‘I’m still trying to recover’: Annie Potts on Ghostbusters, Toy Story – and the car crash that almost killed her
The hallowed beige flight suit was not in the plan. “It wasn’t originally scripted that way,” says Annie Potts of her character Janine’s move from longsuffering receptionist to action hero in the latest Ghostbusters film. Potts has starred, however briefly, in all of the films in the franchise, including the 2016 allfemale version. The forthcoming film, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, is the fifth Ghostbusters film in all, and is released later this month.
“It wasn’t until about halfway through shooting that Gil [Kenan, the director] came to me and said: ‘I think we’re going to put her in the flight suit.’ Of course, I was thrilled, because women can do everything that men do.”
As well as Janine returning, the original team played by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson are also back; Harold Ramis, who played Egon Spengler, died in 2014. Spengler’s estranged daughter and her children are part of the new crew (having been introduced in 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife). “So they have the young ghostbuster, and the mom ghostbuster, and then they have me, the old lady ghostbuster,” says Potts, delightedly.
Ask her why she thinks Ghostbusters is so enduring, and she replies: “Well, it’s made a lot of money.”
But the reason for that is the affection audiences have for it. “It was uniquely hilarious and scary – it’s scalarious – and that turned out to be a very good combination.” For those of us who loved it as children, she thinks we’re trying to “get back to that moment where you’ve been both tickled and scared. And so here we are, 40 years later.” We’re speaking over Zoom; Potts is in New York for the premiere, and she’s warm, funny and has the straightforward air of someone who has seen it all.
Potts, who has a long-running role in the TV series Young Sheldon, says it is “a delight” to work with her ghostbusting colleagues again. “It’s like, hey, we made it another five years or whatever. When we first started working, we were all just kids.” It must be poignant to notice time passing, and the people who are missing – Ramis, and Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two films and produced all of them. He died in 2022. “Yes,” Potts says. “There’s a couple of vacancies.”
Aykroyd, who wrote the original with Ramis, was friends with Murray. Was it intimidating to join an already tight team? “No, although we come from different places,” says Potts. “I was trained in theatre, and they’re quintessentially improvisation people. I’d done some in theatre school, but I like a good script – memorise it, think about it. The improvisation thing scared me, because I thought the script was so good. But they were always trying to make it better. I thought that was the wildest thing – the actors were allowed to make up lines. Like, what?” She laughs. “But I liked it, and I ended up sort of being their straight man.”
Somebody recently asked her why she thought Janine was so “nasty”. “I didn’t realise she was. And they were like, ‘Yes, she was always mad!’ … Because she was working with idiots! I mean, I think she thought they were morons, they didn’t have a plan. But people love to say, ‘She was a bitch,’ because that’s the go-to, isn’t it, when a woman knows what they’re doing and how to do it.”
Did she ever feel Janine was sidelined, that the team’s female receptionist should have had a bigger role? “I don’t know,” she says breezily. “The balance of things was pretty correct, I thought. It’s always nice to have a larger part of the pie, but I’ve been very happy to do what I got to do.”
When Ghostbusters came out in 1984, Potts was 31, a single mother and a working actor with some TV success behind her, “trying to make it in Hollywood”. Did the success of Ghostbusters massively change her life? She thinks back. “I try not to let anything like that change my life too much,” she says. “I guess my visibility ticked up, but of course, 40 years ago, we didn’t have the internet. It was different then, you could run below the radar.” I wonder if, having had that taste of commercial success, the next step was to try to become a huge Hollywood lead? “I’m a practical person, I always felt the most practical thing that I could wish for was to have a long career that paid the rent, and that kind of worked out.” She points out that most actors don’t earn a living wage – only 14% of Screen Actors Guild members earn above the health-insurance threshold of $26,000, which was one reason for the recent strikes. “So I feel quite, as we say here in the US, blessed,” she says.
Potts wanted to be an actor for as long as she can remember. Growing up in Franklin, Kentucky, with her father working in business and her mother a full-time parent to her and her two older sisters, she would rush home from school to watch the 4pm film on TV. “Old classic movies – it was the 50s and your parents let you do that. I don’t even remember homework.” She loved funny women – Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball. “My very first memory of life was laying on my