Allison Janney starts every day like a normal person: playing Wordle. But while I play alone, she dukes it out with 91-year-old Hollywood grandee Carol Burnett. ‘My starting word is ‘stale’, says Janney, who befriended Burnett through their Los Angeles-set TV show Palm Royale. ‘Every day we play Wordle and Connections. Every day I get a text from Carol Burnett, and it makes my day.’ Although, ‘I just found out she plays with other people. She plays with Charlize Theron. I think there’s many more. She’s got a whole Wordle racket. And she’s very good. She gets it in two too many times.’
Janney, 65, hasn’t done an in-person print interview in years, preferring the low-stakes venue of Zoom, and she’s asked me to meet her at 10.45am for an equally low-stakes breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Here dogs sit politely at the heels of suburbanite owners sipping lattes at wooden tables. She’s eight minutes early, which she says is a mark of someone trained in theatre acting, where if you’re a minute late, your understudy takes your part. She orders an Arnold Palmer iced tea and lemonade, and skillet-baked eggs with avocado, tomato and feta. Though she admits coveting the mini pancakes the young girl next to us is having.
Jacket and trousers, Donna Karan. Earrings, Alexis Bittar. Ring, Lady Grey. Shoes, Le Silla
If this isn’t the biggest celebrity interview ever to take place at this Le Pain Quotidien, then it must come awfully close. It’s near the Oscar-winner’s house, and she comes in often, though she does look cooler than anyone else here. She’s 6ft tall, and her blue eyes are highlighted by turquoise Monocle frames that she bought when shooting her new film Another Simple Favor, director Paul Feig’s sequel to 2018 murder mystery A Simple Favor, in Rome. She’s wearing R13 jeans, a white T-shirt under a vintage jacket and carries a pink Louis Vuitton bag. She looks like a gallerist who might sell me a Damien Hirst.
It’s a different look to the one Janney sports in Another Simple Favor, alongside Blake Lively, Anna Kendrick and Elizabeth Perkins. Janney plays Lively’s psychotic aunt Linda, and dresses the part. Despite reports that Lively and Kendrick didn’t get along, Janney says there was no tension on the set. ‘Blake was so lovely. We would share where we found cool jewellery,’ she says. ‘I love this metal dress she wears in the movie. It weighed quite a lot and after every take she would take it off. But that’s a woman who knows how to suffer for fashion.’ She was impressed by Lively’s acting in one mind-bending sex scene in which her character makes love to herself in the form of one of her identical sisters (also played by Lively). ‘She seemed to be so effortless at it, just going back and forth.’
Feig rearranged the shooting schedule to accommodate Janney’s packed diary. Mostly, he says, because ‘she’s the most talented actor I know’. But also, if you’re going to be in Italy for a couple of weeks, you want the person he calls ‘Janney’ to be there. ‘She’s a party in a box. If you want to get a party started, you have Allison Janney show up. She arrives with a playlist and tries to get the dancing started,’ he says. ‘She brings the fun.’
Not that the shoot was wholly straightforward. It was swelteringly hot just outside Rome, where they filmed the bulk of Janney’s scenes, and, ‘I have this wig on and I’m sweating,’ she recalls. ‘The American assistant director looks to the Italian assistant director and says, ‘Get Miss Janney a fan.’ And the Italian assistant director comes back with two people – he thought that I needed to have fans of my work. I’m laughing, wondering how he tried to find fans of Allison Janney. ‘Come on, has anyone seen her in The West Wing?’ He’s probably listing my credits and no one knows who I am.’
Jacket and trousers, Dzojchen. Jumper, Rhea Costa. Earrings and bracelets, Mateo. Brooch, Pdpaola. Ring, Le Vian. Shoes, Kurt Geiger
I’m pretty sure everyone knows who Janney is. She’s done comedies (two Emmys for Mom, a sitcom about addiction recovery), dramas (an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe for the film I, Tonya; four Emmys for The West Wing, one for Masters of Sex and musicals (a Tony nomination for 9 to 5). She’s currently in two TV shows: Palm Royale and The Diplomat, from which she had to carve out time for Another Simple Favor.
It’s hard to believe she has as many credits as she has, since she certainly doesn’t look 65. In real life her face looks more natural than it does in Another Simple Favor, which makes her look somehow younger in person. Though she stopped dyeing her hair years ago and promised to keep it grey, she’s blonde again. ‘My hairdresser changed her mind. She’s done my hair for over 20 years and I’m pretty much her puppet.’ She has never admitted to having cosmetic work done but tells me that she feels pressure to look young. ‘In Hollywood you definitely want to do what you can to make yourself look good,’ she says. ‘But I think I’d feel that whether I was an actress or not. Women naturally feel that pressure. Everyone always has something they don’t like about themselves and it’s great to do things that will help mitigate those feelings. I bought a Pilates machine that I have in my house, which I love. I have someone who comes over and works me out on that. I think that’s the best exercise for me, being 6ft tall. It makes you stand up straight.’
Janney grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where she lived with her dad Jervis, a real estate broker, mum Macy, a former actress, older brother Hal and younger brother Jay. After finishing boarding at The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, she took a Quaalude at a party with other kids who were graduating – and ran straight through a glass door. Today she isn’t wearing socks with her Golden Goose trainers, which allows her to point out a faint scar from which three-quarters of her blood once exited. ‘I sort of hate that I wasted a Quaalude on that. They’re hard to get now. That was a waste of a Quaalude and almost a waste of a life.’ Hal made a tourniquet and raised her leg above her head, which probably saved her life. ‘I definitely almost died,’ she says of subsequently spending seven weeks in hospital, delaying her first year at Kenyon College, and giving up on her plan to become a professional figure skater.
