A kinder kind of comedy
The worst thing about being famous for Melissa McCarthy is how hard it’s become to follow strangers around a discount store called Big Lots. This is a shop where you can find, for example, patio furniture, a large rack of lamb, sparkly nail varnish and also an Oscarnominated actress, twice a week, in sunglasses and facemask, staring at strangers.
‘‘It’s my therapy, I just find it wonderful.’’ she says, lightly.
Not just anyone. She doesn’t want to follow just anyone, she likes to follow, for example, the guy wearing all purple, or with his beard tucked into his belt, or the woman in headphones, singing.
‘‘I guess it’s because,’’ she thinks, ‘‘everything we’re sold is about perfection — are you making your own organic baby food? Are you milling your own glutenfree flour? So, I have a true love and obsession for someone who’s just like — this is me.’’ She grins. ‘‘Yes, I get a true rush of joy when I can tell someone’s living just as they want. Somebody who’s, like, really rocking their life, I want to be in their glow for a few minutes. It recharges my batteries.’’
In another life, would McCarthy be one of those people, rollerskating around a discount store, singing? Would she be beard guy?
Melissa McCarthy as the evil sea witch Ursula.
‘‘I think . . . ’’ she leans in, ‘‘I am one of those people. I am beard guy.’’
And — yeah, I think she might be right. Sure, at 52 she is a star, one of the highestpaid actors in the world, a pillar of mainstream Hollywood comedy, but in our brief but glorious hour together on Zoom it was clear she is also: eccentric, earnest and fabulously camp, an outsider who has somehow been invited in. I sat, recharging, in her glow. McCarthy’s story is one of unexpected diversions from the classic comedian’s path, and abrupt corners turned, seemingly, just for the fun of it.
She grew up on a corn and soybean farm in small town Illinois, where her main feeling as a teenage cheerleader was boredom. This was a place where that ‘‘milling your own flour’’ perfection was valued, so when she discovered a goth bar in Chicago, ‘‘it broke my brain’’.
She immediately dyed her hair blue and black and fashioned a pair of trousers from a poloneck top.
‘‘I remember being like, ‘This is the single greatest thing I’ve ever done’.’’ She loved ‘‘seeing who else I could be, and how that changed how people perceived me’’.
‘‘But the second I opened my mouth, the jig was up because they were like, ‘Ah, it’s only Missy McCarthy’.’’
That was the first time she played with characters, and the first time too that she found a little club of outsiders — she loved it, and she felt very protective of it.
‘‘This is back in the ’80s where it wasn’t easy for my friends who were gay to be out. And there they could be exactly who they wanted to be.’’
Being a goth for McCarthy
‘‘was such an expression of joy. I found it incredibly funny. When you have a footandahalf mess of hair going straight up, like, how is that not fun?’’
She felt the same way when