Megan Mullally – After Will & Grace and onto Her Own How
A search for her on Google brings up 112,000 pages in 0.54 sec, and a number of affectionate and adoring fan websites, with one listing fans from countries as far apart as Denmark, New Zealand, Trinidad and Korea!
To the many millions of fans of the show she co-stars in, she’s the man eatin’, pill poppin’, vodka drinkin’ Karen Walker, but to her fans online she is also the Divine Miss M (alongside Bette Midler, we assume).
That isn’t where the musical comparisons end though, because actress and singer Megan Mullally’s own website has a rather rakish-looking picture of her, but is also is largely based around her singing career with her band Supreme Music Program. She is the vocalist, alongside Joseph Berardi on percussion, Greg Kuehn on keyboards, Stuart Mathis playing many guitars and helping with vocals, Doug Livingston – on the unique pedal steel, mandolin, and sousaphone and Piotr Jandula on the viola.
Their debut CD The Sweetheart Break-In came out in 2001, and was soon followed by Big As A Berry, a collection of classic but eclectic standards from legends including Lennon and McCartney, Bobbie Gentry, Randy Newman, Bertholdt Brecht and Kurt Weill and Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan.
Mullally has a very strong musical side, although she can’t actually read music, and aside from the showcase of her skills when she hosted Saturday Night Live in February last year, she has appeared in concert with Patty Lupone and Michael Feinstein, and takes the stage at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. It’s all a far cry from the hugely successful television program she has won award after award for – “Will & Grace”.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in Oklahoma, she originally studied ballet at high school, but once she realized that: “My favorite ballet roles were the ones where I was required to act – having a mad scene and then dying on stage was the best part”, a new path started to emerge.
“I like to take chances, and that’s the key to comedy – dancing like an idiot but doing it with wild abandon”.
After studying English and Art History at Northwestern University, she then spent six years working in Chicago’s theater scene and eventually made the trip to Los Angeles, where she won her first regular television role playing Ellen Burstyn’s daughter on the short-lived “Ellen Burstyn Show.” Regular roles in other brief series, plus guest spots on “Seinfeld,” “Frasier,” “Mad About You,” “Wings,” “Caroline in the City” and “Just Shoot Me” followed, but it wasn’t until almost a dozen years later that she was offered the role of Karen – a role she nearly turned down.
The stage still played its part in her life, and among Mullally’s Broadway credits are the hit revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” with Matthew Broderick, as Marty in the revival of “Grease”, starring Rosie O’Donnell, “The Berlin Circle” and “Mayhem”. Her own one-woman musical, “Sweetheart”, also enjoyed a sold-out four-week run in Los Angeles and is soon due to return.
She has appeared in the feature films About Last Night âÂ?¦, Queens Logic, Monkey Bone and Stealing Harvard, as well as the upcoming Speaking of Sex, which stars Bill Murray and James Spader, and she also provided her unmistakable voice for Adele in Disney’s animated feature, Teacher’s Pet (2004).
Very different to her wild alter ego in real life, Megan is a soft-spoken homebody who loves gardening, and has a passion for reading, writing and music. She prefers the simple things in life – “I should have my ‘girl citizenship’ revoked. I never get facials. I never get my nails done. I’m so busy” – and is devoted to yoga; she thinks that her spiritual health is the most important thing in her life.
Some fantasies are exploded when she admits that she doesn’t feel like she has anything in common with Karen (except for her joyfulness and “openness” to bisexuality) and she is very happily married to actor Nick Offerman, who lives with her and her two poodles, Willa and Elmo.
