The hallowed beige flight suit was not in the plan. “It wasn’t originally scripted that way,” says Annie Potts of her character Janine’s move from longsuffering receptionist to action hero in the latest Ghostbusters film. Potts has starred, however briefly, in all of the films in the franchise, including the 2016 all-female version. The forthcoming film, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, is the fifth Ghostbusters film in all, and is released later this month.
“It wasn’t until about halfway through shooting that Gil [Kenan, the director] came to me and said: ‘I think we’re going to put her in the flight suit.’ Of course, I was thrilled, because women can do everything that men do.”
As well as Janine returning, the original team played by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson are also back; Harold Ramis, who played Egon Spengler, died in 2014. Spengler’s estranged daughter and her children are part of the new crew (having been introduced in 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife). “So they have the young ghostbuster, and the mom ghostbuster, and then they have me, the old lady ghostbuster,” says Potts, delightedly.
Ask her why she thinks Ghostbusters is so enduring, and she replies: “Well, it’s made a lot of money.” But the reason for that is the affection audiences have for it. “It was uniquely hilarious and scary – it’s scalarious – and that turned out to be a very good combination.” For those of us who loved it as children, she thinks we’re trying to “get back to that moment where you’ve been both tickled and scared. And so here we are, 40 years later.” We’re speaking over Zoom; Potts is in New York for the premiere, and she’s warm, funny and has the straightforward air of someone who has seen it all.
Potts, who has a long-running role in the TV series Young Sheldon, says it is “a delight” to work with her ghostbusting colleagues again. “It’s like, hey, we made it another five years or whatever. When we first started working, we were all just kids.” It must be poignant to notice time passing, and the people who are missing – Ramis, and Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two films and produced all of them. He died in 2022. “Yes,” Potts says. “There’s a couple of vacancies.”
Aykroyd, who wrote the original with Ramis, was friends with Murray. Was it intimidating to join an already tight team? “No, although we come from different places,” says Potts. “I was trained in theatre, and they’re quintessentially improvisation people. I’d done some in theatre school, but I like a good script – memorise it, think about it. The improvisation thing scared me, because I thought the script was so good. But they were always trying to make it better. I thought that was the wildest thing – the actors were allowed to make up lines. Like, what?” She laughs. “But I liked it, and I ended up sort of being their straight man.”
Somebody recently asked her why she thought Janine was so “nasty”. “I didn’t realise she was. And they were like, ‘Yes, she was always mad!’ … Because she was working with idiots! I mean, I think she thought they were morons, they didn’t have a plan. But people love to say, ‘She was a bitch,’ because that’s the go-to, isn’t it, when a woman knows what they’re doing and how to do it.”
Did she ever feel Janine was sidelined, that the team’s female receptionist should have had a bigger role? “I don’t know,” she says breezily. “The balance of things was pretty correct, I thought. It’s always nice to have a larger part of the pie, but I’ve been very happy to do what I got to do.”
When Ghostbusters came out in 1984, Potts was 31, a single mother and a working actor with some TV success behind her, “trying to make it in Hollywood”. Did the success of Ghostbusters massively change her life? She thinks back. “I try not to let anything like that change my life too much,” she says. “I guess my visibility ticked up, but of course, 40 years ago, we didn’t have the internet. It was different then, you could run below the radar.” I wonder if, having had that taste of commercial success, the next step was to try to become a huge Hollywood lead? “I’m a practical person, I always felt the most practical thing that I could wish for was to have a long career that paid the rent, and that kind of worked out.” She points out that most actors don’t earn a living wage – only 14% of Screen Actors Guild members earn above the health-insurance threshold of $26,000, which was one reason for the recent strikes. “So I feel quite, as we say here in the US, blessed,” she says.
Potts wanted to be an actor for as long as she can remember. Growing up in Franklin, Kentucky, with her father working in business and her mother a full-time parent to her and her two older sisters, she would rush home from school to watch the 4pm film on TV. “Old classic movies – it was the 50s and your parents let you do that. I don’t even remember homework.” She loved funny women – Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball. “My very first memory of life was laying on my little couch in our TV room, watching I Love Lucy – and I had a bottle, so I was weaned on Lucille Ball, and what a great example she was. But all the women of that era, you couldn’t have better teachers.” When she was sent away to summer camp one year, one of the teachers took her aside and told her she had a “spark” during drama class. “I was so excited. Nobody ever told me I had anything going at all.”
Just as her career was getting started, it was almost derailed by a car crash when she was 21. “Drunk drivers, three carloads of teenagers in the middle of the day were drag-racing down the wrong side of a two-lane highway and ran head on into the car I was in.” Virtually every bone in her body below the waist was broken, she says. “It took a very long time to recover. I’m still trying to recover.” It must have shattered her sense of security and invincibility, which many of us take for granted at that age. “Yes, when you almost lose your life, it becomes pretty dear. I don’t know if you can know how dear it is until you are faced with losing it.” She says she doesn’t want to minimise the impact of the accident – she has had numerous operations because of it throughout her life – or tritely turn it into a lesson, but it did become “my hardest and my best teacher because I learned so much”.
