I’m good for a while.ĭid making the show alleviate that brutality at all? And I was like, “Oh, this is what it’s like to feel alive.” I got the juice back in me. But I got to perform right before omicron hit. So not having that has put my happiness at a real deficit. It’s the thing that gets me out of bed and gets me excited.
What have the last couple of years, when that often hasn’t been on the table, been like for you as a creative person? It reminded me how integral live performance has been to your work. I rewatched Gynecological Wonder last night. To learn more about her role in the series, The Ringer spoke to Everett about grief, second chances, and family, both biological and chosen.
The show starts low key in time, though, it channels the full scope and singularity of Everett’s talents. (Everett cowrote the pilot with stand-up Bobcat Goldthwait, Sex and the City producer Michael Patrick King, and former HBO president Carolyn Strauss, who also works on Somebody Somewhere-a testament to her range of admirers.) But since Amazon declined to order Love You More to series, Somebody Somewhere is her most significant platform yet. Her performance in Sundance indie Patti Cake$ was critically acclaimed in 2017, Amazon produced and aired a pilot called Love You More, starring Everett as an aspiring singer who counsels teens with Down syndrome.
Her personal experiences inform the story her irrepressible energy sells Sam’s self-discovery, which culminates in Sam singing-what else?-a self-penned song about genitalia.Įverett has crossed over into movies and TV before. (Drag king Murray Hill also stars as Fred Rococo, a choir practice regular who teaches at an agricultural college.) But Everett is the series’ spine. Joel struggles to find a place in his religious community Sam’s older sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) mourns their sister in her own way, while both siblings try to reckon with their mother’s obvious drinking problem. HBO has marketed Somebody Somewhere as a “coming of middle age,” a description that doesn’t just apply to Sam. Through Sam, Everett can dip a toe back into live performance-though in her case, it was the pandemic that kept her from the stage, not a psychological block. She’s also an outlet for the kind of catharsis Everett hasn’t had regular access to since the coronavirus shuttered theaters nearly two years ago. To Everett, Sam is a version of her younger self, a woman who doesn’t trust her instincts or feel uninhibited enough to make a stranger motorboat her chest, a signature move in Everett’s cabaret act. For Sam, it’s a safe, welcoming space to get back into singing, a hobby she abandoned years ago. Through Joel (Jeff Hiller), Sam meets a circle of misfits who come together for weekly “choir practice.” In truth, the gathering is more like an open mic night that happens to take place in a church. Somebody Somewhere picks up six months later, when a dead-end job at a standardized test grading center reunites Sam with an old high school classmate. Like her character Sam, Everett hails from the deep Midwest Everett, too, lost an older sister to cancer, a tragedy that robs Sam of the only relative who truly gets her.
Somebody Somewhere may introduce Everett to a much larger audience, but that audience will meet a very different side of the performer who storms onstage swigging from a bottle of wine in a paper bag.Īnd yet the show, created by High Maintenance writers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen and produced by the Duplass brothers, is very much an extension of Everett. On the surface, it’s an imperfect star vehicle for the diva at its center. Where Everett is “larger than life,” the headline of a recent New Yorker profile, Somebody Somewhere is small and subdued where Everett is a New Yorker through and through, Somebody Somewhere settles into “the eighth-biggest town in Kansas,” where Everett’s character returns to take care of an ailing family member.
With the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz on bass, Everett leads the crowd in an infectiously filthy sing-along: “What I, what I, what I gotta do / What I gotta do to get that dick in my mouth?”Įverett is, in sum, the exact opposite of Somebody Somewhere, the new half-hour HBO series she leads throughout its seven-episode first season. Those outside the tri-state area can see her talents, among other things, on full display in Gynecological Wonder, a special that aired on Comedy Central in 2015. Backed by her band, the Tender Moments, Everett’s stage persona is loud, lewd, and boozy, belting obscene original lyrics to songs with names like “ Titties” and “ Fuck Shit Up.” Before the pandemic, Everett put on regular performances at Joe’s Pub, the more intimate stage of the famed Public Theater. Bridget Everett has built something of a reputation in her years on New York’s alt-cabaret scene.