With the third and final season of the Dorian and Peabody Award-winning comedy series Somebody Somewhere airing Sundays at 10:30pm ET/PT on HBO, and available to stream on Max, writer, executive producer and star Bridget Everett and her co-star Mary Catherine Garrison speak with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about playing on-screen siblings across the three seasons, the way the show deals with grief, and how they feel about saying goodbye to the series.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: I know that you were roommates in real life at one point and I wondered what you might bring from that off-screen relationship to creating these on-screen sisters?
Mary Catherine Garrison: “Well, I know exactly how to get on her nerves with precision accuracy!”
Bridget Everett: “Same! There’s a comfortability and trust. The best part of being in the show with Mary Catherine is that I feel like she’s on my team, she’s rooting for me, and we’re in it together. It’s such a dream. You can’t script it!”
Mary Catherine: “It’s so funny to think that we were living together. She was waiting tables and starting to put her one woman show together, At Least It’s Pink, which remains one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever seen. But to see this—that she’s now a producer, a television writer, and an incredibly brilliant actor—I mean, talk about like a flowering or a blossoming. It’s just the coolest thing to watch in the whole world!”
Bridget: “I think if you’d told us 20 years ago, when we were sitting on the couch drinking Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio respectively…”
Mary Catherine: “…out of a magnum, we always had a magnum…”
Bridget: “…that we would be on an HBO show together that was well-received, I don’t think either one of us could have ever pictured that.”
Mary Catherine: “No! It really has been a dream.”
I was reading a recent study about the epidemic of loneliness in the United States which concluded that it wasn’t the result of us not having enough friends—apparently most people have four or five friends in their lives—but more a result of us not forming deep connections with those friends. I think Somebody Somewhere exemplifies why it’s so important for us to be open and vulnerable with each other and to have those deep relationships. What are your thoughts on that in regards to your characters on the series?
Bridget: “When I met Mary Catherine I was a lot like Sam; shut down and hard to crack. I feel like Mary Catherine and my friend Zach really did a number on me and tried to shake a lot of that deep-rooted, Midwestern—maybe not just Midwestern, maybe more my family—way of living in a blockade. They were the first friends who really tried to get under the hood in that way and I was like, ‘This is not so bad!’ There’s a lot of that in the show and it just takes a while for some of those relationships to develop because you want to tell the story slowly and meaningfully.”
Mary Catherine: “One of the fun things to act about this sister relationship is that they start off in the show so very different. At least they think they’re different. But you grow up in the same family, you have the same traumas, the same experiences, and the same points of reference, and them finding common ground has been a very gratifying thing to act and also probably something that a lot of people can relate to because it’s real.”
“One of the things this show has highlighted, which is what a lot of people I know already experience, is that you can’t always get everything from your family. So then you have this chosen family, the people that really see you and that are committed to you, even if it’s not from the same womb or whatever, but sometimes it is. We have a group of friends—like Zach, who I consider part of my chosen family, and Bridget, and we have some other friends like Jim and Larry—who you want to know forever and take care of however you can. I think the show highlights that in a wonderful way.”
I love how in this season Tricia really becomes part of that chosen family.
Mary Catherine: “I know, I was like, ‘Oh, thank you!’ I was so worried that I wasn’t going to act with them.”
Unfortunately, grief is something that we all have to deal with in our lives, but I feel like it’s not reflected in TV shows and on film enough. Could talk a bit about the way it’s dealt with in the show for your characters across these three seasons. They’re both dealing with grief very much in the in their own ways, aren’t they?
Bridget: “I think there’s the grief of the characters, for the sister Holly that’s gone, and then there’s also the grief for Mike Hagerty, who plays our dad in season one who we lost. So it was about trying to find a way to honor both of those and how things happen in waves. You’re kind of getting on with your life, but then there are those moments where it just spikes up and something happens—a birthday, a memory, whatever the thing is—and then you’re right back where you started. The way that I wanted to handle grief in the show is just exactly that way. It’s not like you’re sad, sad, sad and then you move on to the next story point. It’s still there. It’s always still there. My sister died and I have days and weeks now where I don’t think about it, and then some days it’s overwhelming. You know how it goes, everybody’s been through it.”