The #MeToo movement that came to prominence in 2017 highlighted how rife sexual harassment was in the entertainment industry in the 1980s and 90s. Did Potts go through it? “A little bit, and it didn’t really land with me what it was until it had passed by, and I thought, ‘Surely that person didn’t mean that?’ Which is not to say there weren’t untoward things said and insinuated when I was a young woman, but it never overwhelmed me.”
Even if sexual harassment is now considered appalling, it’s not as if women have equality yet, she points out. “Even in the United States in 2024, we cannot pass an equal pay agreement.” She raises her voice. “I hope it won’t be too much longer before the unfairness of that will be realised and amended.” We talk about abortion rights being rolled back. “It is very scary, but the men think they know best what to do with our bodies, which is none of their effing business. I’m hoping that will shift. It has to.”
Potts starred in the successful American TV series Designing Women, as well as others including the sitcom Love & War and Any Day Now, but when she reached her 50s, she noticed the work drying up. “Like, 55 to 65 sucked,” she says. She went back to theatre, her first love, and did a couple of plays in New York, including God of Carnage on Broadway in 2010. “If anybody told me I’d be 57 when I made my Broadway debut, I might have just tossed in the towel three decades ago,” she says. “But I just kept pushing through and waiting it out.”
It worked – in 2017, Potts joined the cast of Young Sheldon, the spin-off prequel of the hugely successful TV series The Big Bang Theory, as Sheldon’s spirited grandmother Meemaw. Now in its seventh and final series, Potts has had a lot of fun with her character. “She’s a bit of a handful, I love her, and she’s a southern woman who’s well known to me,” she says. Alongside that, she has also voiced Bo Peep in the Toy Story films. The character had been more of a background member of the toy gang, but was given a leading role in Toy Story 4 in 2019. And now there’s Ghostbusters, where this time around she’s in the suit and ghostbusting herself.
The slow years must have been tough. How did she cope with it? “The best I could,” she says. “You run into people and they’re like, ‘Didn’t you used to be an actor?’” She remembers one man: “He said, ‘I remember you, you were really cute and now you’re … old.’” She laughs and pretends to be gracious: “I’m going to accept what the universe just delivered me, I shall be humble, and thank that person. ‘Thank you so much, so nice of you to say, I’ll be on my way now.’”
We’re both laughing at the awfulness of it, but it must have knocked her confidence. “Of course, and the way that that affects some people is they don’t want to go out any more, or they get so much plastic surgery that they’re wearing their lack of confidence on their face.” She smiles. “Of course, a little work can be fun. But there is a temptation to want to please those people so they never come up to you on the street and go, ‘God, you used to be so pretty.’ Just shoot me now.”
Roles have got better for women, she says, and throughout her career she has seen huge shifts in other ways. When she went into TV as a way to keep a stable life for her and her children, it was seen as second best to film. That has switched entirely. Meanwhile, movie franchises have taken over cinema – Ghostbusters and Toy Story among them. Potts acknowledges that audiences like familiar things. “They know if they go to a Toy Story movie their kids are going to be entertained, they’re going to be entertained. They’re going to be moved, they’re going to laugh, everybody’s going to go home happier. Same with Ghostbusters. People know what they’re going to get. These are two examples of really good entertainment, but there are some things that are maybe not as appealing to people my age, but I think that’s just the way it is now.”
We talk for a while about what AI might mean for actors, particularly voice actors. “It will be very easy for them to recreate my voice, which has been a defining part of my career,” says Potts. “But now we have some guards against that,” she says – referring to the protections SAG won for actors in the recent deal. What does she think we’ll lose if humans are no longer acting? “My mind is not big enough to understand,” she says. “It seems like they’re going to be able to do everything we do, including acting and writing and all of that, and pretty much everything, so that we won’t have anything left to do but take care of each other. I soothe myself with thoughts like that. I try to anyway.”
She has always been an optimist, she says. This partly explains her four marriages; she has three sons, the younger two with her fourth husband, the director and producer Jim Hayman, with whom she has been in a relationship for more than 30 years. And life experience has taught her a lot. “When you’ve broken nearly every bone in your body, and you’ve been married four times, you know things, you find out things – and I’ve used those things to have empathy and compassion for others,” she says.
The success of Young Sheldon allowed her to set up a small charity with a friend, “which helps people who are in crisis, sometimes the people who fall through the cracks. People just kept falling in our path that we felt we needed to help.”
This currently includes three Afghan refugee families, and a young Guatemalan woman she’s been helping to put through college. “People were there to help me when I needed that, so I feel it’s only right to give back as long as I can. My salary was more money than I needed, so it seemed a good idea to share it.”
Potts wants to get back on stage, too, “because that is the well of creative nourishment, more than anything”. As for Ghostbusters, she says she wouldn’t be surprised if there was another one, now the younger characters are established. “And as long as us OGs are willing to strap on some kind of proton device, they’ll keep us in there a little bit.”
It took Janine a long time to get into that flight suit. Let’s hope she’s not hanging it up just yet.
• Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is in cinemas from 22 March.
