June Squibb: EPISODE LINK

Transcripts:

Bridgett: Welcome back to Hot Flashes and Cold Topics, everybody. I am so excited and I know all of you will be so excited too, because we have June Squibb on. Welcome to the show.

June Squibb: Thank you. Thank you.

Bridgett: Well, I’m just so thrilled to have you on here. I know that you were just recently in Broadway on Marjorie Prime. Can you tell us a little bit about how that was?

Just your co-stars working with them. And I have more questions about that. But how was it doing at Broadway?

June Squibb: It was wonderful. I know that I had thoughts about, should I be doing this? And I had friends who said, you’re crazy, eight shows a week.

But I just thought it was something I could do. I love the script. So I took it on and it was just the most exciting weeks. They were wonderful. It was so great. The audiences couldn’t have been more enthusiastic, both as audiences and then the people we met afterwards, you know, were just everybody loved it. So it was so rewarding to have done it.

And working with Danny and Cynthia and Chris, I will never forget it. As an actor, you don’t often get a full company like that working the same way and wanting always to make it better. You know, everybody was working that way. It was so exciting, really was exciting.

Bridgett: Well, I just think it’s so amazing. And I’ve seen different people that you have been co-stars with talk about how prepared you are. I am amazed with that because I have trouble remembering anything.  I saw where Will Forte said that you knew the whole script to Nebraska and Cynthia Nixon say that you were so prepared. Well, is this something you’ve always done?

June Squibb: Yeah, I also was at the Cleveland Playhouse before I went to New York, this was in the 50s, I was there for five years and there were a lot, they didn’t teach you about acting per se, but they taught you the decorum in the theater. I really learned everything there of that sort, you know, be prepared, hang up your costumes, you know, things that you don’t think that much about, but are very important when you’re working in the theater.

Bridgett: It’s just common courtesies. I know that like I tried doing some acting things. I think it was right when I was going through menopause, but I started trying to memorize things.

And I thought, what is wrong with me? I can’t remember it, but I’m so amazed at what’s your abilities and everything. Anybody that can memorize anything, it’s just amazing. And so you got your start, like you said, like back in Cleveland, but you’re from Illinois originally. Is that correct?

June Squibb: Right, Southern Illinois.

Bridgett: If you can detect, I’m from the south. I’m from Kentucky.

June Squibb:  I had a bit of a southern accent when I went to Cleveland and there was one actor there that worked very hard with me to take most of the Southern mMidwestern out you know the one that sort of screamed at you.

Bridgett: I know. The words, you know. It’s so difficult to do that.  And then also, I know that you were in Gypsy with Ethel Merman. What was that like?

June Squibb: Well, that was my first Broadway show. So it was very exciting from that standpoint that I was finally appearing on Broadway. And I loved her. We all did. If you didn’t love her, you liked her. She was really a good leader in that sense. You know, she led the company and she was wonderful. And she taught me a great deal about respect for the audience. She had a respect for the audience and she never let you forget that. And that’s something I learned from her.

Bridgett: That’s so important. And coming from somebody like Ethel Merman.

June Squibb: Ethel Merman, yeah. You would think she wouldn’t even think about that, but she was always, she would talk about the audience. She would, she was very aware of them.

Bridgett: And then Eleanor the Great. Which was released, was it released last year? Late last year?

June Squibb: Yeah. I think it was in November it was released. No, before November, because it was before we went to New York. But in the fall, I think it was.

Bridgett: And, you know, it’s a very touching story. It brings humor, but it also brings in a really serious tone. When you got that script, how did you know that, okay, this is something I want to do?

June Squibb: Just by reading it, which is how I decide on all the things that I eventually do.

I just felt it was a beautifully written script and I loved the character. I just felt she had given her so much emotional life which you don’t find in older characters always in film. So I just really loved what I was reading and that I immediately said yes and I actually had the script before Scarlet. I had it about three years before we filmed it.

