Not so long ago, Jane Lynch was walking her dog, happy as could be, and she paused and said out loud to herself: “God, I love being Jane Lynch.” She laughs at herself. “As if ‘she’ were something outside of me.” But things do seem pretty good: she recently finished her run of cabaret dates with her friend, the actor Kate Flannery. There’s a reboot of the underrated sitcom Party Down coming, and a fourth series of the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is about to start. Lynch won an Emmy for her role as Sophie Lennon, a bawdy superstar comic housewife from Queens (in reality, an upper-class Manhattanite, slumming it for financial gain and self-expression). This year, Lynch takes to Broadway, to be in Funny Girl, the fulfilment, at the age of 61, of a childhood dream. Last year, she got married for the second time. “I live in this really cute house in a little beach town,” she says. “I’ve got a beautiful dog, a fantastic wife.” She seems to marvel at it – she doesn’t sound remotely boastful, just grateful.
Things haven’t always been so good. Lynch has been through divorce and alcoholism – giving up alcohol for the second time only fairly recently, after slipping back into addiction. As a teenager, she carried deep shame about her sexuality. Well into her 30s, she felt lonely and alienated, and it wasn’t until her 40s that her career took off. Lynch might be the perfect embodiment of the idea that It Will Get Better.
She is dazzlingly good company, even over Zoom. Funny and radiant, it’s obvious why Lynch has become such a renowned scene-stealer in just about everything she has been in. Lynch is the funniest thing in The 40-year-old Virgin, likewise Role Models. She has been a regular cast member in Christopher Guest’s work – she has been four of his recent films, including Best in Show and A Mighty Wind – and your eye is always drawn to Lynch, the tall blond woman with precision timing. She is still best known as Sue Sylvester, the maniacal cheerleading coach in Glee, the musical high school drama that ran from 2009 to 2015. At the end of Glee, Sylvester – by now the US vice-president – announces her ambition to run for the presidency in 2024 (please someone, make that show). “She would be Maga,” says Lynch, laughing.
I don’t know if we were describing people as “problematic” even as recently as 2015, when Glee ended, but Sylvester goes way beyond that. As the villain, she is clearly deliberately awful, but I wonder if she would be able to get away with the things she said – racist, fat-shaming – were Glee still running. “I think there would have been people out there who would have wanted to cancel Sue Sylvester,” says Lynch. “I don’t know that we could have done that show today, and it was only like … We started that 10 years ago.” Does she think comedy writers are second-guessing how their material will be perceived? “I think so,” she says. “There’s kind of a rabid anonymous group of folks who can really change somebody’s life; they could take away their career. Some of it is about time – some of these people have got called on their stuff [from the past]. But I think we get carried away. This preoccupation with going ‘Aha!’, that’s a drag. Hopefully we’ll get over that soon. I was just thinking this morning about something that we did in Chicago called the Co-Ed Prison Sluts [it became one of Chicago’s longest-running fringe musicals]. It was not politically correct; it would not go over well today.”
Sophie Lennon in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is another megawatt character. The Amazon Prime show set in 1950s and 60s New York follows a young housewife, Midge, who becomes a standup star. Lennon is the old guard, a rare woman who has made it. “What Sophie was dealing with, as it continues to be the deal really, is that it’s a man’s game,” says Lynch. “In order to break through, you had to have material that spoke to men because the club owners were men, the TV producers, the late-night hosts.” Things have clearly improved for women in comedy, although perhaps not by much. Lynch isn’t a standup, but she has heard female comics talk about their experiences. “Any time you look at a comedy club, the headliners are guys. Every once in a while, they might throw a woman in there. It’s harder to work your way up as a woman and, like anything else where you’re trying to break a mould, you have to be exceptional.”
Photograph: AF archive/Alamy
In the last series, Sophie unravelled after a disastrous attempt to be a “real” theatre actress on Broadway, slipping back into her shtick as a Queens housewife. “I understand her,” says Lynch. “She is really talented and smart but insecure, and is so afraid of being found out.” She is embarrassed of her act, says Lynch, “even though it’s made her rich and made her a star. She wants to do more, like so many of us in the acting profession: ‘Don’t typecast me. I’m more than just this.’” How much of that describes Lynch? “Oh, not at all,” she says, laughing. “I’ll do the same thing over and over again. I don’t care. I love it.”
Many of Lynch’s roles were originally written for men, which goes some way to explain why she often plays such deranged authority figures. “I’m obsessed with that random exercise of power, power for power’s sake,” she says, especially if they also have an element of the ridiculous about them. “God forbid they have real power.” Donald Trump is the obvious example. “He was kind of that guy that we used to laugh at. Look at that goof.” She almost spits out the word.
Lots of Lynch’s characters seem driven by insecurity, as if they have something to prove, or need to count in some way. Reading Lynch’s 2011 memoir, there is something of that in Lynch’s life too. “Oh, absolutely,” she says. “Fanny Brice had this too,” she says of the Broadway star on whose life Funny Girl is based. “Comparing myself to Fanny Brice! Please forgive me. I think a lot of us feel this way, but especially actors. You have something inside of you that you know is fantastic and nobody knows. Fanny says: ‘I’m the greatest star, but no one knows it.’ And I had that as a kid: I was in a little suburb that didn’t get the nuance of my comedy. Sometimes even with my own family – and I was brought up by pretty funny people – I would do something and they’d just roll their eyes. It was like, ‘Somebody see me!’” She laughs.
