The longest gap in Laurie Metcalf’s résumé since making her professional stage debut 50 years ago is—by far—the three years between the pandemic shutting down her Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and her return to Broadway in 2023’s Grey House. A charter member of Chicago’s venerable Steppenwolf Theater Company, she’s buttressed those 50-something roles with two Tonys, an Oscar nomination, and four Emmys. Now, Metcalf is tackling one of the greatest American plays, Death of a Salesman, which opened the same day Big Mistakes, a Dan Levy-led comedy in which she stars, dropped on Netflix.
Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece is an intimate play, but Metcalf and co-star Nathan Lane fill up the massive, 1,600-seat Winter Garden theater with sheer talent and force of will. Still, it’s a beast of a play, and Metcalf tells Vogue it represents one of the first times she’s used a microphone onstage. “I’m so old and old-school that I’ve only just started to wear a microphone. It’s the first time that I’ve worn a mic that’s actually doing the real heavy-lifting. If we were having to work without them and just project, nobody would have a voice left by now.”
The deluxe production is a career milestone that Lane and director Joe Mantello had been dreaming up since the ’90s, folding Metcalf in about a decade ago. Since then, it’s been a game of waiting, maneuvering, and, per Metcalf’s strict rules, not watching any performances of the play.
On the eve of her two major premieres, just months after opening in Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road this same Broadway season, Metcalf candidly told Vogue about playing roles written for her by generational fans, the joys of being miscast, and what it takes for her to feel comfortable in front of a camera.
Vogue: How do you carry the knowledge, for 10 years, that you’ll be playing a role someday?
Laurie Metcalf: I penciled into my calendar, “Do not go see a production of Salesman.” That was number one, because that’s going to get stuck in my head and I’ll never forget it. I wanted to come at it as fresh as I could, even though it’s a 75-year-old play. I’ve never seen it—ever. I knew it was one of those bucket-list roles that I would age into—and past [laughs]—so I always stayed away from it. Beyond that, no, I wasn’t pulling it out of a drawer and reading it once a month or anything. I wanted to postpone all of that and wait for the workshop that we did for about four days, when we knew the cast. That’s when I really started digging in, and then luckily I had about a month break to actually learn the lines. I appreciate that what Nathan is bringing to it eight times a week is enormous, but even for me, memorizing took forever.
Is there a process of getting on the same page, playing a married couple?
It took us a while in the rehearsal room. We were joking about it—that Nathan is very sentimental as a person. I am not; I’m the opposite. What would our physical life be like? To me, I was always: Why would I be touching you? I don’t understand—we’ve been married for this long. Get away from me. He was the opposite, so we found a happy medium.
You’ve said before that theater is where you’re most comfortable working. What is it about a stage, versus being in a room with a camera and two other people?
Well, cameras are awful. I never want to be in a room with a camera. Because I started in theater, that’s where I feel most comfortable. Had I started behind a camera, maybe it would be different. But theater is so freeing because it’s not being recorded. I feel much braver, much more spontaneous. I can do anything in front of an audience, and I feel more in control. I know where I want to go—where I want the laughs to be, the pauses, the emotion. I’ve carved it out in the rehearsal room. In film and TV, I’m there on the day, still looking at the script in the hair and makeup chair, and I feel unprepared. I feel like I’m lucky if I bring depth to it, when it all seems fast and unexplored.
Was it easier on something like Roseanne, which was filmed with a live audience?
All the years on Roseanne and The Conners—and when you put it together, it’s like 16 years—I never got used to having the cameras there. I had to push past feeling intimidated. Yes, there’s an audience, but there are also four moving cameras in front of them. I just never got used to it, and I never will. There have been two projects where I felt less of that when there was a camera in the room: Big Mistakes and Getting On. Those were instances where you have, most of the time, a handheld camera and an operator who’s in the scene with you. I’m not always sure where they’re going to be or what they’re capturing; they might be on me, they might be on my scene partner, and it takes away the stress. It’s all just mental, because some actors like it—they like to know they have a better side, or they understand the lighting or technical stuff, which I’ve never figured out and don’t want to. I like when the camera operator is in the mix; it’s a little more spontaneous and messier and a little looser. You’re not hitting a mark; you’re overlapping.