They had asked me to do it, and there were other people involved that eventually dropped out, but they kept saying, we want you to do this. We want you to do it. And so then when Scarlett came on, she and I had a Zoom, and it was great. I think we both knew, yeah, I can work with her. We both felt that.

Bridgett: And this was her first as a director?

June Squibb: First directing, feature. Yeah, feature. She had done a short, I think it was. But this was her first feature.

Bridgett: Oh, and I did see a lot of you and Scarlett going around together. And it just, it really was touching. And I loved seeing that feature. Like you said, you were the main character in this show. And Eleanor, she has some sassiness to her, you know.

June Squibb: Oh, very much so, yeah.

Bridgett: And I like that. I do, too. I love it because you, you know, like you had said earlier, a lot of times they feature people that might be to the side. Someone is a grandmother role, kind of as a side role. But you were the main character. And I love the relationship between you and Bess. The characters of Eleanor and Bess in the movie is just the sweetest thing. And I thought, wouldn’t that be great? If you just could live with your best friend and get up together and go sit at the beach. And, you know, if things work out and your husband or your partner passes and if you could just do that. But I love that it also touched on grief.

June Squibb: Very much. I felt that it was sort of a study in grief. I mean, how to handle it, the different ways of handling it.

Bridgett: Yeah, I love to the multi-generational relationships in the movie. And, you know, it touched not only on your grief of your friend, but your, and I’m drawing a blank at her name, the young girl, your relationship with Erin and her, Nina and her grief, dealing how people deal with grief and how her father dealt with grief about losing her mother. I just, I thought that’s such an important topic. We’ve had grief counselors on that talk about it because that’s a tough thing to deal with.

June Squibb: It just hits people differently in so many different ways and  you react to it so differently everybody does.

 Bridgett: yeah you know different stages, and you don’t know what’s hit you and depending on the person that you lose, how you’re going to react to that.

 I have to tell you, I rewatched Nebraska before I came on this interview. So I watched it like when it came out, and I rewatched it and I, my husband was in the room, but I had my headphones on, on my computer and I just started laughing out loud at things. And he’d say, what are you doing? And I’m like, I’m sorry, this character that Jude Squibb is playing, Kate, and her, just the reactions. No wonder you got an Oscar nomination. I mean,

How did that feel? You know, was that your first Oscar nomination?

June Squibb: Yes, it was. It was. Well, it was very exciting. I went into it completely not knowing what I was doing or what it meant or anything. I mean, it was so completely new to me.

I had been working my whole life but i had never been nominated for an Oscar before so it was just a lot to comprehend but I loved the film. I loved doing it. I loved shooting it. So it was a reward for this beautiful film.

Bridgett:  It really is a beautiful film and how much fun it had to be with somebody like Will Forte who’s typically a comedian, who’s kind of playing the straight man and you get to be the comic! That had to be so much fun. What a great cast. You know, when we rewatched, I was like, oh my gosh, Bob Odenkirk. I forgot that he played the older son in that movie,  and then Bruce Stern. And I just love the other couples. I think one of my favorite scenes is when you are in the backseat of the car and they’re in the barn and the couple comes up and I just like, I don’t know what it is. It’s something you do with your eyes.that it’s very cute and innocent looking that your eyes make and I it’s just I love the sassiness. You get to bring a lot of sassiness in your characters. Are you sassy?

  June Squibb:  you know, I can be. I think I don’t most of the time. I just don’t take the time to be sassy. Yeah, but I can. I certainly can be.

Bridgett: You may not need to be sassy. Yeah. And I mean, I love that, too. The elevator scene in Eleanor the Great, when the lady, when you’re moving out of the apartment, that is hilarious. We talk about her husband. And also Thelma. So Thelma was such an important movie. Even though it had comedy in it, it hit such an important topic. Have you ever been in that situation where somebody’s tried to pull one over on you?

June Squibb: Oh, yeah. I get it on my phone all the time. Oh, yeah. And I’m very, you know, I don’t answer anything if I’m not sure what it is.

