Happy Accidents (23 page)

We shot the pilot in a week that felt like a month. We all feigned excited anticipation and mutual congratulation, but we all knew it wasn’t very good. As is the case with all pilots, the next step was to wait and see if the network would pick it up. I walked away underwhelmed and went on with my life.

In the following October, I got a call from Gabrielle that Ryan Murphy was doing a TV pilot about a high school glee club. They’d just added a character, a cheerleading coach, who would be the group’s nemesis, and Ryan wanted me to play her. I had worked with Ryan several years prior, on his show
Popular
,
and he was now coming off the huge success of
Nip/Tuck.
I loved everything he did. He’s sharp and smart and fascinated by people, especially their quirks and absurdities. Where
Nip/Tuck
was dark, odd, and cynical,
Glee
was to be upbeat, hopeful, and innocent. When Kevin Riley, the head of Fox TV, suggested that Ryan’s script needed a villain whose mission would be to destroy the glee club, I’ve heard it said that Ryan proclaimed, “Her name will be Sue Sylvester, and she will be played by Jane Lynch.” He handed off the job of creating this menacing cheerleading coach to the thirty-two-year-old writer/actor Ian Brennan.

It was Ian who had originally pitched
Glee
to Ryan, but as a very dark movie about high school. Ryan decided it would work better on television as a series, and decided to shoot the pilot. Ian was brought on board, along with Ryan and his producing partner Brad Falchuk, as writer/executive producer. Ian dove deep and made contact with his own inner mean-girl, and threw in a large helping of the diva side of Ryan Murphy. They came up with Sue Sylvester, coach of the McKinley High School Cheerios!, who was hell-bent on destroying the McKinley High School glee club, New Directions. Sue Sylvester would be the darkness in this otherwise cheery and innocent world. But unlike Hannibal Lecter or Freddie Krueger, she wouldn’t be dangerous, but instead would be laughable in her ambitious, contentious, and persistent nature. The first words used to describe her in the script were
:
“Sue Sylvester may or may not have posed for
Penthouse
. She may or may not be on horse estrogen.”
I wanted in. As wrong and uninspiring as that last pilot had felt,
Glee
felt right and inevitable.

Unfortunately for me, I was contractually committed to that wrong and uninspiring pilot. I tortured myself with
Did I just blow my chance to star in a Ryan Murphy TV pilot? Is this punishment for my impulsive nature and susceptibility to flattery?
Luckily, Ryan and company allowed me to do the pilot as a guest star and not a series regular, taking the chance that the other yucky pilot would not be picked up, and if
Glee
went to series, I would be available. I tried not to worry myself with the what-ifs
and to just be grateful that I got to be in the pilot. Trusting that all would be well and as it was meant to be required a supreme act of will on my part.

In October of
2009
, we shot the
Glee
pilot at Cabrillo High School in Long Beach. Ryan Murphy is very specific about everything and always knows very definitively what he wants. He also shares my mother’s obsession with clothing. Sue Sylvester would wear only tracksuits. They could come in any variety of color combinations, but tracksuits would be her uniform, her armor; Sue Sylvester was a warrior.

The first scene I shot was in the teachers’ lounge when Sue Sylvester presents a gift of lattes to her fellow teachers. This was a device to enable my character to ruefully emphasize that the coffee budget had been cut to pay for something the Cheerios! needed. Ryan worked on the script as we shot. From the moment he instructed me to say I like my coffee
scalding
,
the tone was set; there would be no moderation for this cheerleading coach.

Sue Sylvester armed for battle.

Photo courtesy of (Patrick Ecclesine)/FOX

What I love about Ryan is that he is always looking to find the line that marks the boundary of civility, beyond which one should go no further. Then he crosses that line. Ryan had no difficulty showing me who Sue was to be, and he could completely bring to life Sue’s outlandish haughtiness and arrogance. I embraced the lawlessness. With this newfound tone of extremity still wafting about my person, I fairly strutted through the hallway back to my trailer. Catching my reflection in the glass of a trophy case, I gave myself a snarl. I was enjoying myself immensely and felt as if my whole life had been meant to lead me here, to this show, this character, and this moment.

The actors playing the
Glee
kids were all TV unknowns, and for some of them this was the first acting job of their life. I met them on the day they performed “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and I was blown away. Not because of the production values; there was nothing flashy or showy about it. What got me was the ache and hunger of that song matched up with their sweet and hopeful yearning to belong. They were the underdogs of William McKinley High and took slushies to the face for wanting to sing in the glee club.

There was something so moving about a group of kids coming together to express their hopes and fears by raising their voices in song. It was vulnerable and it was raw. It was that same desire to express our feelings and be in the midst of like-minded others that drew Chris and me to the choir room at Thornridge High School. It seemed to speak to the disowned and discarded parts within us all. I knew that this show could find an audience. I wasn’t sure if it would be a big audience, but I was pretty sure it would be a devoted one. I had no idea, however, that they’d be called Gleeks.

