alignment they sometimes disagree yeah i mean but you make decision jobs decisions are always a weird balance of like how much time am i not not going to see my kids how much money am i going to make and make it worth it while or art you know you always have to have one thing in check like totally what's the one good reason yeah like is it because it's the most artistic challenge is it because it's the most fun yeah now i'm gratefully at a stage where i'm like are there assholes yeah you know i mean but seriously that's a good question it's like the top question yeah yeah um well i have to ask because this obviously is a book about girlhood and when i was growing up mean girls was the definitive movie of my like childhood about girlhood can you tell me about that experience of being on that yeah it's always so funny because you're like when you do a movie it's so short yeah and then it becomes this like piece of iconic history francis was there she was a baby really um and anytime you make something well tina's such a tina has the specific skill it's really extraordinary of capturing these moments culturally i mean like mom jeans and like you know she's just got this ear for things that become memes or are iconic or whatever the words are that kids use now but um but i also will say that anytime you're writing about high school it's bobby and marty right like it's everyone hates high school everyone loves high school yeah and high school's funny yes High school is just funny.

46:54I'm in another movie coming out called Never Change about a bunch of 40-year-olds who have to go back to high school to get their diplomas because of a clerical era. And I play the principal who's like, why are all these 40-year-olds here? And it's just funny because it's the first, as I can say as a parent of adolescence, recent adolescence, it's the first time everything's happening. Yes. Like by the time you're 40, you've had your heart broken 5 ,000 times. By the time you're 40, you've, you know, whatever, accidentally shit your pants on the ski slopes i don't know like anything that happens in high school it's like the absolute worst you know it's the worst thing that ever happened all the time yeah it's the biggest and most mom my son they were doing senior skip day because he's a senior and it was like the conversations about well maybe i'll just go to history and maybe you know back and forth it was like literally the most important monumentous decision of his life it's everything is is big at that age you're building all of well your feelings are big because your hormones are big but also you're building all of your resources and and banking all your memories and like learning your lines for life you know totally also how amazing the young cast from that movie what they've all gone on like lindsay lohan and rachel mccadams and amanda cyphery i mean i know with so how old were they on set they must have been what like i guess they were all teenagers or 20s Lindsay still had a Guardian.

48:16Really? Yeah. So young. Yeah, young, really young. But like right on the line. And maybe like 19. And were you on SNL when Lindsay did her hosting stints as well? No, I was gone already. But she was a star. I mean, that was pretty evident. Yes. But that was a major star. I know. I'm really excited. We had a cover with her a couple of years ago. And our headline was just, Lindsay's back. And I love it. It's amazing seeing everything that she's. doing. Well, finally, we can talk about the play Everybody by Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, which is your fourth pick. Tell me what you love about that. Okay, so I think he's an amazing play.

48:55I read plays a lot. I find them to be... Plays continue. They don't always do this, but they often have to live by really interesting narrative device and code. They have rules, you know, and some of it is people break some of those roles and that's modern playwriting for you but really in general to see a play and to have a cathartic experience and to relate to it um or at least my favorite plays they tend to live within a they're very well crafted and the thing that i love about reading plays is because they're so terse by nature every word is considered yes every word is considered and i i love the economy of that I find it really compelling and I think Brendan Jacob Jenkins is a wonderful writer and I think he manages to talk about emotional it's long I don't know if you saw appropriate last year but yes he's my god love it was incredible I almost I almost picked that one that's why I went back and forth I just literally have on my card here appropriate wow yeah yeah because again he manages to talk about huge cultural issues huge American societal issues but family dynamic and all in one it like gives me chills even just saying it that and the craftsmanship is just amazing um i'm really taken because of my experience right now so let me just say everybody is a play that he wrote uh in the teens 20 teens maybe and um it was at it was off broadway and we saw it there a friend of ours was the lighting designer so we saw it but then um um my daughter francis did it at northwestern so i recently saw it again it's based on the 15th century 15th century morality play the everyman which is like one of those boring plays that you study in yeah college and um that they make you do and draw like with the greeks and everything but and francis has really dialed me into she she understands the classics very well so like when you go see hadestown with her she explains the different interpretations of the different readings but the mythology and i don't know if you saw oedipus this year like again like i'm fascinated by the greeks and by as much as i found those things stultifyingly boring when i was having to read them the adaptations and the sort of the fact that for thousands of centuries human beings have essentially battled with the same issues and same family dynamics and same sadnesses and greed and you know Shakespeare same thing there's something so human and connected about those about adaptations so to say I'm also in a play right now Schmigadoon which is very is not a Greek tragedy by any stretch of the imagination but it is a very communal theater experience And what is so fun about Schmigadoon is that our audiences are so engaged and feel so consumed by wanting.

