Allison Janney Rewatches Drop Dead Gorgeous, Juno, The West Wing & More | Vanity Fair

On Instagram, someone was selling t-shirts with Loretta and Alan's character in, when I say, oh, the most smartest. And I bought like five t-shirts from this. I don't even know who these people are making these t-shirts, but I love it. Hi, I'm Allison Janney. And today I'm gonna be watching different scenes from the various projects I've done throughout my career. I'm quitting the PRG. You're what? I'm quitting the PRG. I heard you. I was just trying to scare you into changing your mind. Oh, for Christ's sake, Amber, the woman clung to your tap shoes while flying through the air like a lawn dart. That's right. Oh my gosh. This is one of the movies in my career that I'm most proud of, I have to say. Loretta in Drop Dead Gorgeous is kind of iconic. I get a lot of people stopping me about this movie. And it's so crazy because you can never find it anywhere. And it's such a, it's a cult classic, I think. I had the time of my life. I was in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I'd go to the Mall of America almost every day to get that ax on down. And it was a blast. And my brother at the time lived there too, so I got to hang out with him. And Kirsten Dunst was a doll. Amy Adams, there's so many people in this movie. Well, of course, Ellen Barkin, the great Ellen Barkin. It was, it's a classic. So proud. How about some nice cool mints to turn those frowns upside down? Do you think a nice cool mint would help if I shoved your head up your ass? Iconic lines. Just, Loretta is the most quotable character I think I've ever played. So what do I say? Simple, just say, Mom, I know you sacrificed everything. Everything. Relationships, dreams, your tummy ass and thighs, all to bring me into this world. Also, I could have tap lessons and be in the pageant, the same one you were in. But you know what? I'm quitting. There, easiest fight. I also remember that, the makeup choice. Loretta, you know, spent a lot of time in the sun and wore sunglasses. So she's got raccoon eyes, which was a creative choice that I definitely made for her. And I know you can win. Come here. Oh, I love you much. I love you much. I love the movie so much, I've got a copy in my house and it makes me laugh so hard watching myself and seeing how cute and young I was. God, I was so young. Hell no, she ain't quitting. No, mom said if I did, she'd look up my dad and marry him. I loved Kirsten, they called her Kiki. I don't know if they still call her Kiki, but she was Kiki and she was adorable. We had so much fun together. I loved our relationship. What was her character? I can't remember what Kirsten's character was named. Amber, oh for heaven's sake. And Loretta and Amber had a special relationship. Loretta liked to think of herself as Amber's older sister. They had a close bond and I had a close bond with Kiki too, off camera. She was adorable and I loved her and she's synonymous with that role for me. Anytime I see her in anything else, I'm like, oh, there's Amber. You think sending my aid here was an act of cowardice? You think I have the time and inclination? Sir, due respect, that wasn't what I was referring to. I think jumping up and down on the commander in chief and then beating a path out of town is an act of cowardice. I'm just addressing down a four-star general, which is what I love that C.J. Craig could do. She could stand up to anybody, toe-to-toe and take them down. She was the most powerful woman. I loved playing her so much. I love playing women who are that smart. I play a lot of women who are the smartest women in the room and I love that because I personally don't, I'm not that person, so to get to play these smart, really capable women makes me so excited and watching her dress down this four-star general. Anytime I get to read a scene like this where C.J. speaks truth to power, and always I would get so excited to memorize the lines so I could just rattle those words out and oh, it was so satisfying. I say this with all due respect. I think your motives are personal and I'd like to discuss that, sir. Sure, how about we discuss new defense spending being down to 300 billion from 400 billion 10 years ago. Is that personal? No, sir, I think that's about the Cold War ending 10 years ago and America not needing to spend quite so much money defending itself against a country that can't bake bread. The audition scene I had to do, I remember, was when C.J. tells the press pool that the president has injured himself by riding his bicycle into a tree. What I loved about that, that it was just so comical that the president would ride his bike into a tree, like, it's just the most embarrassing thing and she has to say it with such, you know, gravitas. The president, yes, he has ridden his bicycle into a tree. Chief of Orthopedics at St. John's Hospital has diagnosed the president with a mild sprain in his left ankle sustained while cycling into a large cypress tree. Knowing how comical it was and having to deliver it, knowing myself, the C.J. knows how ridiculous it is, but