Comedy is served
Michaela Watkins cooks up laughs in ‘Dinner with the Parents’
Michaela Watkins, who stars in the new Freevee comedy series “Dinner with the Parents,” will always have Boston close to her heart, for it was here she first knew she was funny.
“I moved to the Boston area with my mom when
I was 15. Wellesley specifically,” Watkins, 52, recalled during a Zoom interview. “I’d visited my dad in Syracuse (they were divorced). When I got back, off the train, she said, ‘By the way, I signed you up for an audition for a community playhouse. Now you’ll have to put up or shut up.’
“I liked to crack people up but I didn’t think it was something I would get to do on the stage and everything.
“So I was in a British farce called ‘See How They Run’ and I played Ida the maid — she’s Cockney — and I got to crack up a roomful of people. And then that became my drug of choice, and continues to be to this day.”
When Watkins said yes to playing Jane Lange, a homemaker in “Dinner with the Parents,” “My husband said, ‘You should really watch the British version and see what you think.’
“I did — and I was cracking up so hard. Then I thought, ‘I can’t watch any more episodes (I think I watched like two) because I was laughing so much. I love British comedy; British humor is the top tippy top. But I couldn’t watch anymore because I didn’t want to be derivative in any way, shape or form.
“I knew that I was going to completely make Jane, this mother, my own.
“The mother of this family who cooks dinner doesn’t sound like a very exciting role but I knew we would get to ‘play’ with each other, and the writers will write to our strengths.”
Jane is married to Harvey (Dan Bakkedahl) and every week their two boys, who are in their 20s, come to dinner — a feast of embarrassments.
“Jane is the matriarch of this family. Well, I guess my mother Nana, played by Carol Kane, also lives with us and is the true matriarch of the family. But Jane is really,” Watkins explained.
“And it’s funny because she has to be a mother to the kids. And then she’s kind of a kid to her mother. So she’s constantly… between trying to parent and just regressing to an insecure person who’s a little lost and feels like they don’t really have much purpose.
“Jane loves her family deeply but also wishes she was just more a little extra in every way. And she’s constantly trying to, I guess, improve her circumstances.”
Freevee streams 2 episodes of “Dinner With the Parents” on April 18.