She’d found her way there via New York, where, studying fashion, she started performing stand up as a drag queen named Miss Y, in a gold lamé coat and huge wig doing sets about “living extravagantly”. “A bunch of funny people trying to play the most unattractive person in the room, instead of trying to be perfect. When you have a foot-and-a-half mess of hair going straight up, like, how is that not fun?” She felt the same way when she found the Groundlings theatre in Los Angeles, an improv company that launched people like Maya Rudolph and Will Ferrell, as well as her husband and collaborator Ben Falcone. And there they could be exactly who they wanted to be.” Being a goth for McCarthy “was such an expression of joy. “This is back in the 80s where it wasn’t easy for my friends who were gay to be out.
That was the first time she played with characters, and the first time too that she found a little club of outsiders – she loved it, and she felt very protective of it. ‘Perfect people don’t exist’: Melissa McCarthy.
But,” she chuckles darkly, “the second I opened my mouth, the jig was up because they were like, ‘Ah, it’s only Missy McCarthy.’” “I remember being like, ‘This is the single greatest thing I’ve ever done’.” She loved “seeing who else I could be, and how that changed how people perceived me. She immediately dyed her hair blue and black and fashioned a pair of trousers from a polo-neck top. This was a place where that “milling your own flour” perfection was valued, so when she discovered a goth bar in Chicago, “it broke my brain”. She grew up on a corn-and-soybean farm in small town Illinois, where her main feeling as a teenage cheerleader was boredom. McCarthy’s story is one of unexpected diversions from the classic comedian’s path, and abrupt corners turned, seemingly, just for the fun of it. Sure, at 52 she is a star, one of the highest-paid actors in the world, a pillar of mainstream Hollywood comedy, but in our brief but glorious hour together on Zoom it was clear she is also: eccentric, earnest and fabulously camp, an outsider who has somehow been invited in. I am beard guy.”Īnd – yeah, I think she might be right.
It recharges my batteries.” In another life, would McCarthy be one of those people, roller-skating around a discount store, singing? Would she be beard guy? “I think…” she leans in, “I am one of those people.
Somebody who’s, like, really rocking their life, I want to be in their glow for a few minutes. “Yes, I get a true rush of joy when I can tell someone’s living just as they want. “I guess it’s because,” she thinks, “everything we’re sold is about perfection – are you making your own organic baby food? Are you milling your own gluten-free flour? So, I have a true love and obsession for someone who’s just like – this is me.” She grins. She doesn’t want to follow just anyone, she likes to follow, for example, the guy wearing all purple, or with his beard tucked into his belt, or the woman in headphones, singing. “It’s my therapy, I just find it wonderful.” she says, lightly. This is a shop where you can find, for example, patio furniture, a large rack of lamb, sparkly nail varnish and also an Oscar-nominated actress, twice a week, in sunglasses and facemask, staring at strangers. T he worst thing about being famous for Melissa McCarthy is how hard it’s become to follow strangers around a discount store called Big Lots.
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