‘It’s a little like Sliding Doors,” says the actor and cabaret artist Bridget Everett, speaking from Manhattan, New York. She’s talking about her new dramedy Somebody Somewhere, which is set in Manhattan, Kansas. “Basically, what life might be like if I had stayed in Kansas and never moved to New York and found my voice.”
I feel I ought to point out that Somebody Somewhere is nothing like Sliding Doors. Everett plays Sam, a subdued, laconic woman, sometimes depressed, sometimes just not feeling it. She has a quiet life and a gigantic voice, which she slowly comes around to unleashing in the drab community centres and church halls where thwarted, flamboyant people find one another. The drama doesn’t so much centre on Sam as move stealthily from one understated struggle to another: Sam and her sister’s grief at losing their other sister; their mother’s alcoholism, which, like bankruptcy, moves first slowly and then very fast.
It’s poignant, haunting, and funny in ways that mean you sometimes don’t laugh until two days later. To say the show was about disappointment would be too simple, and misleadingly bleak, but part of what makes it so unusual is the richness it finds in a life that drama might ordinarily overlook – that of a person, Everett says, who has “floated through life in their 20s, 30s, 40s and just given up”.
The HBO series is called “semi-autobiographical”, but “semi” doesn’t exactly cover it. Everett, like her character, grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, and spent years waiting for a break. “I had a couple of failures early on and let that be the litmus test of what was possible for me. I slipped into a life of waiting tables and staring at walls – for 20 years. More. From maybe when I was 14 till I was in my 40s.”
Everett is flattening the picture a bit: there was a bit more to those years. While she was “pretty settled, watching my friends succeed and just being their cheerleader, there was something inside me that really missed music, missed singing. Once a week, we would go to a karaoke bar and I would go wilder and wilder and wilder. I’d start with a microphone and, by the end, I would be on the bar, ripping my shirt open, throwing Jack Daniel’s at the crowd.”
In one way, it didn’t matter whether it was a karaoke bar or Madison Square Garden. “There’s something about singing,” she says. “I feel really plugged in and electrified. When I was little, my family – we didn’t communicate well, but the one time we really experienced joy was around the holidays, when every day would be drinking and singing. My sister would pour me a glass of Blue Nun. And I would be so happy then. There’s something I cling to about that.”
Everett wasn’t wasted in karaoke – she just had a talent karaoke couldn’t contain. So in the early 00s, a friend who ran a tiny theatre asked her to turn her weekend wildness into a cabaret act. It’s a niche art: it’s not comedy, it’s not musical theatre, there’s no such thing as “mainstream” cabaret. It wasn’t a fast track to fame.
“Cabaret doesn’t pay as well as some people might think,” Everett says drily. “So I still had to hustle to keep the roof over my head and buy the occasional bottle of chardonnay.” It was, however, a passport to something: “A lot of my stuff was rock, because I originally wanted to be a rock singer. I just had to figure out how to get the stage time. When I was encouraged to write an act, I stepped into my voice more. I have a bunch of songs about various parts of the anatomy. I think you should sing what you know – and what I know is different kinds of tits.”
So perhaps it was quite cult and subversive, and only just managed to keep the wolf from the door, but Everett’s act by the late 00s was pretty established. She’d open for the comedian Amy Schumer, and had piqued the interest of various film producers. In 2008, she featured as an incredibly drunk woman in the Sex and the City movie. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a movie now. My life is going to change.’ But life just does not fucking work out that way. I was waiting tables for at least another 10 years.”
Everett had to be dragged kicking and screaming into an audition for the 2017 US indie film Patti Cake$, because by that time she had a reputation. “It takes an incredible amount of confidence and courage for me to get up on stage and give myself away. The shows are very personal. I talk about my body – there are a lot of tender moments. I’d worked hard to feel like I belonged there. I thought if I got to Sundance and stank the whole place up, that’s going to rock my confidence.”
Cabaret is, she says, “much more embraced in London and Sydney. But in New York, there’s a whole cabaret counterculture – people doing things that are very subversive and wild.” Maybe everybody in showbiz is the black sheep of their family, unless they’re part of a dynasty. But Everett is drawn – in Somebody Somewhere – to the question of what remains of family relationships; which part of the black sheep is still very attached to the other sheep.
The show isn’t directly true to life in all its details: Everett is one of six, while Sam, her character, just has two sisters. They’re similar but not identical, and the show is less raucous than the stage act. “If people knew what I was like when I’m not on stage,” says Everett, “they’d think Sam made sense. I can be a little depressive. We constantly talked about how much to Bridget-ise Sam, how much to bring in the raunchy lyrics or the dirty side. Sam is not me but there are parts of me in her.” There is one crucial parallel though: both Everett and her character have lost a sister. “Families work because everybody has their role. Lose one cog and the whole thing can fall apart. ”
In the drama, Sam and her sister Trisha try to overcome their differences: Trisha is uptight, judgmental, godly, homophobic; Sam is surly, avoidant, alienated. But they can’t make it work without their late sister Holly. Instead, they have to change how they are. Everett has said she didn’t want Somebody Somewhere to be one of those dramas where people grow. And, yes, it is a cliche when a character goes on a journey – but that’s what a drama is. She modifies her position a bit: “It was important for me to not have Sam grow because of a romantic relationship. I feel like I’ve seen that 1,000 times. That’s not been my experience and I just didn’t want to do it.”
Somebody Somewhere just had the green light for a second season and Everett has, I suggest, pulled off something impressive: she got her big break with a complicated, unconventional show at an age – 49 – when female performers are expected to step out of the limelight and rejoin the chorus. “When you put it that way, I want to give myself a high five,” she says.
But Everett’s just not that good at even the most fleeting self-congratulation. “I watch the show alone. I don’t like to be around other people when I’m watching myself. The HBO label comes on, that static sound. I don’t believe it’s me. It’s hard to grasp that I might have achieved something. It’s hard to sit with that. It’s a midwestern thing – to keep your head down, keep working and hope for the best.”
• Somebody Somewhere is on HBO Max in the US, Binge/Foxtel Now in Australia and begins on Sky Comedy in the UK in March.
