Bridget Everett is dancing to Blondie and Bette Midler. She is snarling like a tiger and kicking up her high heels as she poses for photographs in Salon’s New York studio. And all I want to do is tell her about the dead people in my life.
The star, writer and executive producer of HBO Max's beautifully honest and critically-acclaimed show "Somebody Somewhere," which winds down after three seasons this Sunday, first gained attention for her fearlessly campy cabaret act. She gained wider exposure through her work on the Comedy Central sketch show “Inside Amy Schumer” and Schumer’s raunchy rom-com “Trainwreck.” Now, she has emerged as one of our greatest storytellers on loss and loneliness.
Everett has a gift for pulling you along wherever she’s going. She has said she wants her audience to feel free, and that freedom may come with a cathartic, lonely cry or hooting along with a song about fellatio.
In the bittersweet thick of her victory lap as the Peabody Award-winning "Somebody Somewhere" ends its third and final season, Everett appreciates how her show about a middle-aged woman in small-town Kansas navigating the crushing loss of her sister to cancer, has complicated her hard-hitting stage persona — “tits and all that,” as she explains.
“The show explains a little bit about how that stage person came to be,” she says. “There's a thing about the in-your-face presence of my stage stuff that is, in a way, screaming to have people see this person."
Watch the video version of this interview here:
Everett’s success seems both unlikely and inevitable. The 52-year-old Manhattan, Kansas, native spent decades flying just under the mainstream radar, honing her bawdy cabaret act while waiting tables in New York, including at the still-missed Ruby Foo's. When I tell her she surely must have served me edamame at some point in the last 20 years, she offers a knowing nod. I can only hope I tipped her generously.
Everett arrived in New York in the late 1990s, after studying music and opera in college, uncertain of 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 recalls. "I would get on top of the bar, I'd rip my shirt off. The further I went, the more people engaged."
"I was happy to wait tables so I could do my cabaret act," she says. "Did I love waiting tables? No. Did I love being 42 and working next to somebody who's 24 and they're looking at me like, 'Look at you. You're still trying to go for this?'"
Everett speaks like a woman who recognizes the banality of the alternative. "Yeah, I'm still trying to go for it," she says. "You'll be lucky if you have the heart to stick around as long as I have."
As she refined her act, she caught the attention of artists like 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” audience interaction.
“It wasn't ever about trying to shock or do anything wild. It was just what felt exciting in the room at the moment,” she says. “What the audience was asking for, I was giving. I feel like we created it together.”
The result has often been gleefully, hilariously ribald.
"When I grew up in Kansas, I was always getting in trouble for my blue sense of humor,” she says. But she comes by that rejection of inhibitions honestly. She describes her mother, who was a school teacher, as “very conservative” — and also prone to going to the grocery store in just a nightgown and no bra.
“She would go to Food for Less with her beavertails just down to her waist and get the shopping cart,” she says, gesturing toward her midsection. “That was my favorite side of my mom. Didn't give a s**t. She was just loose and free and happy. I was like, this is what I want."
In an odd way, that’s where she eventually went, pitching “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 show was built around her loss. Grief becomes a launching place for Sam’s shifting relationship with her surviving sister Tricia and the new community of friends she builds. Over three seasons, “Somebody Somewhere” was embraced by fans and critics for its authentic portrayal of hurting, healing and personal growth.
“Having the show to deal with those things helped me by the time I lost my mom,” she says. (Fredrica Everett died in 2023) “It's all connected and it's oddly a gift.”
Everett credits her co-stars with giving her an understanding of different kinds of love and ways of grieving that helped her play Sam to such acclaim. They also made the show a true ensemble, portraying, in a way rarely depicted on television, the lives of gay and trans people in small-town America. Sam’s church-going, tax-paying, uncloseted friends believe, as one character says early in the first season, “We deserve to be happy.” That means doing their Zumba and making their vision boards right there in Kansas.
“Those people are people that we've created that feel very real to me,” Everett says. “I think about the world through their eyes a lot of times.”
And her castmates, in turn, credit Everett’s commitment to just going for it as a foundation of that ensemble work.
In season three, for instance, Sam helps guide Brad, her best friend Joel’s boyfriend, through a tuneful declaration of his devotion.
"I’ll never forget the look on Bridget’s face when I was having trouble singing," actor Tim Bagley, who plays Brad, tells me in an email. "She stepped in with such love and sang the song, then encouraged me to sing the rest of it. The expression on her face was pure love and support.”
Jeff Hiller, who plays Joel, writes in an email, "We were making a show about 'found families' and we became a found family. Puke, amiright? Sorry, sometimes the truth is ugly."
"Bridget is a brave performer,” he adds. “She is known for broad, bawdy comedy, but she chose to do this show that is personal, tender, revelatory and raw. It makes me want to be braver too."
"It’s ruined everything for me," says Bagley. "Now I just want to work this way, quietly, intimately, deeply, and with all of my heart. It’s going to be awkward next time I have to say, 'Here’s your salad ma’am' using all of myself. I feel bad when the next director has to say, 'Um, Tim, it’s just a salad, put it down and disappear.'"
Mary Catherine Garrison, who plays Sam's sister Tricia, was Everett’s roommate in a cramped Upper West Side apartment for eight years. “You know when you find your tribe. Bridget and I went through a time where we didn't talk very often, but I knew we'd come back around,” she tells me. “I know we'll know each other forever, and I'm surely grateful for that.”
"This just feels like doing a show with friends," says series co-star Murray Hill. Everett praises Hill for helping set the tone for her experience on set, specifically the scene in the pilot in which Sam encounters Hill’s character Fred Rococo directing choir practice.
“I struggle when I go into a set for a movie 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 an opportunity to get out of my head and just relax."
Everett’s devotion to “Somebody Somewhere” shows in how deeply she recognizes how the show has changed her life since it debuted nearly three years ago. And as ever, a big part of that growth means taking the audience along with her.
“I didn't think my cabaret audience would follow me to the [TV] show, and I was dead wrong about that,” she says. “I did a [stage] show a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, people that know me from that TV show are not going to understand this. And I couldn't have been more wrong.”
If in the past she’d been screaming for us to see “this person” — the person who is complicated, sometimes mournful, and sometimes belting out a tune while sitting on a stranger's lap — it’s undeniable we do now.
“There's a lot of things about [Sam], in ways that she's grown, that have helped me through my grief and belief in myself,” Everett says.
In the meantime, though, the world of Sam and Joel and Tricia is still not over for her, she says, even if it lives on only in her head.
“Maybe we can do a movie or something down the line,” she adds. “I hope that we get to revisit the world of 'Somebody Somewhere' somehow, some way, someday. I just want to keep going. That's all. I don't want this to be the end."
