LYNCH MOB: Actress Jane Lynch talks about career to Outfest audience

“I’m a character actress. What I do caught up with my age.”

That’s how Jane Lynch describes her blossoming career of the past decade. Although she’s been acting professionally for more than a quarter of a century, it took the arrival of the 21^st Century for her to achieve stardom.

Her breakthrough roles came with 2000’s Best in Show where she played a lesbian dog trainer and 2003’s A Might Wind where she played a porn star turned folk singer. Soon after, she tried to deflower Steve Carrell in 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin and a had an acclaimed stint on The L-Word, Showtime’s lesbian soap opera.

But a year ago, she hit superstardom with the arrival of Glee in which she plays Sue Sylvester, a vengeful cheerleading coach determined to squash the burgeoning show choir which is siphoning money for her cheerleading budget.

Honored as this year’s Outfest Achievement Award winner, Lynch sat down with Variety’s associate editor Peter Bebruge on Saturday, July 10 to talk about her career while a packed house of 500+ people listened in.

Here’s some of the things she shared:

1.Being cast as Sue Sylvester was serendipity. At the pitch meeting, Fox president Kevin Reilly told Glee creator Ryan Murphy that the show needed a nemesis. Murphy immediately responded that she would be named Sue Sylvester and played by Jane Lynch.

2.But getting the job wasn’t so easy. Lynch was contractually tied to another series that was stuck in development hell. So, she had to film the Glee pilot and the first 4-5 episodes as a guest star until her contract expired. Then she was free to officially join the Glee cast.

3.Lynch was a class clown growing up. “People always described me as funny,” she explained. “But my family wasn’t particularly funny, so the bar wasn’t very high.”

4.A native of Dalton, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, she dreamed of being an actress early on. When Ron Howard of Happy Days fame did a local radio talk show, she called in and asked for his advice. Howard told her to keep auditioning for any plays that came along.

5.Following Howard’s advice, she wrote letters to agents. Upon catching her doing that, her mother chastised her, telling her, “No one gets what they want in life.”

6.She developed a reputation as a quitter in high school when she was cast as the king in a production of The Princess and the Pea. “That was the beginning of my being cast in traditionally male roles,” she said. “No one in that production wanted to be an actor more than me, but I didn’t like being cast as the king. So, I quit and joined the tennis team.”

7.She went to Illinois State University as a communication major. Unbeknownst to her, Illinois State had a strong theater department, so she soon switched majors and started living out her dream.

8.Soon after college, she was in the stage show, The Real Brady Bunch where they took actual scripts of that 70s family series and performed them as a parody. Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz got wind of it and issued a cease and desist order. Schwartz came to see the production, lawyers in tow. Cast members recognized him and brought him on stage where he received a standing ovation. So moved, he told them they could perform the Brady Bunch as long as they wanted, for
free.

9.Despite playing Carol Brady on stage, when Schwartz decided to do a big screen parody of the Brady
Bunch, Lynch couldn’t get the time of day from casting directors. When she tried to explain to them that she originated the idea of doing the show as a parody, casting directors were completely clueless.

10.She worked as a receptionist at a Chicago realty firm until finally quitting to pursue acting full time.

11.When she joined the touring cast of Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe, she went around the country performing the best of Second City skits. But she was expected to perform them as written. Thus, improving was not allowed, which suited her fine. While she loved performing sketch comedy,
improve scared her.

12.A friend recommended her to director Andrew Davis for a small role of a doctor in 1993’s The Fugitive. The role was written for a male, but Davis liked her and cast her. “I got paid $8000 and was ecstatic!”

13.Shortly afterwards, she moved to Hollywood. She says she was lucky because her Chicago agent had an LA office so she was able to come to town with representation, something that gave her a leg up on other just-arrived-in-town actors who have to find an agent.

14.When Christopher Guest cast her in his Best in Show, she was terrified. Cast members were given a two paragraph description of the character and had to flesh it out from there. She had no idea what to do, but when she got to rehearsal, she discovered the other cast members like Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara were equally unsure what to bring to the character. But once they started, magic happened.

15.In between movie and TV roles, she appears in many short films, almost all of which have played at Outfest.

16.She doesn’t miss performing on stage. “It’s really hard work and you have to do it night after night.”

17.When fame started coming her way, she never had any illusions about pretending not to be gay for public. “I had too much history in town to pretend that.”

18.She had no problem being openly gay in Hollywood. “You’re allowed to be gay as a character actor in America.”

19.“I’m blonde and I’m gay. You don’t get maligned for being blonde. So I felt a responsibility to do things like this (Outfest panels), to talk about being married.” Lynch married her partner Lara Embry in late May.

20.Her L-Word character was originally named Barbara Lynch, but that eventually changed to Joyce Wischnia.

21.She was especially excited to be paired with Cybill Shepherd on The L-Word, explaining that she went to the post office to pick up her script. As she always does, she quickly glanced through the script there at the post office. When she discovered that Shepherd was going to be playing her love interest, she had a fit right there in the post office.

22.On Glee, she doesn’t see the kids much. She works primarily with Matthew Morrison. She sees the kids primarily at events.

23.She worked hard on the Vogue video for Glee. The first meetings about that video were held in November and they didn’t shoot it until March. So, she had months to practice the moves; she was on planes at Christmas practicing the arm movements. But when they finally shot the video, she was proud of her work. “I just felt like when we shot it, I nailed it.”

24.She became friends with Olivia Newton John while shooting her appearance on Glee. “I now call her ONJ. She sent us an e-card for our wedding.”

25.She especially admires the work that Chris Colfer does with the character of gay teen Kurt on Glee, saying he’s so truthful in his work. “He’s an old grandmother in a 20 year old body.” She adds that Ryan Murphy will never write Kurt as a victim.

26.Glee is adding a Christian character who will have problems with Kurt being gay, will give Rachel a run for her money.

For more coverage of Outfest's opening weekend, click here.