“Decompress, Let It Rip and Fly”: Bridget Everett gave it all for us — and got a gift in return

Bridget Everett dancing to Blondie and Bette Midler. She growls like a tiger and kicks up her high heels as she poses for photos in a New York salon studio. And all I want to do is tell her about the dead people in my life.

The star, writer and executive producer of the beautifully honest and critically acclaimed HBO Max show “Somebody Somewhere,” which ends after three seasons on Sunday, first gained attention for her gritty cabaret work. She gained widespread fame through her work on the Comedy Central comedy show “Inside Amy Schumer” and Schumer’s raunchy rom-com “Trainwreck.” She has now emerged as one of our greatest storytellers of loss and loneliness.

Everett has a knack for taking you wherever you go. She has said that she wants her audience to feel free, and that this freedom may come with a reduced or solitary cry or a scream with… A song about the tongue.

In the midst of bittersweet triumph, as the Peabody Award-winning series “Somebody Somewhere” concludes its third and final season, Everett appreciates how her show is about a middle-aged woman in a small Kansas town coping with the crushing loss of her sister to cancer. , complicated her strong stage persona — “boobs and all that,” she explains.

“The show explains a little bit about how this person appears on stage,” she says. “There’s something about the in-your-face presence of my theatrics that is, in a way, screaming to make people see this person.”

Watch the video version of this interview here:

Everett’s success seems unlikely and inevitable. The 52-year-old Manhattan, Kan., native spent decades flying under the mainstream radar, honing her bawdy cabaret act while waiting tables in New York, including at the still-missed restaurant Ruby Foos. When I told her that she had definitely served me edamame at some point in the last 20 years, she nodded. I can only hope I tip her generously.

Everett arrived in New York in the late 1990s, after studying music and opera in college, unsure of her next step. “I thought I didn’t have the body of a pop star, or the looks of a pop star, so maybe I’d try Broadway,” she says.

When that didn’t work, she found something she liked better: karaoke bars.

“I loved it,” she recalls. “I’d go up to the top of the bar, rip my shirt off. The farther I went, the more people would react.”

Bridget Everett in a New York salon studio. (salon)From there, Everett developed her famous interactive cabaret style. (If you’ve seen her live, your face has probably spent some time in her cleavage.) She built a loyal following, and continues to work as a server.

“I was happy to wait tables so I could perform as my cabaret,” she says. “Did I like waiting tables? No. Did I like being a 42-year-old working next to a 24-year-old and them looking at me like, ‘Look at you.’ Are you still trying to do this?”

Everett speaks like a woman who recognizes the insignificance of the alternative. “Yes, I’m still trying to do it,” she says. “You’ll be lucky if you have the heart you can stay in for as long as I have.”

As she improved her acting, she caught the attention of artists such as Patti LuPone, Amy Sedaris, Adam Horovitz, and drag king Murray Hill, whom she counts among her fans and collaborators. Her signature style involved “tangible and visceral” audience interaction.

“It was never about trying to shock or do anything wild. It was just what felt exciting in the room at the moment,” she says. “What the audience was asking for, I was delivering. I feel like we created it together.

The result was often raunchy and delightful.

“Growing up in Kansas, I always got in trouble for my blue sense of humor,” she says. But she accepts this rejection of barriers frankly. She describes her mother, who was a school teacher, as “very conservative.” “He also tends to go to the grocery store wearing only a nightgown and no bra.

“She would go to Food for Less with her hair cut to her waist and get a shopping cart,” she says, pointing toward her waist. “That was my favorite side of my mom. She didn’t give as**t. She was loose and free and happy. I was like, ‘This is what I want.’

In a strange way, that’s where I eventually went, pitching Someone Somewhere with a simple concept: What if Bridget Everett had never left Kansas? Like her character Sam, Everett had a sister who died of cancer, and the show was built around her loss. Grief becomes the starting point for Sam’s changing relationship with her surviving sister Tricia and the new community of friends she builds. Over the course of three seasons, “Somebody Somewhere” has been admired by fans and critics for its authentic depiction of pain, healing and personal growth.

