“I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this before, but…”
When someone is holding a microphone and saying that to a room full of people, it’s a pretty good indication you’re in a place a lot more comfortable and inviting than your average Emmy season event. And that was absolutely the vibe at The Ankler’s inaugural Women Shaping Television luncheon, where Emmy-nominated stars mingled with executives (Shondaland’s Betsy Beers, Paramount’s Jane Wiseman and Matt Thunell, Universal’s Beatrice Springborn and Erin Underhill, FX’s Sarah Bellante and Apple’s Michelle Lee and Dana Tuinier) and creatives (The Bear‘s Joanna Calo, Power creator Courtney Kemp, Yellowjackets‘ Ashley Lyle and more) and let themselves get candid, too.
Okay, sure, as a co-host of the lunch with Ankler CEO Janice Min, I’m biased! But spirits were truly so high at Spago in Beverly Hills yesterday, where more than 70 influential women in Hollywood joined us for the invite-only luncheon — including 10 Emmy-nominated actresses: Hulu’s Paradise co-star Shailene Woodley; Linda Cardellini (HBO’s DTF St. Louis); Janelle James, star of ABC’s Abbott Elementary; HBO Max’s The Pitt trio of Tal Anderson, Taylor Dearden and Fiona Dourif; Apple’s Widow’s Bay breakout Kate O’Flynn; HBO Max’s Hacks guest actress Lauren Weedman; Karolina Wydra from Apple’s Pluribus; and Constance Zimmer (FX’s Love Story).
For the onstage conversations, rather than dividing the actresses by the categories they’re nominated in, I wanted to group people together who would have a lot in common based on their work — and might be eager to talk to each other about it. Believe me, there’s no greater thrill as a moderator than when your subjects ask each other better questions than you could have come up with. (And during all three of our panels, it worked better than I possibly could have imagined.)
On Monday, I’ll share the full video of the panel conversations — make sure you’re refreshing The Ankler’s YouTube page for updates in the meantime — and for more photographs from the event, which was presented by Morgan Stanley Global Sports and Entertainment and sponsored by SharkNinja and Lifetime, visit The Ankler on Instagram. For today’s newsletter, though, I’m revealing some highlights of our conversations — full of frank and fascinating stories from women with plenty to celebrate this season.
Good to Be Bad
For our first group conversation, I wanted to bring together three actresses who are all Emmy nominees this year for playing characters the audience both loves and hates, sometimes within the same episode.
“People did seem to like the character, but I’m so used to people lying!” said Weedman, who earned her first Emmy nomination this year after five seasons of playing the brash Mayor Jo on Hacks, a woman who can dominate a room just as effectively as Weedman did in real life.
As she cracked jokes about improvising with the Hacks scripts (“There was a script — I acknowledged it”), Weedman had the entire room howling — none louder than Hacks co-creators and fellow nominees Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, who watched Weedman with open adoration from a nearby table.
“I was allowed freedom, and I got to come back as a guest star, and that’s rare,” Weedman continued. “I’m excited about the confidence that it gave me. And it comes at an age when I already feel like I’ll do what I want. So I look forward to it, now that people know that I also am capable of that — that controlled mental illness.”
There was a very different kind of control being exercised on Pluribus by Wydra, who plays the mysterious Zosia, the human ambassador for the globe-conquering hive mind who sparks a highly unusual but genuinely emotional relationship with Rhea Seehorn’s skeptical Carol. Playing Zosia required a lot of restraint, Wydra explained, playing someone who is “so content and blissed out and peaceful.” But she added, “It’s so beautiful when you get an opportunity to be on the show where you can play so much and try different things within the contained version of who Zosia is.”
Even though she’s returning for a second season of Pluribus, Wydra — who had previous roles in True Blood and Justified and had stepped away from acting for six years to raise a family — also said she’s eager for a role that’s the opposite of Zosia: “I would love to play someone batshit after playing someone so contained.”
Cardellini also got to break out a bit on DTF St. Louis, acknowledging that many of her most successful past TV roles (on shows like Netflix’s Dead to Me and NBC’s beloved cult series Freaks and Geeks) were as characters who are “warm and open — and Carol is none of those things.” On DTF St Louis, she plays a woman who is initially suspected of being involved in her husband’s death, but who reveals a surprisingly stiff spine as the season continues. “By the end of the season, I had people apologizing for misjudging me,” Cardellini revealed. “I expected her to be greedy or self-serving or manipulative — and maybe she’s a little of some of those things. But that wasn’t really everything she was.”
“I wasn’t expecting where it was going to go,” Wydra chimed in. “I thought you were the bad guy!”
“I knew it from the beginning,” Weedman deadpanned.
