You know Judy Greer from somewhere — we all do. Back in 2014, she even wrote a memoir about getting recognized called I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star. Greer’s ubiquity comes from a résumé that unfurls like a CVS receipt, her long, fruitful career built by stealing scenes in countless film and TV shows like 13 Going on 30, Jawbreaker, Arrested Development, Wilson, The Wedding Planner, The Descendants, and way too many more to list. Most recently, you’ve seen her in Showtime’s Emmy-nominated series The First Lady, as Leah Askey in The Thing About Pam with Renée Zellweger, and as Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter in the latest Halloween film. And starting on September 20, you’re about to see her again, as Bree Marie Jensen in Reboot, an ensemble Hulu comedy in which Greer plays a leading actress in a reboot of a fictional ensemble Hulu comedy called Step Right Up — a concept so delightfully meta.
Despite the roll call of successes, Greer told Shondaland she sometimes worries the well will dry up, so in true Midwestern fashion (she’s from Detroit), she has a tendency to keep her foot on the gas when it comes to her career.
“I think sometimes my work ethic is a little too intense,” Greer says. “I think if I’m not shooting something or working on something, then I must be failing. That’s not how this business is meant to be, but for me, I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t I work every day? Most people work every day.’ As a woman, we’re all aging, and these great roles are coming my way, so I’m like, ‘Yes, yes, yes! What if I don’t get this again?’ My career seems to keep going in this really exciting direction, but it does make me feel the pressure to say yes to projects instead of saying yes to myself. I should try to plan a trip, but that doesn’t come naturally to me. Sometimes, my friends think I need to take a break and not say yes to everybody. That’s something held over from the Midwest, definitely. Not to generalize, but let’s say I’m frugal and find it important to save my money. I definitely brought that with me to Hollywood. If you’re not good at managing your finances, this can be a very difficult business.”
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Greer says she was about 10 years into her career when she realized performing was it for her. “I was kind of always eyeballing grad school,” Greer admits. “I was always like, ‘The jig will be up sometime; this isn’t something I can do forever. One of these days, I’m going to stop getting jobs, and I’ll have to figure something else out.’ I’ve always wondered, ‘When are they going to find out?’ But they haven’t. I love what I do! This probably sounds like a silly thing to say, but it was well into it that I realized this was for good. This is my job. This is my life.”
Now more about that life: Reboot is a thorough and effective, dead-on send-up of streaming TV culture — from pitch meetings to writers’ rooms, to trailer antics, to power plays, and everything in between — right down to the workaday obsession with lunch. “To speak specifically to my character, she’s struggling with being out of the business for 15 years, with aging, being worried about her talent, and impostor syndrome that I and so many of my colleagues feel all the time,” says Greer. “That was all really interesting to me and things I feel are universally relatable.”
When asked what drew her to the role of Bree (a role she tackles with aplomb), a star stepping back on the set of her long-defunct, long-running sitcom after a stint as duchess of a fictional Nordic country, Greer immediately mentions the opportunity to work with showrunner Steven Levitan, who also mined sitcom gold with shows like Just Shoot Me, Modern Family, Frasier, and plenty more of note. “He is a genius. And he is a weirdo. He is so funny,” Greer says. “I knew he was a genius before I met him. But having spent so much time with him, it’s been really interesting to get to know what he’s really like. He’s quieter, more thoughtful, and more cerebral than I would’ve anticipated. He hears everything, so be careful what you say, or it will end up in an episode!”
She also mentions she couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with the formidable cast of the show, namely co-stars Keegan-Michael Key, Paul Reiser, Rachel Bloom, Johnny Knoxville, Calum Worthy, and Krista Marie Yu. “So many heavy hitters in comedy land! Everyone has acting chops. I fall in love with shows because of the people, and I root for the characters. We made a really funny show, but you do end up, at least the hope is, that you root for these people,” says Greer.
