Leo stars in a drama about laughs
Dying is easy. Playing the owner of a circa-1970s L.A. comedy club — THAT’S hard.
“But when I say that it was hard and that it was a reach for me, I mean: Those are the things that interested me as an actor,” says Melissa Leo, who stars as Goldie, the tough-love gatekeeper to fame and fortune for a rising wave of standup comics on I’m Dying Up Here, airing on HBO Canada.
The 10-episode season dwells on a swarm of young comedians (played by Ari Graynor, Michael Angarano, Clark Duke and Al Madrigal, among others) whose pilgrimage to stardom — a careerlaunching spot on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, then a sweet TV or movie deal — has first led them to Goldie. But dying is easy. Landing 15 minutes on Goldie’s stage is hard. Goldie is no pushover.
“So much storytelling asks women to be somebody’s something — somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife, somebody’s sidekick. Goldie is not like that,” Leo says with satisfaction. “She is allowed to be her own character. She is a CHARACTER!” As in: odd, eccentric or noteworthy person. “And I like playing CHARACTERS.”
Through a three-decade-long career, Leo, 56, has declared independence and wholeness for her characters in such films as Frozen River, 21 Grams and The Fighter (for which she won the best supporting actress Oscar), and on TV projects including All the Way (playing Lady Bird Johnson to Bryan Cranston’s Lyndon Johnson), Mildred Pierce, Treme and, Homicide: Life on the Streets.
Both on and off the screen, she seems free of vanity.
In contrast, “Goldie is a lady,” says Leo, leaning hard on that word.
“She knows how to use her feminine qualities, her sexuality, to get what she wants. That was not something I was brought up with. To play Goldie, with her makeup and bleached-blond hair, I had to act like a girl, and that was, oddly, the reach for me.”