Supporting Stars
When you think of the most unforgettable scenes on television in the past year, odds are at least one of them included one of the four actresses who participated in our second panel — Anderson, O’Flynn, Woodley and Zimmer.
In the case of O’Flynn, it’s actually an entire standout episode, the already legendary “Beach Reads” from Widow’s Bay, in which her quiet administrator character, Patricia, throws a party that turns witchy, bloody and hilarious. O’Flynn, it should be said, was the person everyone in the room wanted to meet, including her fellow nominees. How did she create a character who captivated so many of us? O’Flynn somehow makes it sound very simple.
“That episode was just so brilliantly written by Mackenzie Dohr that I just reread it and reread it and honestly just sort of wandered around in my flat just pretending to be Patricia,” O’Flynn said.
O’Flynn praised the immersive world of Widow’s Bay (“It did just feel like a massive playground”) in a very similar way to how Anderson talked about the set of The Pitt, where her character Becca — the sister of Dearden’s Dr. Mel King — arrived this season for both medical treatment and a long overdue declaration of her own independence.
Anderson is an actress with autism and an advocate for neurodivergent individuals. In playing Becca, who has autism, she tried to remember her character “is an outsider in The Pitt. I had to watch the tone of her actions and remember her unique perspective so that all that contrast would come across.”
No one had to go through quite as much onscreen this year as Woodley, who admitted that unlike her Paradise character Annie, “I’ve never given birth — and I’ve never died.” (Sorry for the spoiler!) Putting her character through both of those things, Woodley continued, required her to “pretend my ass off and hope it goes well.” But she also leaned hard on her co-star Sterling K. Brown — “I really trusted him and his heart as a human being,” Woodley added. “He gave me the space to stretch myself in as many ways as possible.”
Then there are those roles that transform an actress. That’s what happened for Zimmer after playing Ann Marie Messina, the mother of Carolyn and Lauren Bessette, on Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
“It made me incredibly more emotional and in touch with my feelings and the rawness of what it means to be a woman in her 50s, and how those women — and I say ‘those’ even though I am one of them — how differently we are treated and seen and spoken to and not listened, not heard,” she said.
To embody Messina, Zimmer was brutally honest about playing (and being) a woman in her 50s. For the role, she wore a wig of gray hair, and told the rapt luncheon guests that when she first walked on set, no one even talked to her.
“It was the first time in my career where I was like, ‘Wow, I can fucking do anything, and nobody’s going to care,’” she said. “It gave me this power and this strength to say, ‘Oh really? Watch this. I’m not going to fucking disappear.’”
Trade Secrets
Now, at last, we get to the actress who told us something she’d never told anyone else before. For our third and final panel, I gathered three nominees who have had the chance to play the same character across multiple seasons, watching both the character and themselves evolve in the process.
“A thing that’s kept me interested in the character is that she’s growing and learning and adapting, but her core personality stays the same,” said James, who earned her fifth Emmy nomination this year for playing the audacious Principal Ava Coleman on Abbott Elementary. “She’s learning lessons and adjusting, but she is still who she is, which is a character. In every sense of the word.”
Here comes the twist, though: “I’ve never said this before, but a thing that surprises me about Ava is I don’t like her,” James said, to audible gasps in the room. “But people do, and that’s the skill. My job is to make this person likable and charming, and that’s what keeps me engaged.”
Dourif, currently playing Dr. McKay on The Pitt (filming for season three is underway), seemed to immediately clock what James meant: “Does Ava like herself?”
“Ava doesn’t like herself, so that’s part of it,” James responded. (Remember what I wrote about interview subjects asking each other questions?) “She’s mean, and she is guarded, and her meanness is a protection for her,” James added. “And everybody knows that person where you’re just like, ‘Oh man, I don’t like this bitch, but she seems like a good time.’ She’s kind of always acting, and that’s how I play her.”
Though Ava is the opposite of a heroic educator, James and her Abbott co-stars have gotten used to hearing from teachers who are grateful to see their work portrayed onscreen. The same is happening for Dourif and her Pitt co-star Dearden; both agreed that their work on the show has gotten more comfortable, and even playful, as they’ve gone along.
“I think they start writing to our strengths,” Dourif said. Dearden agreed, and added, “I think there’s a bit of your own character bible that when you get to play it longer, you have a more significant knowledge of, ‘Oh, Mel would do this this way.’ Especially for your first season of anything, you’re kind of like, ‘I hope this works. I have no idea.’”
From “I hope this works” to being an Emmy nominee — it was a familiar feeling for so many of the people who joined us, and maybe one of the many reasons the entire day felt like such a celebration. See the video evidence for yourself in Monday’s newsletter, where I’ll also have dispatches from some of the splashiest campaign events happening in Los Angeles this weekend. Until then, back into the Emmy FYC mayhem I go!
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