Melissa Leo plays comedy-club owner in Showtime series
There’s something to be said about having nothing. According to actress Melissa Leo, growing up without made her the woman she is today. Leo, who earned the Academy Award for her role as the fight manager-mother in “The Fighter,” says, “I had a great blessing in that I grew up in a family with very little means. So when as a young actor I got hungry, it was not unfamiliar.
“That willingness to do without, that willingness (to know) it wasn’t about having whatever I wanted to eat in a day, it was what I NEEDED to eat in a day. That’s how I was brought up. That is absolutely what gets me sitting here today.”
Actually what gets her sitting here today is another mouth-gaping performance by Leo. She plays the tough comedy-club owner and impresaria in Showtime’s “I’m Dying Up Here,” premiering June 4.
Executive produced by Jim Carrey, the series is about the burgeoning comics of the ‘70s – many of whom are the top rib-ticklers of today. Though loosely disguised, many of them are recognizable. And while the legendary Mitzi Shore ran Hollywood’s famous Comedy Club in those days, Leo insists she’s not playing Shore.
“I have to say my first response when I was invited into the show and saw the script and read it, I was delighted. But I was SO surprised they were asking me to play Goldie. So I was a little daunted. And there’s a pilot episode scene where I’m having cocaine and am quite riled, I thought, ‘Ewwww, I don’t know …”
But Leo insists it’s the roles that frighten her the most that she relishes. “When we feel that fear that we can’t do something it needs to be done, I think,” says Leo who’s wearing a tweedy jacket with black stripes, a black lace top, draped by four necklaces.
“Because we wouldn’t be afraid if it weren’t so important. And so then you just screw your courage to the sticking post and march forward. I reference my upbringing of not having much. You cannot have anything if you keep skirting around the fire. When you go through that blaze that’s when the gifts arrive. When you skirt round it that’s all you’ll ever have,” she nods.
“They think, ‘Oh, such confidence!’ No, it’s acting. That’s acting. So every day I work it’s that process of surmounting what’s terrifying. It’s a blessing to me.”
Before she was 10, her parents divorced and her father drifted out of the picture. Her mother, who was working on her graduate degree in early childhood education, moved Melissa and her brother to Vermont.
Her father’s departure had a long-term effect on her. “When my dad left was confusing to me, that set up some difficulty later in life of how that gets dealt with,” she says.
“A couple of parents in the house is a really good thing for a child growing up, two different people. Then when I had my own son, we had some pretty tough years.”
The tough years were precipitated when she and her son’s father split up. “I was not going to continue residing with his father,” she says. “And finding out how our family would get shaped those were pretty tough years. A lot of it was the five years I was on ‘Homicide: Life on the Street,’” she sighs. Her son is 29 and doing graduate work in fine art in Frankfurt, Germany.
She says she’d love to engage another sweetheart, but doubts that will happen. “It’s quite a mess out there and I’m not a man, never been a man, but it feels like it’s a bit harder. A woman partners when she’s younger, or she doesn’t. I would love to find somebody who’s a big, strong, strapping man who would let me also be whoever the heck I might be.”