I walked away from that pilot shoot of
Glee
hoping and praying that the deal with the other pilot would fall apart. Nothing is ever a
sure thing
in Hollywood, but I would’ve bet the farm that
Glee
would be picked up and on TV in short order. And when that happened, I didn’t know how I would be able to stand not playing Sue Sylvester on it. I shuddered to think of it and sometimes had to consciously switch channels in my mind to avoid doing so.

While I was waiting to see what was going to happen to these two competing deals, I still needed something to do with myself. I was shooting commercials, doing more guest spots and recording voice-overs, when Providence brought me an unexpected bounty. In December of
2009
, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the Starz network had ordered ten episodes of
Party Down
. It had been a year and a half since we’d done the pilot, and I had already mourned what I had assumed to be the loss of the show.

I was thrilled to have it resurrected with a promise of ten weeks of work. Of course, there were some changes. We lost Andrea Savage due to pregnancy but gained Lizzy Caplan (
Mean Girls
) as the wannabe comedian and love interest to Henry (Adam Scott). We also added Martin Starr (
Freaks and Geeks
) as the aspiring science fiction writer. With our somewhat altered cast assembled and our black bow ties replaced with pink ones, we reshot the pilot, launching us into the first season of
Party Down
.

On the first day of work, I walked onto the set of the private home we were shooting in and saw Fred Savage sitting at the kitchen island. I went up to him and said, “Do you remember me?” Before he had come out to Los Angeles to star in
The Wonder Years
, he played the kid who swapped identities with Judge Reinhold in a movie shot in our hometown of Chicago called
Vice Versa
. I was about twenty-seven back then, and I’d had a small part in it. Fred had been about ten. “Of course I remember you!” he said. When I asked him, “What the heck are
you
doing here?” he looked at me strangely and said, “I’m directing the episode.” I don’t tend to read call sheets and was surprised to say the least to see him there. When did he get old enough to be in charge? He directed every other episode, and Brian Gordon (
Curb Your Enthusiasm
)
helmed the others. They were both great fun and moved fast and furious, as we had only four days to shoot each show.

Ken Marino, Ryan Hansen, Adam Scott, Martin Starr, Lizzy Caplan, and me

Like
Lovespring International
,
Party Down
was a low-budget and high-octane shoot. This was just the way I liked it: very little time in between setups and a great group of actors. As a cast, we actually adored one another. Lizzy was a cigarette smoker, and by the second or third episode we were all puffing away together in the early morning freezing cold outside our trailers. We’d hang out on base camp laughing, goofing around, and having great talks. Our writer Jon Enbom captured each of our characters’ voices so well in his scripts that we pretty much stuck to his words. The exception was Martin Starr, who is constitutionally incapable of speaking anything written for him. He made up everything that came out of his mouth to great effect, and it was different for every take. I loved the one-on-one relationships we started to build between the characters within the catering company. My Constance Carmell had great empathy for the foibles of Ken Marino’s Ron Donald, and both characters were equally clueless. No one made me laugh harder and more often than Ken, and it got so that I couldn’t even look at him without having to say an internal Hail Mary.

Though she had never been much more than an extra in her acting career, Constance had many stories to tell of her mostly imagined halcyon days. The most willing ear became that of Kyle Bradway (played by the adorable Ryan Hansen), a young blond actor whose trade was what Paul Rudd called the “handsome business.” Not only did Constance narcissistically see Kyle as a younger male version of herself, she regarded him as her protégé. Kyle was just as thick and deluded as she, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed pontificating to him about the “actor’s life.”

The fact that I was contracted to the other dreaded pilot and that they could rightfully pull me off the set of
Party Down
at any time was always in the back of my mind. That
Glee
could shorten my time on
Party Down
were
it
picked up didn’t weigh as heavily on me. Having to lose my catering job to join the glee club would be another one of those luxury problems and, in truth, a win-win.

A twelve-episode pickup for
Glee
was announced midway through shooting
Party Down
, and they offered to have me continue to play Sue Sylvester as a guest star for as long as I could before, and if, the other pilot called me away.

The eighth episode of
Party Down
would be my last, and the cast threw me a surprise going-away party that included a lap dance by a real stripper. She smelled like McDonald’s and was about as comfortable writhing on my lap as I was having her there. It had been Ken Marino’s idea; he loved watching me suffer and couldn’t get enough of it, whooping it up, screaming, “Yeah! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” There’s nothing sexy about getting a lap dance in front of your coworkers, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy it in private either. I was embarrassed and felt really sorry for the girl. Everyone, including the crew, watched uncomfortably, until Ryan Hansen came to my rescue and whispered in my ear, “You don’t have to do this,” and led me away.