Mary Catherine: “I like that the show points out that because Sam has been living in Holly’s house it’s so immediate for her and so constant, whereas Tricia has kept herself at arm’s length from it all successfully until she couldn’t do that anymore. Sam helps her through that stuff. The grief process is so individual and this show portrayed that so well.”
Bridget: “One other thing that’s very present in my family—and I also maybe a Midwestern thing, at least with some of the people I know—is that you don’t always talk about things a lot. With Sam and Tricia—even though that’s probably their biggest commonality, or one of the biggest things—they just haven’t found a way to let that be a shared thing that they can work through together. So we wanted to include a little bit of that.”
At one point this season, Sam talks about how singing and music allows one to express one’s emotions in a way that just talking about something can’t. What does singing and music mean to you in your own life and how do we see that play out through the character of Sam?
Bridget: “That’s exactly what it means to me. I have a really hard time communicating thoughts, but singing feels like home, it feels like the best friend, the love of my life, the only thing that really understands me and so I wanted that to be a huge part of the show.”
There’s a lovely moment this season, after Tricia has gone to bed having had a few too many drinks, which almost turns into a duet with the sisters singing “I’ve Never Been To Me”.
Mary Catherine: “Best song ever!”
That must have been a really fun scene to do. Does the singing ever happen when the cameras aren’t rolling? Are there cast singalongs, or is that just me fantasizing about that?
Bridget: “Oh, sure!”
Mary Catherine: “Bridget’s always singing.”
Bridget: “That song was Mary Catherine’s idea. We were trying to figure out a song to do in that moment that wouldn’t feel cheesy, so Mary Catherine made me a huge playlist and then she mentioned that song. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s such a good idea!’ Then we did it and it just felt perfect. I pick a lot of the music in the show, but this one was all Mary Catherine and it was the right song for the right moment.”
Mary Catherine: “You know what’s funny—I’m not sure I ever told you this Bridget—but I had this secret fantasy that one day you and I would perform that song together on stage. So it’s kind of like we did.”
Bridget: “Yeah, check that off your bucket list!”
Mary Catherine: “That’s done, check it!”
I recently rewatched Priscilla Queen of the Desert and that’s the opening song of the film.
Bridget: “Oh, that’s right!
There’s a nice story thread this season with Sam thinking about adopting a rescue dog. Bridget, is that your own dog, Lulu, in a cameo role?
Bridget: “It sure is! There was a dog that was hired that was there with the trainer and the animal escort and they did not deliver what we needed. So I was like, ‘Well, Lulu is in the car, let me get her. Shall we try it?’ And we did. Lulu is very overactive and very much a talker, but for some reason she nailed it!”
Mary Catherine: “She knows what she’s doing!”
As an audience member, Somebody Somewhere has been such a healing and comforting show to watch. Very funny, lots of lots of tears too. As it comes to an end, what has it meant to each of you to have been part of making this series and putting it out into the world?
Bridget: “Honestly, when this is all over, when the press is done and it’s all behind us, I think it’ll really hit me what it’s meant to me. I talk to people on the street and I know how I feel in theory, but it’s too overwhelming to take it in because it’s been a dream job with people that I love very much. Getting to be on HBO and tell a story in our own way. It doesn’t even seem real. That’s the real truth for me.”
Mary Catherine: “Yeah, I keep saying I’ve peaked! It’s not going to get any better than this, this is as good as it gets! It never for one second felt like work. All the love you see on our side of the camera, the same thing was happening behind the camera with the crew and the transpo guys. It was a love fest and a lot of that’s because of Bridget. She’s our top person, it was trickle down, and she treated everybody with so much respect and so much care and so much generosity. It’s how everyone felt loved and cared for. I’m like, ‘Will that ever happen? Will it ever be anywhere close to this set ever again?’ I don’t know.”
Bridget: “I don’t know either. I really don’t”
Mary Catherine: “I couldn’t have dreamt up a better scenario.”
By James Kleinmann
New episodes of the third and final season of Somebody Somewhere debut Sundays at 10:30pm ET/PT on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.
Wonderful interview!! I’m really hoping another service picks this up!!