Murphy looks to put ‘Schitt’s’ role behind her
Ottawa-born actress out to prove she’s more than a one-hit character
Not even “A Little Bit Alexis.”
After “Schitt’s Creek” ended its run last year, Annie Murphy longed to distance herself from the role of the privileged-thenpenniless socialite that won her an Emmy.
“It was really important to me, coming off ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ that I do a character as far from Alexis Rose as I possibly could,” says the Ottawa-born actress, “not because I didn’t have the best time of my life playing her, but just because I really needed to prove to myself that I could do something else.”
Murphy, 34, had minor guest roles in a few series but was a breakout in Dan and Eugene Levy’s endearing comedy about a high-society family that struggles to adjust to small-town life when their fortune evaporates.
But casting directors tried to typecast Murphy into roles similar to the frothy and (initially) shallow and self-seeking celebutante.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Listen, it’s not at all like Alexis,’ ” Murphy recalls. “It’s a completely different character. She has a totally different hair colour and drives a car and has money.”
Then “Kevin Can F**k Himself” came along. AMC’s comedy (premiering at 9 p.m., Sunday) centres on Allison, a woman unhappily married to Kevin (Eric Petersen), a sports-obsessed, blue-collar cable guy in Worcester, Massachusetts. She dreams of a better life where roaches don’t crawl across a linoleum floor. (In real life, Murphy has been married to musician Menno Versteeg for nearly a decade.)
Throughout the eight-episode season, the series shifts between two sharply divergent tones: a sitcom with a laugh track, in which Murphy’s Allison serves as the butt of jokes made by her inattentive and immature husband, and a grittier drama in which Allison plots an escape from her sitcom life.
Creator Valerie Armstrong (“SEAL Team” and “Lodge 49”) was inspired by the familiar CBS sitcom wife, classic foils for their typically less-attractive husbands (think “Kevin Can Wait,” “The King of Queens,” “Everybody Loves Raymond”).
The show title is a play on the Kevin James sitcom “Kevin Can Wait” which aired on CBS from 2016 to ’18. After a lacklustre first season, Erin Hayes, who played James’s wife, was killed off the show and replaced by Leah Remini as a potential love interest. Remini and James co-starred on “The King of Queens” for nine seasons.
Murphy said she now sees many of those sitcoms as missed opportunities.
“They do not give a thought to the women involved, so many of whom are spectacular comedic actresses,” Murphy says. “And they give them very, very, very little to work with.”
She wasn’t always this enlightened and it’s something she’s “deeply ashamed” about.
“I’d watch a sitcom no problem with the rest of them and that’s just the way it was,” Murphy says. “I didn’t really overthink it and now I can do nothing but overthink it.
“There is no going back to watching a sitcom the way that I used to because now I have a completely different lens on when I watch. Just to see the amount of misogyny and homophobia and racism that we are being kind of coached to laugh at in these sitcoms is really jaw-dropping. You can’t unsee it.”
Armstrong says she wanted to follow the wife “from her brightly lit, laugh-tracked living room with her funny husband” to the kitchen, where her unfunny reality sinks in.
“In there, you can see just what her life actually looks like, and she’s miserable and alone, and no one really seems to pay attention out in that other room,” Armstrong says.
“Allison was so appealing because she was so different from Alexis,” Murphy says. “But she was also this woman who was just so full of anger and hurt and sadness, with a deep desire to change her life for the better.
“It’s that desperate hope that I can identify with,” Murphy adds. “Especially after this past year, so many people have stepped back and taken stock of what their life looks like and what they want it to look like, and how they want it to change and who they want to be a part of it. That’s exactly what Allison’s doing in the show.”
Armstrong says Murphy brings a rooting interest.
“We knew that we needed humour in it, and we needed it to come from Allison’s sort of rage and desperation,” Armstrong says. “We needed someone who could make that funny and Annie does that in spades, but she also holds her own in the (sitcom world) and she also completely nails every dramatic scene that we throw at her.”
Murphy, who is also featured in the upcoming season of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” says TV scripts are less often about women solely obsessed with a significant other. “I really do think that things are starting to change,” she says, “and that just having a female character who likes her boyfriend and that’s about it is coming to an end, thank God!”
“Schitt’s’ ” Alexis falls into the category of multi-dimensional women. She ended a relationship to pursue a career in public relations. What she’s been up to since the show wrapped in April 2020 will remain a mystery, for now.
“I wish I had something to tell you,” Murphy says when asked about a possible reunion. “I wish I had something to tell me and I just don’t.”
News as hard to swallow as Moira Rose-endorsed fruit wine.
“Allison was so appealing because she was so different from Alexis.” ANNIE MURPHY
ON HER NEW ROLE IN “KEVIN CAN F**K HIMSELF”