Hello, and bonjour from the Cannes Film Festival, where, as you read this, I am overcoming my paltry French and righteous jet lag to hopefully catch my first-ever Cannes screening: Fatherland, the new film from Cold War director Paweł Pawlikowski, starring Sandra Hüller.
Things will really swing into gear starting on Friday, when The Ankler kicks off our live Croisette Conversations programming in partnership with Brand Innovators. I’m thrilled to be sitting down with some of the festival’s biggest directors and major movie industry players.
Follow along on The Ankler’s YouTube channel, and make sure you’re subscribed for our Cannes Daily dispatches, where my colleagues (and Cannes flatmates!) Ashley Cullins and Manori Ravindran will be sharing beat-by-beat updates on the biggest stories from the fest, as well as videos from our Croisette Conversations. My newsletter on Monday will do its very best to recap all of it — plus hopefully some good gossip from the parties and word on the actual centerpiece of this event: the movies, duh!
One last plug, before I get back to the other big event still happening all around us: Emmy season! I’m going live tomorrow with my East Coast colleague Christopher Rosen to talk all about Cannes, starting at 6 a.m. PT (bring your coffee!). Watch along on YouTube or subscribe to Prestige Junkie After Party to get a ping when we’re up!
Now, let’s return to some regularly scheduled programming: my conversation with the prolific character actress Alanna Ubach, a woman who is a key part of three major Emmy contenders this season — and has the career she always wanted.
No Small Parts
On the incredibly prolific TikTok fan account @alannaubachfans, a recent post paid tribute, set to “Non-Stop” from Hamilton, to a year that has been “absolutely insane so far 🔥.” The reel includes clips from Peacock’s Ted, HBO’s Euphoria and HBO Max’s Hacks, plus red carpet and fan convention appearances and a moment that appears to have been shot at the top of the Empire State Building. One of many comments reads “Emmy Academy, wake tf up.”
Ubach’s fans may be amazed by how many different roles she can play and how often she’s working. Ubach herself, however, claims this is nothing new.
“Early on in my career — and I sounded insane to most people — I said, ‘I want to be a character actor.’ I want to be the potatoes and the butter and the broccoli on the side,” she tells me. “Which is why you have to say yes to everything, because you don’t get paid as much as the leads. For that much money, I’ll play a hot dog vendor — why not!”
But Ubach, 50, is talking to me on Zoom and is the focus of a TikTok fan account with over 70,000 followers because she’s doing a whole lot more than playing a hot dog vendor. (Not that she wouldn’t crush that part, too.) Last month, she returned to Euphoria as the blowsy mother to Sydney Sweeney and Maude Apatow’s characters, delivering a truly harrowing mother-of-the-bride speech to Sweeney and then joining a James Brown impersonator onstage to perform “Get Low” during the reception.
Over on Hacks, she’s playing the booking manager of Madison Square Garden, dealing with the many demands of Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance — with more shenanigans to come as the Emmy-winning comedy hits its final three episodes. Those guest appearances come on the heels of her main role as the overwhelmingly sweet mom on Peacock’s raunchy family comedy Ted, which debuted its second season in March. I didn’t even realize until after we hung up that she also popped up on an episode of Law & Order this season!
It is not, in fact, actually easy to make all of this work, at least not from a scheduling perspective. To return as Suze on Euphoria, a role she describes as “winning the lotto, creatively speaking,” Ubach had to take time away from the second season of Ted. Making that happen is a process she has become very familiar with over the years. “What you do is you call the line producer from one production and then the line producer from the other production and you introduce them to each other and they try to make these dates work out,” Ubach tells me. “Most of the time they never work out, and other times they really do and you get lucky.”
Ubach wasn’t the only person on the Euphoria set navigating scheduling conflicts, of course, with Sweeney, Zendaya and Jacob Elordi all having become megastars since the show first debuted in 2019. Filming the wedding between Sweeney’s Cassie and Elordi’s Nate and reuniting most of the main cast, Ubach says, “must have been just open heart surgery on the fly. Impossible work. I really didn’t believe it.”
Full scripts of Euphoria episodes aren’t shared even with the actors — Ubach says it took her a while to even figure out who her onscreen daughter was marrying — and she’s of course not revealing anything about what might happen next, including if Suze will return at all. (She hasn’t appeared since the wedding episode.) But she did indulge me in some speculation about how Suze might feel about Cassie’s new career pivot to OnlyFans, which ramped up in the most recent episode. As with many of Ubach’s answers about her work, she’s got a fantastic personal story to go along with it.
“I remember my sister wanted to be a model when she was 18,” Ubach tells me. “The first modeling gig she got was bikini ads, and my mom was a real snob, very highly opinionated. When my sister showed her the bikini ads, we were just cringing, waiting for my mom to say something that would put her in therapy for the next 30 years. Instead, she said, ‘Oh, look at those legs! That’s my baby, my masterpiece.’”
Mother of the Year
It’s hard to imagine Euphoria’s Suze having much at all to talk about with Ted’s Susan — and even harder to wrap your head around how they’re played by the same person. But Ubach dives into the Ted role with just as much relish, playing a mother so sweet and self-sacrificing that she tells her teenage son, with a completely straight face, “I’m your mother. You don’t have to thank me or appreciate me or even notice me. I’ll always be right here.”
Ubach credits Seth MacFarlane — who created the series based on his 2012 hit about a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear — for crafting the show so rigorously that he and the writers often forget how much comedy they’ve built into it.
“I think the beautiful thing about Seth is that he really does have no idea of how funny he is,” Ubach says. “It’s very much like breathing for him.”
Though she’s excelled at playing wisecrackers and party girls over the years — shout out to bandana-wearing Noreen, who is hopelessly devoted to Marcia in The Brady Bunch Movie, and, of course, Elle Woods’ ride-or-die Serena in Legally Blonde and its sequel — Ubach is equally good at playing the deeply sincere Susan. She credits The Carol Burnett Show and the New York prank call comedy act Jerky Boys for giving her an early love of trying out new voices — but cites an entirely unexpected inspiration for capturing Susan’s mix of earnest devotion and sneaky comedic genius.
“I went to an Episcopalian school and then to catechism across the street at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and the nuns were out of their minds,” Ubach says. “They have this sort of childlike way about them for obvious reasons. They have this higher calling, and sex is out of the equation. So they have a whole lot of fun being silly and goofy and being big believers. So I said, for Susan, we’re going to make her Sister Mary. That’s who she is.”
When you talk to Ubach, you get a sense of how someone can sustain the level of energy required to work on so many projects, let alone have what feels like a career breakthrough at the age of 50. (“Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!” she jokes. “Pre-menopausal!”) Her secret to what keeps her going is, of course, another fantastic story:
“I was born and raised in Downey, Calif., in East L.A., and there was this Santa Claus who just loved what he did. The kids that sat on his lap, he made sure that he’d say what they wanted extra loud so the parents could hear,” she says. “And then if the parents couldn’t hear, he’d make one of the elves write it down and slip it to the parents. He was hired every single year. I remember going to Santa up until I was around 7 or 8, and then, over the years, hanging out at Ferrell’s with my friends smoking cigarettes and people saying, ‘Hey man, there’s that same Santa.’”
Ubach continues, “I do feel like that Santa Claus, it’s weird. I just really, really love doing this and it’s so silly and insane because I’ve been doing this for such a long time. It’s seriously all I know.”
