Tough act to follow
IF you didn’t already know Katey Sagal from her role as tacky housewife Peg Bundy in the long-running Fox sitcom Married... With
Children, you may have discovered her later as Gemma Teller Morrow, the leather-clad mother hen of a California biker gang in the FX drama Sons Of Anarchy.
But the actress, 63, has led a life as colourful as any of her characters, some of which you can read about in her memoir Grace Notes: My Recollections, released this year. Raised in a showbiz family in Los Angeles – her parents were introduced by Norman Lear – she spent years trying to make it big in music, toiling as a singing waitress and ing backup for Bob Dylan, Etta James and Bette Midler. Sagal released an album of covers in 2013 and performs regularly with her band, the Reluctant Apostles.
The actress and mother of three returned to her sitcom roots last year with Superior Donuts, in which she stars as Officer Randy DeLuca, a cop in a rapidly gentrifying Chicago neighbourhood.
Gemma was a complicated woman. What do you think of her now that you have a little distance from the show?
I have enormous affection for her. She was so loyal to family, which is kind of my value system as well, but with an entirely different approach to that loyalty. I didn’t think at all that she was a bad person. It was really fun to play somebody that had such base instincts, and followed through with them. You know she didn’t just think about kicking your ass – she would kick your ass. We all have that instinct, but we don’t always act on it.
Your husband, Kurt Sutter, was the showrunner and creator of Sons Of Anarchy. Was it challenging to work together like that and would you do it again?
I would always work with him. He’s a really great writer. We definitely had our growing pains when we first started it, because the tendency was to bring it all home. We found a really good boundary in that he was the writer and I was the actor. What I really learned by living with (a writer) is my job as an actor is to interpret what they’re creating, it’s not to say “this is what I think should happen”.
Did you keep anything from Sons Of Anarchy? Gemma had some pretty cool leather.
I kept one piece – in the pilot she wore this long leather coat. And I have that coat. And I have the Peg Bundy wig in a plexiglass box at our house in Idaho, in a cool place so it doesn’t disintegrate. Did you think the show–or your acting career – was going to go anywhere?
I had just sort of dipped my toe in an acting career. I’d done one show (Mary) that lasted 13 episodes and I just thought, “Well, that’s done.” Then Married... With Children came along. I thought it was hysterically funny, and I thought nobody will ever watch this, and it was on this network that nobody had ever heard of. On the premiere night, they would play it three times in a row because they didn’t have any programming.
Would you be open to a Married... With Children revival? They’re all the rage.
I actually would. I thought it would be really fun to do it like on Netflix where we could swear. Every year it kind of comes up.
Ed can’t do anything because of Modern Family, I probably can’t do anything because of (Superior Donuts) and so it just never seems like the right time, but I would definitely be open to it.
We’ll see. True to Bundy form, it probably won’t happen.
So what motivated the change to acting?
I was very adamantly not going to be an actor. Music was my first love. I was going to be a singer-songwriter. I made two records, then I would get backup gigs and go on the road. But when I was in my late 20s it started to dawn on me that this isn’t really happening.
These friends of mine asked me to be in a musical and I got spotted by a theatrical agent. Then within six months I started working, and then within nine months I was on television. It happened very quickly, but it was kind of a conscious decision. I didn’t want to keep being a struggling artiste.
Do you think it helped that you didn’t have your heart set on it?
Oh, yeah, 100%. I got asked by CBS to come read for this sitcom, Mary. Danny Devito was the director, and it was with Mary Tyler Moore.
And I was like, are you kidding? I just went in not caring if I got it and not nervous because I just thought this is not what I do. It was the greatest lesson in not putting too much emphasis on the results.
Your parents died when you were young. How did that shape you?
I kind of went down the rabbit hole there for a minute, and it was a hard time throughout my 20s, because they died within five years of each other. I kind of just checked out for a while.
Then I came out of it. Now I would say I have an enormous appreciation for life. I really am grateful, not to sound really super corny, but for really simple beautiful things.
They say when your parents die is when you finally grow up, so I grew up young. – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service