51:56Every day someone says, like, I want to live in Schmigadoon because it feels like you're living in like your idea of what a high school old timey musical theater town is. There's every happy part about it. The town is bright and colorful. It is not cynical. It is not mean. um it it calls out in a really modern and funny way some of the limitations of that you know very entrenched thinking but it's very joy filled and um I'm very taken with theater that is engaging to people that makes them feel feel like they're a part of the story that they're living with you you know there's a mayoral election in our play our play so grabs people that people are often voting in the audience I will look out and they are voting for my opponent you know I play the bad guy um so what the everybody what everybody did which is really cool is basically brendan jacob jacob took the everyman he adapted it to modern times so there are these um the everyman sort of tells this morality story of like the conflict of our various attributes so we have friendship we have love we have kinship kinship and it's all anticipating towards death right so how many of these things are meaningful and how many of them do are we independent of and how many are integrated, I think is how you would put it.

53:12And the play, you know, it's that struggle. So how many of these things do we need to say were important before we die? And how can we say that we've had a full and fulfilled life? I think that's what I would say the play is about. But what's wild is he had every actor, the conceit is that every actor, because we are an everyman, every person inhabits all of these really complex attributes. Every actor learned every track. And he had a big bingo ball machine. The audience was participating in it. And they would call out who, they would pull it out and different people would play different tracks every night.

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54:35Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Just five years of fiber-powered Wi-Fi that boosts speeds to the devices that need them most. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity. Imagine that. Select plans only. Restrictions apply. Powered by fiber. Connected to the premises by coaxial cable. Actual speeds vary. So my daughter did it in college. and it is so compelling because as an artistic experience to have to have an ensemble that engaged with your audience playing that many different kinds of roles is just thrilling we talked about every brilliant thing as well the other play that Dan Radcliffe just finished um here on Broadway and it's a similar thing where the audience is so engaged right I just love theater that does that I think it's really really important and actually in um um September Davis the my altar my my arch rival or whatever she's got a piece coming um that's very much about her connection to the audience as well and I I'm very interested in that kind of theater yeah it is it's fascinating and Schmigadoon is so compelling and I really I felt like when I was watching it I was almost being transported into a whole different mental state in my own brain I thought the sets as well were so beautiful and so like the lighting all of And it was exquisite.

55:53The lighting was so beautiful. And it's so integrated with the sets. And it's so analog. It's all hand-painted. Wow. They're hand-painted flats, like traditional. It's really transporting. It takes you to another. It's like living. When we first saw the set, I was like, I feel like I'm living on Main Street in Disneyland or something. Exactly. You feel like you're living in that place where you wanted to live. It's so immersive as well because of how big the color, and the music and the dancing and like yeah i i mean i loved it all 14 pieces in the orchestra yes there's instruments we often don't hear live anymore there's you know what i call comedy instruments you know there's a lot of like bassoon and there's a there's a vibraphone which is so magical every night he plays it this one sequence is so beautiful the orchestrations are fantastic and then the costumes your english the british i don't know i'm supposed to say what's the pc um um this liberty of london fabric on a lot of the girls dresses it i want to like i said to linda our linda our costume designer i was like do you have any scraps i feel like i need like a little pillow of like all of the girls costumes their women's costumes are so beautiful i also just loved the age diversity of the casting for some because there's something so joyful about seeing like an older gentle not old old but like older gentleman doing these like dances and like really going for it.

57:18Yeah. It's brilliant. It's a true love letter to musical theater. Yeah. I'm so excited for you guys with the Tonys and, you know, I'm keeping everything crossed for you. Thank you so much. And this was so fun and thank you for bringing such brilliant books to talk about. I hope they're compelling and interesting. It was definitely. We've, yeah, we've got loads of stuff. It's great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Charlotte. Thank you. Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you, and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up.

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