she also knows she has to deliver it in this way that, as the press secretary, you have to do and not making fun of the president. My life completely changed because, of course, West Wing, those were back in the days where you shot 23 or 24 episodes in a season and it's an hour drama, so we were shooting 18-hour days sometimes. Fridays become fratter days, as we called them, and early call times, and we didn't have cell phones back then, so I completely lost contact with my family, my friends, it was just, the West Wing cast became my family and to this day we are still family because we spent so much time together. I spent more time with them than I spend with my family, truly. It was an extraordinary time in my life and an extraordinary role that put me on another level in my career completely. Winning an Emmy, I think I won an Emmy for supporting and then I won for lead actress, too. It means unfit for service. No, sir, again, with all respect, I hate to disagree, but it means unfit for service based on the Pentagon's two-war doctrine. It's based on how fast these divisions would be able to extract themselves from their peacekeeping mission, retrain on home bases, and ship off to a second of two full-scale Gulf War-sized conflicts. I think Aaron, as he got to know each of us as individuals, started putting the little flavors of the real people into the character as he really did with the Jackal because, I mean, this is embarrassing to say, but a lot of time when you're in a trailer and you're waiting around for six hours or whatever and they called you in too early and you have nothing to do, but you could maybe learn a new language or read a book, but no, Richard Schiff and I would be in my trailer and he'd be playing air guitar and I'd be learning the lines to songs like the Jackal and performing them to make our other castmates laugh or just make each other laugh. And Aaron came into my trailer this one day and I performed the Jackal while Richard was on air bass or air guitar, I don't know, and lo and behold, it was in the script. The brother loved the high PhD in street stride. They called him the Jackal. And I'll tell you something funny about that though because we filmed that CJ doing the Jackal in the Roosevelt room and I did it and I had so much fun and then the next day, Aaron said, we gotta reshoot that scene. I said, why? And he said, because you were Allison doing the Jackal and I think CJ doing the Jackal would not be quite as good as you are. So we shot it again and CJ was a little more shy and not comfortable performing it but was doing it because everyone was egging her on so she did it but it wasn't as, it wasn't like Allison Janney did it and I thought that was kind of great. The thing is, the brook was never fired on and it never shot its guns. Right now and in photographs, you're wearing a medal you never won. How does that usually go over with the boys? You know, now that I see it, I go, yeah, I can't believe I even memorized that. Like, it was so great. She's so powerful. She has all the words right there which is what I love about her because me, I'm like, just like, I mean, Aaron is the king of writing those kinds of speeches and those ones that make you get chills and make you go, yeah, you just want to stand up and root for CJ or whoever he's given a, you know, something great like that. I mean, obviously the West Wing is what everyone wishes. What's happening in our White House right now, it's there are people in the West Wing who have great moral compasses and they're good people that want, they want to do their best for the American people and right now, I don't, well, I don't feel that that's happening and to hear all the people that are going back to the West Wing now, it's kind of a salve for the American people who want government to look like this, the way Aaron Sorkin wrote it. So that's the legacy. People just keep coming back to it. I love that they have a template now of what good politics, what good, you know, people that are in public service, what it should look like instead of, you know, what is now, which is very upsetting. And an arm and there's the feet. Oh, would you look at that? Such a great script Diablo Cody wrote. I remember I was in Maine with my family and I got that script and I knew it was something special. Her writing was just so unique. I never, I really hadn't read anything quite like that. Jason Reitman directed that and I got to meet with him and he ended up giving me the role. So it was, it was, it was a really, I was very happy to be part of this movie and that's how I got to meet Elliot, who was so incredible in this movie and J.K. Simmons, who played my husband. I loved those people. I remember having, we shot in Vancouver, I think, but this scene, a particular one is the one that people, people love with, with my, my character, Bryn. What is your job title exactly? I'm an ultrasound technician, ma'am. Well, I'm a nail technician and I think we both ought to stick to what we know. Excuse me? You think you're so special because you get to play picture pages up