“Having the show helped me deal with these things at the time I lost my mom,” she says. (Frederica Everett died in 2023) “It’s all connected and it’s a strange gift.”

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Everett credits her co-stars with giving her an understanding of different types of love and ways of grieving which helped her play the role of Sam to such acclaim. They also made the show a real ensemble, depicting, in a way rarely depicted on television, gay and trans life in small-town America. Sam’s church-going, tax-paying, non-close friends believe, as one character says at the beginning of Season 1, “We deserve to be happy.” That means doing their Zumba workouts and making their vision boards right there in Kansas.

“These people are the people we created and they feel real to me,” Everett says. “I think about the world through their eyes often.”

Her colleagues, in turn, credit Everett’s commitment to moving this work forward as the foundation for this teamwork.

In Season 3, for example, Sam helps guide her best friend Joel’s boyfriend, Brad, through a gentle declaration of his devotion.

“I will never forget the look on Bridget’s face when I was having trouble singing,” actor Tim Bagley, who plays Brad, told me in an email. “She came in with so much love and sang the song, and then encouraged me to sing the rest of the song. The expression on her face was pure love and support.”

“We were making a show about ‘found families,’ and we became a found family. Oh puke, right? Sorry, sometimes the truth is ugly,” Jeff Heller, who plays Joel, wrote in an email.

He adds: “Bridget is a brave actress. She’s known for her outrageous, outrageous comedy, but she chose to do this personal, sweet, suggestive and raw show. It makes me want to be braver, too.”

“It ruined everything for me,” Bagley says. “Now I just want to work this way, quietly, intimately, deeply, with all my heart. It will be embarrassing the next time I have to say, ‘Here’s your salad, ma’am’ using my whole self. I feel it will be bad when the next director says: “Tim, it’s just a salad, put it down and disappear.”

Mary Katherine Garrison, who plays Sam’s sister Tricia, has been Everett’s roommate in a cramped Upper West Side apartment for eight years. “You know when you find your tribe.” “Bridget and I went through a time where we didn’t talk much, but I knew we would come back.” “I know we’ll know each other forever, and I’m certainly grateful for that.”

“It’s like we’re doing a show with friends,” says series co-star Murray Hill. Everett credits Hill for helping set the tone for her experience on set, specifically the scene in the pilot in which Sam confronts Hill’s character, Fred Rococo, who is directing choir rehearsals.

“I struggle when I go to the set of a movie or TV show,” she says. “I always feel like I’m trying to prove something. But here I was just with my friends, and it gave me a chance to get out of my head and relax.”

Everett’s devotion to “Somebody Somewhere” shows in how deeply she recognizes how the show has changed her life since it debuted nearly three years ago. As always, a big part of that growth means taking the audience along with it.

“I didn’t think my club audience would follow me to [TV] “I was completely wrong about that,” she says. “I did [stage] came out a few weeks ago, and I was like, people who know me from this TV show are not going to get this. And I couldn’t have been more wrong.

If in the past it screamed for us to see “that person” – the complex, sometimes sad, sometimes belting out tune while sitting on a stranger’s lap – it’s undeniable that we do now.

“There are a lot of things about [Sam]“The ways I was raised that helped me overcome my grief and believe in myself,” Everett says.

(salon)She seems keenly aware that the next chapter will likely look very different. “We created this show for me,” she says. “I don’t know that people would say, ‘We need a Bridget Everett character in this Marvel movie.’ I don’t think Spielberg would call me, and I wouldn’t mind if this was the time it happened, and I could keep creating other things.

Meanwhile, she says the world of Sam, Joel and Tricia is far from over for her, even if it only lives in her head.

“Maybe we can make a movie or something in the future,” she adds. “I hope we can get back to the ‘Someone Somewhere’ world somehow someday. I just want to keep going. That’s all. I don’t want this to be the end.”