Megan Mullally: from Will & Grace actress to West End singer
She stole the show in Will & Grace. Now the actress/singer is bringing her band and her musical chops to London
Megan Mullally arrives at a West Hollywood café in a chauffeur-driven black SUV with tinted windows. But the bawdy actor and singer, best known as Karen Walker in the Manhattan sitcom Will & Grace, is not pulling star rank. She has come straight from the set of a morning talk show.
The quick-witted 51-year-old is serious about her forthcoming West End residency with her six-member band, Supreme Music Program — their first overseas engagement — and she doesn’t want any misunderstanding. “This is not ‘Liza with a Z’,” she deadpans. “There are no sequins, costume changes or scripted patter. It’s just me and the music. I hope people don’t show up expecting Karen. If they do, they are in for a rude awakening.”
In concert the diminutive Mullally is far from the caffeinated caricature some might be fearing. Long-time fans are already aware of her musical gifts on Broadway, where she has starred in revivals of Grease, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and most recently in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. But in her live performances with SMP she does cabaret her own way, shunning show tunes and other staples in the grande-dame repertoire. Her singing is in an entirely different key from the comic persona that garnered her two Emmy and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.
With unexpected arrangements and soul-baring interpretations of songs by the likes of Tom Waits, Kurt Weill, Kris Kristofferson and John Prine, Mullally’s voice dispels any suspicion that her concert career is just another vanity project for a bored celebrity. She takes her inspiration, she says, from a sisterhood of musical originals, including Gwen Stefani, Regina Spektor and Lady Gaga, “flat-out unmitigated geniuses that do it their way” . The big question is whether her long-time fans will allow her to grow in new directions, and will those who take their music seriously listen without prejudice?
“The band is crazy excited to go to London,” she says, “but I’ve heard UK audiences are not as responsive as US audiences. The theatre management asked us to add an intermission so the crowd can go to the lobby and buy alcohol and get wasted. That should help.”
After performing and recording with this band for 12 years, Mullally says this is where she feels most at home. And unlike with a lot of other work — such as In the Motherhood, a web series that became a sitcom but didn’t last long on American primetime TV — here she’s in complete control. “Music is a safe place for me because of the low profile. It’s a purely creative venture. Nobody is trying to get anything out of it. We’re doing it for its own sake.”
Mullally has been anything but low-profile since the debut of Will & Grace in 1998. The series, about a gay lawyer and his ex-girlfriend-turned-best-friend, a fashion designer, ran for eight years, racking up 162 award nominations and 51 wins, including Emmys, Golden Globes, SAG and British Comedy Awards. Even more impressive is its impact as a cultural bellwether, broadcast around the world, including countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, South Africa and Croatia where gay identity is no laughing matter. It remains one of the most popular American series still in international syndication. Yet it was Mullally, whose character was Grace’s socialite sidekick, who tended to steal the show.
Despite inheriting the looks of her mother Martha, a former model, and a flair for show business from her father Carter, an actor who was under contract to Paramount in the 1950s, fame on such a massive international scale never looked likely for Mullally. She went to high school in Oklahoma and sang commercial jingles to put herself through Northeastern University. And she didn’t land the role of Karen until she was almost 40.
If acting is Mullally’s bread and butter, she talks about music as if it’s her heart and soul. “Commercial radio music is so overproduced I have a hard time connecting emotionally,” she says, explaining her own set list. “I don’t like anything formulaic or by the numbers.” Listen to Mullally rip into Ryan Adams’s rocking Shakedown on 9th Street or reach down to the bone on Randy Newman’s heartbreak ballad Real Emotional Girl and it sounds like a woman putting herself on the line — and having the time of her life.
“I never had a career plan,” she says. “I just do what’s fun. It doesn’t matter if it's cool or not. I’ll do anything if I think it’s fun or funny.” She isn’t kidding: she recently made a disco commercial for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and is developing a one-woman show aimed at Broadway called Karen: The Musical. So why return to the character that, yes, made her a star, but almost typecast her out of a broader career? “I guess if you played Gilligan [from the American sitcom Gilligan’s Island] you wouldn’t want to be Gilligan for the rest of your life but Karen singing struck me as funny, especially without any television censors.”
But isn’t she concerned at a backlash? “Where I’m at right now is so much more exciting and cool,” she smiles. “I’m a late bloomer and a perfectionist. I work my ass off seven days a week. I’m busier now than I ever was during Will & Grace. Everything I do is for the audience. When you think it’s about you, it’s over. Maybe not that day or even that year, but it’s over.”
Some celebrities earn a measure of perspective and peace of mind after years of exposure. This woman seems to have arrived from her Midwestern home that way. She learnt to stop reading reviews even though she received some of the best stage notices of her career when she starred in The Receptionist, which she calls her favourite “legit” — ie, non-musical — acting experience. Next up is a return to Broadway in April for a revival of Terrence McNally’s award-winning Lips Together, Teeth Apart. The same month she reappears on American television as Lydia Dunfree, a naive Pollyanna, in season two of Party Down, a critically revered dark comedy about Hollywood wannabes and never-weres.
With her stage and television calendar fully booked for the foreseeable future, it is the gig in London that feels like a new horizon. “I’ve only been to London once before in 2002, when my husband [the actor Nick Offerman] proposed in Queen Mary’s rose garden,” Mullally says, eyes shining. “It was duck mating season and they were, uh, pairing off. It was like Masterpiece Theater and Animal Planet in one.”
Megan Mullally and Supreme Music Program are at the Vaudeville Theatre, WC2 (0844 412 4663; www.meganinlondon.com), Feb 16-21
Eric Gutierrez, The Times 08-02-2010