there? My five-year-old daughter could do that. And let me tell you, she's not the brightest bulb in the tanning bed. So why don't you go back to night school in Manteno and learn a real trade? Stepmothers sometimes get a bad rap and I think this movie did a lot for, to, to dispel that theory that Bryn actually has her back and, and, and loves her. Yeah, they finally came around to, to seeing each other in a different way and appreciating each other. Bryn, you's a dick. Love it. So Elliot and I, we, we, we, I fell in love with him on this movie and then we got to work in a movie called Tallulah. It was directed by Sean Hader, which was a lovely, beautiful, much smaller movie. It didn't quite hit as Juno did, but he's an extraordinary actor and, and just, and so smart. One of the smartest people I've ever met. And I think that comes through in his, his acting. And he's just completely who he is. And it's like, it was wonderful to watch. I was so intimidated almost by how smart he is. Our careers have crossed paths a bunch and I just adore him. I haven't seen him in a while, but, but we had, we had a great time together on that. Surely a good friend of mine told me, if I could forgive you, I could finally be free of all the anger in my heart. And I really need to be free of it because if I'm not, I'm, I'm going to drink again or jog myself to death. Ellen Burstyn, how amazing was, was it that I got to work with her? Truly one of my, my heroes. And that scene, I remember it now. That's why it was starting to make me cry a little bit. That's what was so great with Chuck Lorre. He was able to have a scene like that, but also have laughs in there. And I think he wanted to see how far he could, he could get with mixing that, those two things together. Like we dealt with a lot of things. We said, well, you know, addiction, cancer, just so many heavy things. Cause obviously in life, if you don't have a sense of humor, it's hard to get through all the things you have to get through in life. Cause it's not easy for anyone. We handled that beautifully with the combination of the, the serious and the very funny. It's just friend. Well, to be honest, she's not so much a friend as the mother I never had, but I'll be damned if I'll tell her that. I get so many letters of people thanking me and thanking the show for helping them through their struggles with addiction and just feeling seen. And one of the main reasons I wanted to do this was to honor my brother, to help to show that people can survive an addiction. They can, there is life after, after that. And that was important for me to put out into the world. And I felt proud of what I was doing, a message that we were putting out. There was a good one. And yeah, I'm really glad I got to do that. Cause I think it helped. I think a lot of people saw it and it helped them. And I get proof of it every day cause I get so many letters, you know, from people thanking us for what we did in that show. I want you to know, I don't know. I'm on your side. It's a big crowd out there. A lot of people support you. You've done good. My dear friend, Steven Rogers, and I went to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York together from 1982 to 1984. He wrote I, Tanya. And he wrote this part for me. And he told me about it way before he even finished it. He said, I'm writing you a part and you're going to wear a fur coat and have a bird on your shoulder. And I was like, okay. Like, I couldn't imagine like what he was talking about. What would, it sounded like completely a cartoonish thing. I'm like, who would do that? I didn't know what he was doing. And then I found out he was writing the Tanya Harding's story. And he wrote the part for me. And I looked through everything, found the footage, the actual footage of LaVonna Harding. And sure enough, she is in a fur coat with a bowl haircut and a bird on her shoulder. And I looked and scoured for all the footage I could find on her and who she was. Because of course this version is Tanya's version of her mom. So I didn't get to actually meet the real LaVonna Harding. She was nowhere to be found. Tanya does not have a relationship with her. So we couldn't find her and I couldn't talk to her. So I knew that this was just, this was Tanya's version of her mother. And according to Tanya, this is exactly, I was spot on. And I was like, wow. Because one of my first scenes, I had to be so mean to Margo. And it was very hard. It was like, I just met her. You know, I just sort of, hi, I'm Margo. And we just started rehearsing. And my little trick I did for myself is I pretended Margo was me. You know how we can be so mean to ourselves? So that was really easy to think of her as me, some part of me that I hated or was mad at. And it was like, it clicked in for me. It made it so much easier to do those scenes. Now it's quite an upsetting scene to see her. Oh, you think, God, maybe she does love her daughter, but she does in her own way. I don't know. She's just looking for a dime. Did you know about the attack? Well, you can tell me. What? What are you looking for? What