No, I think it’s insidious. It’s the most insidious crime that we have going at this point because of what it’s doing to people.

Bridgett:  Yeah, and I have met, well, people in my family have been called exactly like that, using the voice of a 20-something, maybe a teenager. My in-laws have been called with a call saying it was my daughter. I have lots of friends that…

they’ve been called. And one woman was at the bank. She was at the bank and her parents, the parents of the child, got to her before she withdrew money. So that is such an important topic. And to any of our listeners, if you have not seen Thelma, you really need to check it out because if you want to share a little bit about what the plot of that is or what’s going on in the movie Thelma.

June Squibb: Well, a woman who is scammed and is determined to get her money back. And she goes on a quest with a friend and on his mobile scooter. And they travel around and she does find the, she had an address to send the money to. And these were not, oh, let’s say professional criminals. They were sort of amateur criminals. So she found where they live or where the address was and she gets her money back.  I mean that’s what’s so wonderful,  I think is that she actually does this

Bridgett: Yes. I mean, I think that’s amazing. And I hope that, I hope that there is a way that this can be stopped because so, yeah, like you said, one of the most insidious crimes and my mother was scammed, not in that way, but somebody come into her house saying they had done work on her roof and she wrote a check. And before she could call one of my sisters to say, well, maybe my daughter did send someone to do this. They’d already cashed the check. And thankfully it wasn’t a crazy amount of money, but it does. And I just think. It’s the most rotten thing.

June Squibb: Well, it makes you so mad because you’re really being taken advantage of in every way.

Bridgett: Right. And it’s just so awful to just do that to anybody. I don’t care what their age is. Just doing things like that’s just so awful. And, you know, I forgot to share with our listeners, if you haven’t watched Eleanor the Great, can you share also a little bit about what that story is about?

June Squibb: A woman who has been living with her best friend for about 11 years in Florida, and both husbands have died, and their families are not with them. One of her family is in New York. And she had been a Holocaust survivor, and she dies, and all at once this woman, Eleanor, is alone.

So she moves back to New York to be with her daughter. And you see they’ve had problems, I think, all their lives. They have not gelled too well together. And so she goes from one thing to the other. And it’s not comfortable. She doesn’t like being there. And, of course, she’s mourning Bessie.

And she goes to the Jewish Community Center. She’s been entered into a singing group. I think her daughter put her name in for a singing group. And she gets into the Holocaust survivor room by mistake and is kind of caught there. And then they start talking about it. And she realizes she knows all of Bessie’s stories. And Bessie told her, you have to keep it alive.

You can’t let my stories go. You can’t let nobody hear them. So she starts telling the Holocaust stories if it’s her own, if she was experiencing it. And this keeps up for a while, and she becomes a little, sort of, I guess, for a better word, famous, because it is in the press.

 She’d never had a bat mitzvah, and so she’s getting one. And her daughter comes to the temple and tells the group, my mother was not in the Holocaust. And also the young girl is a journalist, and she was at the meeting, so she wants to interview Eleanor. And she does. And they become friends. They become very close friends and spend a lot of time together. So Eleanor has not only betrayed her, but her daughter. I mean, everybody feels betrayed by this. But then they all realize at the end that she’s doing it because of her love of Bessie and her need. She needed to do something like this to keep Bessie alive. So it’s grief. It’s, you know, it’s how do you grieve? What’s the right way to grieve? And how should we be doing all this?

Bridgett: Right. And acceptance and forgiveness, too.

June Squibb: Because, yeah, because there’s very I think that’s very much a part of it.

Bridgett: Right.  I felt like when I was watching it first, like, oh, they’re being really hard on Eleanor. But I think the way you grieve and come around. They are in shock and these are things people go through when they’ve lost someone that they love. And I love I just love the love of the friendship that is shown in that movie.

June Squibb: And I think the way Scarlett portrayed that was so, so beautiful. You know, just, you know, after the death, me sitting alone on the beach, that still touches me when I see the film.

