“Unzip, let it rip and fly”: Bridget Everett threw everything out for us – and got a gift in return

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

The star and executive producer of Max’s beautifully honest and critically acclaimed show “Somebody Somewhere,” which ends this Sunday after three seasons, first gained attention for her fearlessly campy cabaret act. She rose to prominence for her work on the Comedy Central sketch show “Inside Amy Schumer” and Schumer’s raunchy romantic comedy “Trainwreck.” She has now become one of our greatest storytellers about loss and loneliness.

Everett has the ability to take you anywhere. She has said she wants her audience to feel free, and that freedom can come with a cathartic, lonely scream or holler to a song about fellatio.

In the midst of her victory lap, as the Peabody Award-winning series “Somebody Somewhere” wraps up its third and final season, Everett appreciates how her show about a middle-aged woman in a small Kansas town has dealt with the devastating loss of her sister to cancer her tough-as-nails stage persona complicates things – “tits and stuff,” as she explains.

“The show explains a little bit about how this stage person came to be,” she says. “There’s something about the direct presence of my stage music that screams out to be seen by people The Person.”

Watch the video version of this interview here:

Everett’s success seems both unlikely and inevitable. The 52-year-old Manhattan, Kansas, native flew just under the mainstream radar for decades, honing her bawdy cabaret act while waiting tables in New York, including at the still-missing Ruby Foo’s. When I tell her that she’s probably served me edamame at some point in the last 20 years, she nods knowingly. I can only hope I tipped her generously.

Everett arrived in New York in the late 1990s after studying music and opera in college and wasn’t sure what her next step would be. “I thought, I don’t have that pop star body, that pop star look, so maybe I’ll try Broadway,” she says.

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

“I loved it,” she remembers. “I got on the bar and ripped my shirt off. The further I went, the more people got involved.”

Bridget Everett in Salon’s New York studio. (Salon)From there, Everett developed her famous interactive cabaret style. (If you’ve ever seen her live, your face may have spent time in her cleavage.) She built a loyal following and continued working as a waitress.

“I liked waitressing so I could do my cabaret act,” she says. “Did I love waiting tables? No. Did I love being 42 and working next to someone who is 24 and who looks at me like, ‘Look at you. Are you still trying to do this?’”

Everett speaks like a woman who recognizes the banality of the alternative. “Yeah, I’m still trying,” she says. “You’ll be lucky if you have the heart to stay here as long as I do.”

As she refined her performance, 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 included “tactile, visceral” interaction with the audience.

“It was never about shocking or doing anything wild. It was exactly what felt exciting in the room at the moment,” she says. “Whatever the audience asked for, I gave it. I feel like we created it together.”

The result was often lighthearted, hilarious and raunchy.

“Growing up in Kansas, I was always getting into trouble because of my dark sense of humor,” she says. But she expresses this rejection of inhibitions honestly. She describes her mother, who was a teacher, as “very conservative.” ” – and also tend to go to the grocery store in just their nightgown and no bra.

“She went to Food for Less with her beaver tails up to her waist and got the shopping cart,” she says, pointing to her stomach. “That was my favorite part of my mother. I didn’t give a shit. She was just loose and free and happy. I thought: This is what I want.

In a strange way, she ended up going there and presenting “Somebody Somewhere” with a simple concept: What if Bridget Everett never left Kansas? Like her character Sam, Everett had a sister who died of cancer, and the series revolved 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 creates. Over three seasons, “Somebody Somewhere” has been praised by fans and critics for its authentic portrayal of hurt, healing and personal growth.

“When I lost my mother, having the show helped me deal with those things,” she says. (Fredrica Everett died in 2023) “It’s all connected and it’s strangely a gift.”

(Salon)

Everett credits her co-stars with giving her an understanding of different types of love and types of grief, which helped her achieve such success in the role of Sam. They also made the show a true ensemble, portraying the lives of gay and transgender people in small-town America in a way rarely portrayed on television. Sam’s churchgoing, taxpaying, closeted friends believe, as one character says early in the first season, “We deserve to be happy.” That means they do their Zumba and make their vision boards right on site in Kansas.

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

And her castmates, in turn, acknowledge Everett’s commitment as the foundation of this ensemble work.

For example, in the third season, Sam helps accompany her best friend Joel’s boyfriend, Brad, through a melodic declaration of his devotion.

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

Jeff Hiller, who plays Joel, wrote in an email: “We were doing a show about ‘found families’ and became a found family. Puke, right? Sorry, sometimes the truth is ugly.”

“Bridget is a brave performer,” he adds. “She is known for her varied, bawdy comedy, but she chose to make this show personal, tender, insightful and raw. That makes me want to be braver too.”

“It ruined everything for me,” Bagley says. “Now I just want to work like that, calmly, intimately, deeply and with all my heart. It’s going to make me uncomfortable the next time I have to say, ‘Here’s your salad, ma’am,’ using my full self. I feel bad when the next director has to say, ‘Um, Tim, it’s just a salad, put it down and get out.'”

Mary Catherine Garrison, who plays Sam’s sister Tricia, was Everett’s roommate for eight years in a cramped Upper West Side apartment. “You know when you find your tribe. “Bridget and I went through a period where we didn’t talk much, but I knew we would come back,” she tells me. “I know we will know each other forever and I am definitely grateful for that.”

“It just feels like you’re doing a show with friends,” says series co-star Murray Hill. Everett credits Hill for helping set the tone for her on-set experience, particularly the scene in the pilot where Sam meets Hill’s character Fred Rococo, who is leading the choir practice.

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

Everett’s devotion to “Somebody Somewhere” shows how deeply she recognizes how the series has changed her life since its debut nearly three years ago. And as always, a big part of that growth is taking the audience with you.

“I didn’t think my cabaret audience would follow me to the (television) show, and I was completely wrong,” she says. “I did a (stage) show a few weeks ago and I thought the people who know me from that TV show won’t understand. And I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

If in the past she screamed that we should see “that person” — the person who is complicated, sometimes sad, and sometimes sings a tune while sitting on a stranger’s lap — it’s undeniable that we do now .

“There are a lot of things about (Sam) that helped me grow through my grief and my belief in myself,” Everett says.

(Salon)She seems fully aware that her next chapter will likely be very different. “We made this show for me,” she says. “I don’t know if people will say, ‘We need a Bridget Everett type for this Marvel movie.’ I don’t think Spielberg will call me. And I don’t mind when that happens and I can move on and create other things.”

But in the meantime, the world of Sam, Joel and Tricia is not yet over for her, even if it only lives on in her head, she says.

“Maybe later we can make a movie or something like that,” she adds. “I hope that one day we can relive the world of ‘Somebody Somewhere’ in some way. I just want to keep going. That’s all. I don’t want this to be the end.