do you mean? Stop it. I still meant everything I said. Get the **** out of my house. Get out! I still meant everything I said. I just don't ever judge my characters. It makes it so much easier to play them and do the things they, like everything's for a good reason. Everything she does that everyone else finds despicable, she's got a good reason for it. And so that's the only way I can do it. But on the outside, of course, I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe that McKenna Grace is in this movie as a little girl and I beat her with a hairbrush. I mean, that was actually the really, the hardest thing to do because I was like, McKenna, you know this, I'm not really, you know, I felt I had to apologize to her over and over again. Lick my ass, Diane. Yeah, lick my ass, Diane. She can do a ******* triple, that was a great line. Beautiful. You bled on them. Really? Todd. No, it's probably cocktail sauce. It is not. Oh ----, sorry. Could you check them, please? Just sent one. Yeah, I don't see it anywhere else. It's there. Where? It's okay, it's just on the ice. There? Get your hands away. You know what, we won't eat the ice. Your guests are afraid you're gonna give them hepatitis. This particular scene in Grace Penn is interesting because she's at her family estate, her old family home, and it's her home, but only now she's the President of the United States. And this scene is so lovely on so many levels because it's, first of all, it's like a little play Deborah Kahn has written for us and Grace and Todd have been fighting all day and Kate and Hal are fighting in there and they're these huge, you know, they're politicians, but they're now just people, two couples in a home and they're trying to, like this is the first time they've had to interact this way, not in the Oval Office. They're trying to be just two couples sitting down and having drinks and talking about their day and underneath there's so much going on. Everyone knows that, you know, Grace is the one that planned the attack on the HMS Courageous and they all have different ways of wanting to deal with it and there's just so much tension under the scene, so many different layers. This was enormously fun to play this and to play Grace as another woman who's smartest woman in the room and to have gone from playing C.J. in West Wing and now playing President of the United States is kind of a great arc. How was everyone's stay at the office? You know, there was a law in the books at some point, maybe early 18th century, that you were not permitted to serve oysters to prisoners in prison more than twice a week. Really? Or the prisoners would mutiny. Why? Because the oysters wouldn't keep? No. They were not a delicacy. They were so damn plentiful, it was punishment. Lobsters, not oysters. Really? I watched the first season of Diplomat and had no idea that I was gonna be joining the cast. I just fell in love with the show immediately and just couldn't wait for season two and then I got this call from Deborah and I was completely flattered and so excited that she wanted me to play Grace and she didn't have to pitch me anything. I just said, yes, yes, I wanna be there. I wanna play Grace Penn. I have total faith and trust in Deborah and whatever she's gonna write. I didn't have to sit down with her and go, now listen, I think Grace should be this way and I want her to be this kind of, like, do it. Let me be your client. Let me play her. Do, write for me. I will, and she hasn't disappointed me. Every scene, every episode, every season has been an incredible challenge and so much fun as well because Carrie and Rufus and Brad are all so much fun to play with and the whole cast is really a brilliant cast. I. I, Grace Hagen Penn. Do solemnly swear. That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States. I didn't have any mad designs for having to play Grace. I just wanted to have her be real, have her be believable, have her be fierce, have her be a badass, have her be, you know, it's great. When I got sworn in as president on the set, it was a very emotional day because obviously we haven't been able to elect a female president here in these United States which is, we really felt that when I was being sworn in. Everyone got kind of emotional. It would be amazing to have, to finally have a woman president. So there's that feeling, that responsibility on my shoulders but I just look at the script, what's in front of me and I fill it with everything I know how to do as an actor. When I was filming it, I didn't feel the power of that. I was just worried about, oh, did I hit my mark? Did I put my hand too high? They told me to put it, like I had those technical things in my mind and just getting the lines right but everyone after we'd filmed it came up and said, oh my God, we're all crying behind the video village seeing you get sworn in as president. It was so emotional. I was like, really? I was like, of course. And then I saw it. When I saw the episode, I got with the music and everything behind it and it felt, I got very emotional too. Thank you so much for watching.