Bridgett:  Oh, yeah. And when you’re cleaning off her bed. Oh, yeah. It’s just, it’s like you didn’t, you didn’t have to say a word, you know, it’s just that it was just right there. And then, you know, you were talking about the music. So you still, you have a really beautiful voice. Did you always had this gorgeous singing voice. I mean, I’ve seen you on Glee and different shows and it’s still there.

June Squibb: Well, so to speak, I doubt that I’ve got the higher notes that I had, but yeah, I still have a voice.

Bridgett: I’m always amazed by someone that has such a beautiful singing voice because I do not have one. And I just found, I find it almost miraculous that anybody has such a beautiful voice like that. And so like, I know I saw you on Glee. singing memories. And that whole scene, there’s a lot of great people in that scene too with Glee. When they ask you to do something like that, how much preparation does that take?

June Squibb: Well, actually that took very little preparation because they didn’t give me the music beforehand. So I didn’t study anything. And it all just, we worked through about 10 days.

And they do a technical thing with the singing so that everything fits where they need it. And I was able to do that, I think, in one session, one or two, one time. I forget how many hours we spent. But they said it usually took longer. So I was able to do it, you know, in a shorter period.

 But I had been singing for years, years and years, so it was different than someone that, you know, came in and that hadn’t been. But I loved it. And Chris Colfer and I are still good, good friends. He wrote that episode and starred as Peter Pan in it. And he’s one of my closest friends now. We never sort of let go of each other after Glee.

Bridgett: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s fantastic! I mean, I love the whole scene. I love to see it. Was Billy Dee Williams in that?

June Squibb:  Yeah, Billy Dee Williams. Tim Conway.

Bridgett:  Just to see them in that scene as well. Oh my gosh, what a touching scene. I didn’t realize that Chris Coffer wrote that.

June Squibb: Yeah, he wrote the script. And he’d written some others, but I think that was the biggest thing he had written.

Bridgett: Wow. Well, I also just wanted to ask, you’re from Southern Illinois. And what does it take for someone to say, okay, I’m going to go, I’m going to follow this dream. I’m going to go, you said, to Cleveland and then to New York. Was that encouraged? Did you have somebody that you saw that did that or was that just something inside of you?

 June Squibb:  it was something inside of me that knew that. I don’t want to say I didn’t belong in that town, but in a way I didn’t and I knew it my whole life. It was a wonderful childhood, I mean it’s not that, but and I did not get encouragement ever, really. And it was just me. I knew this is what I had to do.

 Bridgett:  I think that’s so remarkable because I feel like a lot of people do get discouraged by someone in their family. I know when I would try out for cheerleading, my mother would say, I don’t know if you’re going to make it this year. And she loved me. She was a great mother.

But I think it was she was trying to prepare me for disappointment.

June Squibb:  I know people don’t want to see someone crushed and hurt.

Bridgett:  But I think it really I think that says a lot about you, that you just went ahead, that you have a lot of drive in you.

June Squibb:  Yeah, because it was, you know, it was new. Everything was new to me then certainly, but I always knew that I was going to be leaving.

 Bridgett:  you always worked whether it was Broadway or film. I was listening to Amy Poehler’s interview with you and that you would do reviews and just different types of cabarets and things. Is that what you think kind of led you to where you are now?

June Squibb:  Oh, I think very much so. Yeah. my first 20 years were musicals, either stage musicals or reviews in nightclubs, cabaret work.

So I was on a certain line, and then I met a man who became my second husband, and he was an acting teacher. And we worked together in stock, and he knew my background. He knew I, in fact, we were doing a musical and he knew that’s what I did, basically. And he said, “if you really knew what you were doing, you could be a really fine actress.” And I guess I believed him, you know, and I had started out as an actress, really. That’s what I wanted to do. But the musical thing started happening and I was good at it.

So it just was the thing to do, it seemed. But he was determined that I was going to be an actress. And he coached me, but also I went into his class. And a lot of screaming and yelling, a lot of back and forth, you know. But it worked. He taught me a new way of working.

