I feel like it makes it sweeter, in a way. For some people, it takes a little longer to step into your stride. “If I had been successful in my 20s, I’d be in prison,” she said. And she is glad, she said, that it didn’t happen earlier. Starring in an HBO show at 49? That’s consolation, too. “Somebody Somewhere” suggests that even if this accident hadn’t happened, even if she had never made it in New York, she would have made a life for herself anyway. So a lot of those themes are in the show.”įor Everett, success has always felt like an accident, albeit an accident resulting from years of survival jobs, very late nights and hard work. Speaking by telephone, Hill, a drag king superstar, recalled growing up within a conservative New England community and feeling a sense of belonging only once he moved to New York and discovered cabaret. “There’s a certain muting one has to do when one goes into slightly less benevolent spaces for the cabaret queers of the world.”īut that was OK, because the cabaret queers had each other. “There were times when we would be in the grocery store and get some looks,” Hiller said. “You don’t have to be gorgeous and perfect you can be imperfect and queer and weird and too large. “It is a show that I hadn’t ever seen before,” he said, speaking by telephone. Hiller has often played small roles on TV, mostly waiters and, as he put it, “mean gay customer service representatives.” No show had ever wanted so much of him. That’s the main thing: Like, what were they going to do? Replace me with Kathy Bates?” “And we built it together - I knew I couldn’t get fired. “It’s because I lived with the project for so long,” she said. In the past, film and TV shoots had unnerved Everett, often to the point of intestinal discomfort. “It was a set for people who really wanted to be there.” “That made the set really fun,” Bos said. Hagerty, who recurred on “Friends,” has perhaps the most credits, but no one is what you would call famous. Most of the cast, Everett included, had never played roles this substantial. The cast and crew arrived in Lockport this spring and shot as quickly as they could, sometimes locking down a scene in only two or three takes. Plans were made to resume shooting in September, but as case numbers rose, the producers pushed production again. Bos and Thureen wrote the script, interpolating some of Everett’s real experiences and a few verbatim quotes.Ī seven-episode series was greenlit early in 2020, then paused when the pandemic began. Everett and Jay Duplass, a director and executive producer on the show, took a research trip to Manhattan, Kan., so Duplass could meet her family, walk its not-so-mean streets and soak up what Everett suggested were its passive-aggressive vibes. “We didn’t want to do a snarky show,” Everett said. The show’s bittersweet message is that it’s never too late to find yourself, whenever and wherever you are. The second one is arguably Sam’s, though its comedy of chosen family is tinged with heartbreak. That first story is more or less Everett’s, though it took decades of restaurant work and a lot of sozzled karaoke nights before she had anything that could be called a career. There are plenty more about big-city transplants finding happiness only when they return home. There are plenty of stories about small-town kids who come to the city with a dollar and a dream, and make good. “They threw in the dead sister, and I was sold,” Everett said. Sam sits on the couch a lot in her underwear. She has a soul-eating job at an educational testing center and various family obligations - a father (Mike Hagerty) with a struggling farm, a mother (Jane Brody) with addiction issues, and a sister (Mary Catherine Garrison) with a wobbly marriage and an Instagrammable approach to evangelical Christianity. After years of bartending in a big city, Sam has returned to her hometown. (Not very close, as it turns out, though Everett said that the sides were delicious.) She was joined by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, the creators of “Somebody Somewhere,” a wistful Kansas-set half-hour comedy that arrives Sunday on HBO.Įverett, 49, stars as Sam, a woman whose biography parallels her own, to a point. This was on a Monday afternoon in mid-December at John Brown BBQ, a purveyor of Kansas City-style barbecue in Queens, which is to say the closest that a person can get to Kansas within the New York City limits. “I would probably work in a restaurant and have two D.U.I.s and sit on the couch a lot in my underwear.” “I’d probably live in Kansas City, or Lawrence,” she said. Sometimes Bridget Everett, the actress, comedian and self-proclaimed “cabaret wildebeest,” wonders what would have happened if she had never left Kansas.
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