Even from the first episode, it’s clear Greer is having fun with Bree — a byproduct of the Reboot writers’ room, she says. “This was a really easy job — I mean easy in that it all came very naturally. It was hard work, but I was so excited to go to work every single day, I would show up early. It’s always fun to make people laugh, definitely. The scenes are so perfectly written. Our writers are so incredible, the way they’re able to get so much in and so succinctly in such a short amount of time. We always have Steve [Levitan] and another writer on set throwing out alt lines, so it’s almost like they’re improvising for us. What do I think I can do better?”
Greer’s tenacious work ethic also has roots in her pre-acting life, when she trained as a ballet dancer before attending Chicago’s prestigious Theatre School at DePaul University. Her formal training reinforced the basic tenets of the craft, but there are some things, she says, you can only learn on set. “I learned to be nice to everyone, all the time,” Greer says. “Not only can people keep getting promoted and become your boss or a director you want to work with someday, but also your crew takes care of you. They’re people, and they deserve to be treated well. Sometimes, I’d see people not being so nice to the crew, and I learned early on they could make your life a living hell.”
Though she makes acting easy, and she doesn’t have to audition for every role she’s cast in anymore, Greer admits to one aspect of her work that can be challenging. “A couple of times in my career, I just haven’t had great communication with the director. It’s really difficult to either decipher what it is that they want or talk to them about a character because they have one idea, and I have another,” she explains. “You can go into a project that you’ve been offered and have never really communicated with these people about what you’re bringing to the character. If I can’t figure out what my director wants, it makes the days on set really hard.”
Given that Greer is already a published memoirist, the question of whether she has another book in her is met with an enthusiastic “Yes! I do have another book in me! I love writing,” she says. “It was much more time-consuming [to write it] than I thought it would be. I wrote that book while I was shooting movie after movie and traveling a lot for work. I love my book; I’m really proud of it. If I was to do a book again, I would really want to take time off to focus on it. It’s hard enough to read a book while I’m shooting, but to actually be writing one, I don’t know. I used to do so much at once, and I’m trying really hard to get back to a one-thing-at-a-time kind of vibe.”
True to her need to keep going, going, going, she’s also recently managed to add a side hustle to her repertoire: Greer is co-founder of a company called Wile, which makes supplements, powders, and tinctures for “grown women” in midlife. When approached by close friend and former publicist Corey Scholibo, Greer couldn’t resist the opportunity to start an important conversation about menopause. “We have this twisted idea of the word ‘menopause’ — it’s a bad word, it means you’re old, society doesn’t want you, and you’re not valid anymore,” Greer says.
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Her desire to get into the women’s health space was inspired by her own personal experience. “Menopause can happen any time in your 30s; it’s totally natural — it’s just a hormonal shift,” Greer explains. “The more we can manage those symptoms, the happier we’re going to be in our lives. It’s a space I was excited to talk about because I felt like no one was talking to me about it. I went to three gynecologists before I found one who would really talk to me about these symptoms. All the ones leading up to her were like, ‘Maybe you should go on antidepressants; maybe you should go back on the pill.’ I’m like, ‘Why are you putting me on antidepressants? You’re not addressing the issue.’ So, with Wile, in addition to providing a great product that I take myself, I’m just hoping to start this conversation so that women don’t find themselves in the position my friends and I found ourselves in.”
Acting-wise, up next for Greer is something decidedly unfunny: a dramatic film called Eric LaRue, Michael Shannon’s directorial debut. It’s based on a 2002 play by Brett Neveu, and Greer plays the mother of a boy who shot three of his classmates, depicting the aftermath of the trauma. This swing from something so light and funny to something so tragic is a true testament to Greer’s versatility, but there is one type of role she has yet to play — an action hero. “I’d love to be in an action movie — that’s something I’ve never done,” Greer says. “I want to jump out of a helicopter!” At this rate, it won’t be long before she does.
Vivian Manning-Schaffel is a multifaceted storyteller whose work has been featured in The Cut, NBC News Better, Time Out New York, Medium, and The Week. Follow her on Twitter @soapboxdirty.
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