And which meant that I was, you know, much closer to the acting thing.

Bridgett: I’ve seen photos of you in your I think it was your gypsy outfit. And I did you have like light bulbs or something?

June Squibb:  Yes. Yes.

Bridgett: That is so wild. I think that’s so incredible to be part of that whole show.

June Squibb: Oh, yes, it was incredible. It is an incredible show. I mean, it was just done. And Danny Burstein, of course, was working in it before he came to Marjorie Prime. But we had a lot of back and forth talking, you know, about Gypsy.

It was a great show. And the original, you know, God, it just broke boundaries for musical work.

Bridgett: I forgot to bring up About Schmidt. I mean, when you were in that, you’re with Jack Nicholson.

And a very different role for him as well to do. How was it working on that movie?

June Squibb: It was great. And I don’t mean to be Pollyanna about everything, but I really have had wonderful experiences working. And Jack was wonderful. And he always made me feel like a peer.

I mean, he never once made me feel “I’m Jack Nicholson and you’re not.” There was none of that. It was it was a great experience. It really was. And it is I realize now it is the film that put me into sort of the Hollywood minds where they thought all at once of June Squibb doing a role, you know, on film and television.

Bridgett: And another role that you were just so cute in.  And then you find out, oh, she’s been having an affair with his best friend all those years. But I love that role. And I love to hear that about Jack Nicholson, too, because, you know, he’s this, I don’t even know how many Academy Awards he’s won. He’s won a lot. And just to hear that he just, the treatment of you is great, is so fantastic to hear that.

So, you know, your role, now you’re getting offers all the time. What are maybe some reasons you might take a role or you might turn down a role?

June Squibb: The script. And there are certain people that I will do anything for.

One is coming up, a director I have worked with three times before, and she’s asked me to do a film. And I said, yes, I didn’t even need to read the script because there are some people that I have great faith in that I love and that I’ve worked with and know what will come out, basically. And if those people are involved, then I just say yes. But otherwise, the script, I read the script and I read everything that gets sent to me. And I make my decision on the script. On the script and the writing.

Bridgett: And that’s got to be a lot of reading.

June Squibb: It is. There’s a lot of reading. But I just feel I can tell from a script right away, almost, if this looks like something I should do or not.

Bridgett: Well, I think it’s so wonderful to see you in all of these different forms, film, stage, everywhere, TV. Do you find it’s getting better for women? You know, once they pass like that 40-year-old mark, do you find that roles are better?

June Squibb: I think so. I think they’re writing more for older people, both men and women. I just think that they’re being more realistic. You know, they don’t stop at 40 or 50 now they go on 60, 70 sometimes 80 and 90 because I’m always getting scripts for 90 year olds, so they’re being written by someone.

Bridgett:   and I love it too because just like  Eleanor the Great, you are the main character.

And, you know, like we said before, you’re the main person in it. And I love seeing that. I think it’s so important to include people of all ages, to know that people, there’s still lots to live. There’s still a lot of life left in people. And that’s a big, big message that we like to share with our listeners is it’s not over.

June Squibb: I think that also we are becoming an older generation, an older population. And I think that all at once, all of this is very important to people where I don’t think it was that important before. I don’t think people thought that much about living into their 80s and 90s. And now it’s almost common. So people are rethinking this.  I think that’s why all at once you’re able to have scripts with 80 and 90 year old people and people are interested.

Bridgett: They really are.  And you’re a great. You’re sharper than most. I’m pretty sure you’re sharper than me. When everybody said how prepared you are, I keep thinking, oh, my gosh, your brain must be like synapses are going and everything. And I just think that’s so amazing. And I want to thank you so much for your time, for taking the time to talk to us.Just everything that you’re doing. I can’t wait to see you on more things. And thank you so much, June Squibb.

June Squibb: Thank you. This has been lovely. I’ve enjoyed it.