What was it about Big Mistakes, or working with Dan, that allowed you to feel at ease?
I didn’t know that he was going to shoot it that way. That was a bonus, when I got there, to learn that he was going to do this looser type of shooting. Otherwise, it was just him. I’m such a fan that I wanted to be in the room with him, see how it works, and do scenes opposite him. I didn’t really have to read it. He’s very funny, and he writes very generously for all of the actors in the company. He knows how to set the tone of what the show will look like, but also the behind-the-camera tone. Everyone is included. I’m speaking for the cast, but I know that all of the crew have his respect. You feel very protected by him.
Being unsentimental, and having played as many roles as you have—especially in a repertory company—were there any in which you think you were miscast?
I’ve been miscast a lot. Way back in the early Steppenwolf days, I was always miscast because there weren’t plays that had five, six, seven 20-year-olds in them, so I was either the 14-year-old or the grandmother. But I think all that miscasting made us stronger actors; we had to figure out a way in. The last thing I was very miscast in was Virginia Woolf. The way it’s usually cast, physically, is not like me. I was going to say emotionally, but I don’t know—an actor can find their way into the emotional part. But I felt like I had to find my own way into that role. Part of me thinks… We did nine previews, and it closed when Broadway closed because of the pandemic. I feel like I did it, but I regret that it didn’t get to find an audience because it was on its way. It was already very, very funny, and I think, mentally, I had just cracked the third act. I knew what my key into the third act was going to be, but I never got to do it because it didn’t run long enough. Yeah, I was definitely miscast in that.
I would have never expected you to say that. I would think you were at a point in your career where, if you felt you weren’t right for something, you could have turned it down. Did [director] Joe Mantello have to convince you?
No, I wanted to do it because I thought the number one challenge for me was to find a different approach. If it’s not going to be a woman who can immediately seduce men based on her looks or sex appeal, how does she wrap them around her finger? Does she do it? And so I had to find my own way into it, and it was through humor and flattery. It was a different approach to being a siren—more like a predator in that way.
If the opportunity presented itself again, would you revisit that role?
I think we missed it. I think the time would have been coming right out of the pandemic and going right into it. I think it’s been a little too long. I don’t think we need this old of a Martha. But then you have other things like Little Bear, which actually was the first time something was written for me. That fit like a glove.
Was it weird to read those lines and think, This guy knows exactly how I’m going to do this one?
Little Bear was perfect for me, mostly because I think Sam Hunter captured my sense of humor, which I want to say—this is a generality—but it’s sort of Midwestern, very dry, and that ran all the way through it. I like to play against sentiment, and that was also something very strong that Little Bear had going for it—that it was very unsentimental, but you end up feeling for the characters anyway. I didn’t know Sam; I didn’t know if he’d ever seen me on stage or what he’d seen me in. I was like, What is he basing this on, that he could write a character for me? That was what was odd—like, So this is how you see me. That’s interesting. I guess I appreciated that he thought my particular style, or sense of humor, or unsentimentality was worthy of a whole character. That’s what I appreciate.
Did that experience ignite a desire to commission new roles for yourself?
Some of my favorite playwrights are the ones I’ve worked with in the past 10 years, when I did a flurry of plays. I nag at them once in a while—like, Lucas Hnath, what do you got? Bruce Norris, Sharr White, Levi Holloway, who did Grey House. They all happen to be men, but anyway, I think the writing is where it all begins. So if you click with a writer, that’s just instant gold—especially if they can be in the room with you, as all those writers were.
What’s it like working with people like Sam or Dan—fans from a different generation who are now writing for you?
I don’t know where they know me from. I hope it’s not just TV. But it’s super flattering that these people—whatever their ages are—I’m such a big fan of, and that they want to work together. I mean, my God.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.