Actress blooms late with a vengeance
Alison Wright, best-known as Martha on The Americans, now juggles multiple roles
NEW YORK— Alison Wright is having her moment, every day a birthday cake. She has blown up at age 40, geriatric for most actresses, and it’s all the more delicious for having taken nearly two decades and an eternity of tending tables.
She never even played a corpse on Law & Order, the television port of entry for New York stage actors.
The first time she landed a pilot — the first time she was ever on a series set — was as poor, frumpy, two-timed yet unsinkable Martha Hanson on FX’s acclaimed The Americans.
Now, she’s starring on Broadway, playing a factory worker seeking solace in the bottle in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize and earned three Tony nominations on Tuesday, including one for Best Play.
Wright is British by birth, yet she works as an American actress, rarely hired to use her natural accent.
“I’m a citizen” of the United States, she says. “I’ve paid my dues.”
She’s scored a trio of roles on quality TV series, playing sharp Pauline Jameson on FX’s Feud: Bette and Joan, devious Marjorie on Amazon’s Sneaky Pete and, most notably, Martha on The Americans, now in its fifth and penultimate season.
In Tuesday’s episode — spoiler alert! — we found poor Martha living in exile in the U.S.S.R., her sham marriage to Clark Westerfeld (Clark being Soviet agent Philip Jennings, played by Matthew Rhys) over. Fans came to adore Martha. “Alison is constantly surprising you with her wisdom, her sense of humour, her overwhelming dignity,” observe executive producers and showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields. “Her dedication helped transform the character into the complicated woman audiences came to love.”
That success would take so long to come to Wright was predicted by early colleagues.
“As a young actress, everyone thought I would come into my own when I was much older,” she says. “I think probably it was because they thought I wasn’t beautiful.”
She says this as a matter of consensus, though to gaze at Wright, looking glam in borrowed clothes from Zero + Maria Cornejo, is to consider the observation — to borrow a Britishism — rubbish.
“I never thought I’d be in film and television,” says Wright, who always longed to be on the American stage. “I didn’t think that people who looked like me could be on TV.”
She had to wait for the medium to mature before she could land work.
In person, Wright is smarter, smaller, younger, funnier and lovelier than Martha who, in the pilot script, is described as “very plain.”
Martha was always destined to last longer than most of the prey of murderous agents Philip and Elizabeth. Says Wright, “It’s nice how deeply Martha has touched so many people and they can be sympathetic to her plight. Unlike the two leads, she is a good person. She doesn’t deserve all that.”
Wright was slow to realize how key a role Martha and the show would play in her career.
“I don’t think it was until the third season of The Americans that I began to think I might really be onto a win- ner,” she says.
Then, the call, the stuff of a New York waitress’s dreams. “It was a straight offer to play this role in Ryan Murphy’s new show,” she says of landing a part in The Feud.
Straight offer, as is no audition, hon, the part’s all yours. What Murphy wanted Wright to do was play Pauline Jameson, a composite character, assistant to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? director Robert Aldrich, played by Alfred Molina.
Murphy described her “as whip smart, cool as a cucumber, and she could hold her own against Bette and Joan. He wanted her to have sort of an Eve Arden feel,” Wright says.
Graham Yost, an executive producer of The Americans, and an executive producer and showrunner on Sneaky Pete, says that “of all the heart-rending scenes in the run of The Americans, seeing poor Martha spirited off to the Soviet Union ranks for me as the most affecting.” He cast Wright in Sneaky Pete, about a con man hiding from violent gangsters, because “I wanted to see her play someone who gets revenge,” he says. “And I wanted to hear her lovely northern English accent.”
Wright is the only child of an accountant father and a mother who did social work with the elderly. Her dramatic tendencies were first noted at age 4. An aunt said to Wright’s mother, “She’s either going to be on the stage or on the streets.”
By grade school, Wright was performing in musical pantomimes, a British tradition. She took classes in musical theatre, tap dancing and ice skating, her mother working two jobs to pay for it all. Wright read Stanislavsky and saw the direction her acting would take.
She moved to New York to study. She waited tables. She waited more tables at no-frills burger joints, never at swank destinations.
She kept acting. “I worked steadily in small things only friends came to see and random people, like many hard-working New York actors paying their dues,” Wright says.
“I worked in smaller theatre companies that were not able to produce much work and independent films that nobody ever sees, including me.”
Fun, and yet her income was a pittance, she was the poorest of all her friends and health insurance was long a luxury. All that has changed. “I have health insurance now,” she says. She lives in Harlem in a nice apartment with her maltipoo, Luigi. She’s committed to another season of Sneaky Pete. She is scheduled to be in Sweat through September if ticket sales stay strong.
And she may appear on the last season of The Americans.
“One day, I’ll be rich enough and cool enough to live in Brooklyn,” she muses. “This is just the beginning for me. I feel like my life just started.”
But for the moment, she’s a 40year-old Broadway actress in a Tonynominated play who still rides the subway to work.
“One day, I’ll be rich enough and cool enough to live in Brooklyn. This is just the beginning for me. I feel like my life just started.” ACTRESS ALISON WRIGHT