Tony winner Laurie Metcalf sat down with Willie Geist on Sunday Today April 29 to talk about currently starring on Broadway in Three Tall Women, winning a Tony for A Doll’s House, Part 2, her Oscar nomination for Lady Bird, her return to the role that won her three Emmys with the reboot of Roseanne, and more.
“I love the work and so I like to keep the work coming,” Metcalf said in the interview of her busy schedule. “I don’t know too well what to do with my down time. I get a little antsy.”
Still, the theatre remains her home and her priority. “That’s the thrill of being in something live: the rush of the response, that instant gratification you get when you’re in the room together,” she said. “I like that there are no cameras involved. I have a camera-phobia and I’ve never been able to shake it.”
Sounds strange for a woman who spends so much time around the cameras, but she truly does prefer the stage. An original member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, she credits the acting troupe with hooking her to a life in acting.
Metcalf made her Broadway debut in My Thing Of Love in 1995, but took a long hiatus from the stage before returning in 2008 with November; it also marked her first Tony nomination. The next year, she signed on for the short-lived Brighton Beach Memoirs, and in 2013, she earned her second Tony nomination for The Other Place. In 2015, she starred in Misery opposite Bruce Willis and earned her third Tony nod. But it was in 2017 with A Doll’s House, Part 2 that she finally walked away with the Tony statue.
Now, she stars alongside Allison Pill and Glenda Jackson in the Joe Mantello-helmed revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, currently playing at the Golden Theatre.
And Metcalf loves spending her time onstage. In fact, she said, “movies are at the bottom for me. The process is not for me. You do some big emotional scene and you think, ‘We got it’ and then you realize that was the master. Now for the next six hours we’re going to come in and do close-ups and over the shoulder.”
Watch the full interview above, and get extras at Today.com/Sunday.