Lynch grew up outside Chicago, her childhood the picture of American suburbia: her father went to work in a bank and her parents would have cocktails on his return. Lynch had always thought she was “a depressed child” but she recently saw some home movies of herself and was struck by how full of life she was. “Always dancing to the camera; air guitar. I was a real free spirit and I loved to perform. And then, of course, high school happens, and maybe even before that when you start to realise: ‘Oh my God, I may be gay but I don’t even have a word for it.’” She longed to be on stage but, carrying so much shame – she’d heard school friends talk about gay people with disgust – she was also afraid of being so visible. Lynch was cast in a play but walked out. “The fear started to come in, and the light that I think I projected as a younger person just started to go deep inside.”
Glee was praised for its portrayal of LGBT teenagers. What would it have meant to have had a show like that when she was growing up? “It would have been such a relief,” says Lynch. “If I had something like Glee, where it was stories that you could relate to on a deep level, that maybe as a person in high school you couldn’t express, yeah, I would have loved it. I don’t mean to overstate it, but I do think it might really have helped a lot of kids.”
In her book, she wrote that one of the few times she felt “safe” was while acting, playing a role. “I still feel that way. These people have to talk to me because they have to say lines,” she says with a laugh. “I was always afraid of being thrown away, socially. Like if someone really saw what was inside of me, they wouldn’t want me. And the great thing about being in a play is they can’t – at least for the time you’re on stage.”
Lynch had started drinking as a teenager and carried on, drinking almost every day, into her 30s. “The first time you [have a drink], it’s like: ‘Ah, I found it. I feel happy in my body, this feeling of bliss. No one can say anything to me that would make me upset or feel badly about myself right now.’ And then maybe the next time you drink, you get it again. Before you know it, it’s not doing it for you. So for the most part, when I was in the throes of addiction, it wasn’t working. You end up chasing [that feeling]. And then if you’re not chasing that, what are you doing? Who are you? You have to really face this emptiness.”
She was a functioning alcoholic, working steadily in theatre, even if some nights she would still be in the bar at 7am the next morning, or would find vomit in her bathroom and have no idea how it got there. One day, she just decided to stop, “a kind of magical lifting of my compulsion to drink”, poured her glass of wine down the sink and joined Alcoholics Anonymous, which she loved. “I felt sorry for people who weren’t alcoholics: I just loved AA,” she says, smiling. “It was very much a gift; it was almost like I was struck sober.”
It stuck, until about five years ago, when Lynch thought she’d had enough therapy and was grownup enough to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. “And I loved it,” she says, deadpan. “I became a connoisseur of wine in a way that only an alcoholic can. I went back into denial, after all those years of sobriety and self-knowledge. I fooled myself – I woke up one day and went: ‘I’m back.’ It took about three years. I’m telling people I’m drinking one glass of wine a night, and I’m drinking five.” She wouldn’t allow herself to drink until 5pm. “I was tied to this thing again, to some hope of what it was going to do for me, and the rest of the day didn’t matter. The only part of the day that really mattered was five o’clock.”
What was going on for her at that time? Her career was going brilliantly, although she had come out of a divorce from her first wife a couple of years earlier. “I think boredom,” she says. “I think I got to a point where nothing was doing it for me any more.” Was she surprised to find herself back there? “Yes,” she says. “I was a little ashamed, and also the denial, the justifications. My friends were fooled. I remember a friend said: ‘I told you you’re not an alcoholic any more.’ I’d go: ‘I know!’” A perfectly timed grimace. “I was.”
Lynch wonders aloud to herself if she was drinking when she started filming Mrs Maisel, but thinks not. “I was during The Good Fight, though. I couldn’t wait to be done and go have a drink by myself.” She was, she says, “scared of it”. She remembers going to a Glee event, negotiating with herself: “I’m not going to drink on the plane, but as soon as I get to the hotel I’m going to have a drink.” And she remembers thinking, “Shit, did I squander this?” when reflecting on her years of sobriety and what it had brought her: a successful career; a good therapist who had given her the courage to come out to her family. It took Lynch another six months to stop. Again, she says she was struck sober, “like the sober fairy said: ‘OK, I’m giving you one more chance.’ And it was over. Five o’clock would come and I didn’t notice it.”
After the first time she got sober, Lynch spent years working hard as an actor, taking whatever she could get – theatre, TV and film roles, adverts, voiceovers. “I just had a lot of white-hot ambition,” she says. She wrote and performed in a one-woman show, which “blew the doors off my confidence”. The sadness she had been feeling began to dissolve. “I was just in a really good space and all of that loneliness and alienation didn’t have a place to land any more.”
She met Christopher Guest on a breakfast cereal advert he was directing, then bumped into him in a coffee shop several months later; he offered her a part in Best in Show, which gave Lynch’s career as a character actor a huge boost. It must have also given her great confidence to be one of Guest’s chosen people, alongside actors such as Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “John Michael Higgins [another Guest regular] always says it’s a preposterous fantasy come true.”
Lynch was 40 when Best in Show came out; she was nearly 49 when Glee made her a star. Throughout all the knockbacks – among them, she was part of the renowned Chicago improv theatre group The Second City but was told she’d never make it to their main stage – she kept faith that it would work out. Even as a child, her mother warned her that she would probably never become a successful actor, and when she wrote a letter to the head of casting at Universal Studios – Lynch was 13 and had let them know her availability – she received a letter back that would have crushed most children. She carried on. “All I knew was that I loved doing it,” she says, smiling. Lynch was having this conversation recently with her friend Kate Flannery. “We always say ‘we’re of show’ because we’ll do it no matter what.”
Season four of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel begins on Amazon Prime Video on 18 February.