Allison as White House press secretary C. J. Cregg in The West Wing, 2001.
When she did arrive for her first year at Kenyon, a private liberal arts college in Ohio, she landed a part in a play directed by Paul Newman, who was christening the theatre he had donated to his alma mater. He liked her so much he granted her ‘one favour’ from him that she could cash in whenever she needed it. However Newman’s wife, Joanne, then got her into New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse, and she never did call in that favour. Janney subsequently spent years supported by her parents as she worked in New York theatre, almost giving up on a career in acting. At one point, she took a three-day-long series of tests to find out what career she should pursue. The result was ‘systems analyst’. She still doesn’t know what a systems analyst does.
In 1994, she appeared in Nicky Silver’s darkly comedic play Fat Men In Skirts, in which the first act ends with Janney being sodomised by her son. One night, she got no reaction from the audience and turned to co-star Stanley Tucci to ask what was going on. ‘At the end I find out that Jackie Onassis, John F Kennedy Jr, Mike Nichols, Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino were in the audience. It was a benefit performance, but they didn’t tell us who was going to be there. And Jackie O left at the intermission. She died a week later. I kept thinking about it. I was like, ‘Oh my god, that poor woman, the last play she saw was half of Fat Men In Skirts.’
Her theatre contacts began paying off and she got roles in movies such as Big Night, Private Parts, The Ice Storm, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Primary Colors. In 1999 she landed the role of White House press secretary C. J. Cregg in The West Wing. But she would have to wait almost 20 years to win an Oscar in 2018 for playing figure skater Tonya Harding’s mother in I, Tonya. Where does she keep it? ‘He moves around a lot. Sometimes he’s in the kitchen. Sometimes he’s on the top of the bookshelf I have in the living room. Sometimes he’s in my office. It depends where he is needed,’ she says. ‘I’m in the bedroom and sometimes I need to look at Oscar. I just look at it and go, ‘That happened. That really happened.’
With Elizabeth Perkins (right) in just-released Another Simple Favor
So how does it actually feel to win an Academy Award? Janney takes out her phone and pulls up the 1977 photo of Faye Dunaway lounging by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel next to her Oscar the morning after winning it, looking dreamily postcoital. This is not how it went for Janney. ‘I had to go to work the next day at Mom. I went to bed at 2am, got up at 4.30am to do the TV talk show Live With Kelly And Ryan, then went to work. We did the read-through of the Mom script and then they said congratulations [for the Oscar win] and sent us all home.’
After being offered mostly ‘alien and lesbian’ parts in her early career, she has carved out a career playing smart, powerful women. ‘It’s fun because that’s so not who I am,’ she says, claiming to be both shy and happiest at home, despite her reputation for bringing the party. She gets all her travel in when she’s working – including a long stay in London for Netflix’s The Diplomat, during which she fell for the famous chicken with morels dish at Noble Rot, the cosy, French-inflected wine bar on Greek Street in Soho. ‘You have to order the minute you sit down. I dream about that, going back to London to get this chicken,’ she says.
She’s never married (she was engaged to actor Richard Jenik for two years, but they broke it off in 2006) or had children and she hasn’t dated in a while. ‘I don’t date any more. Dating sounds awful. I’ve only had long-term relationships. The people I wound up with were friends who slowly developed into something,’ she says. ‘I joined one of the dating apps once, Raya, but I didn’t actually engage with it. That’s on the backburner indefinitely.’
She finds the older man at the next table, however, worth talking to. That’s because his adorable dog is looking all over for food, and because it makes Janney wonder if she can bring her dogs here, too. She’s recently down to two, one of which was abandoned and offered to her on the set of Palm Royale. ‘I said, ‘If no one will take him, I will.’
Dress and jumper/wrap, Sa Su Phi. Earrings, Alexis Bittar. Bracelets, (left arm) St Moran and (right arm) Tory Burch. Sandals, Larroudé
After the older one lives out his days, she plans to adopt a dog from her niece Petra Janney, a pilot and co-founder of Amelia Air, a nonprofit that rescues animals from kill shelters and flies them to areas with more demand. ‘She’s just a rock star,’ says Janney of her niece. Janney also has a nephew, Niall; both he and Petra are her older brother Jay’s children. Hal, Janney’s younger brother, took his own life in 2011 after years of struggling with addiction, and Janney dedicated her 2018 Oscar speech to him.
Talk turns to upcoming projects – Janney is hopefully going to be in a £75 million Ridley Scott-directed film also starring Margaret Qualley and Jacob Elordi, which isn’t likely to be out until 2027 or 2028. ‘It’s based on a Peter Heller novel [The Dog Stars] about a post-apocalyptic world.’ Oh, and she is in a band, The Broken Dolls, with Courteney Cox (who she befriended on the Hollywood circuit) and her West Wing co-star Mary McCormack (the show’s cast are all still in touch with one another on a big text group, she says), although they haven’t played anywhere yet. ‘I’m the one who’s holding us back. I need to learn how to play the guitar,’ she laughs. ‘It’s really fun to do all the band things except play. We hang out, get drinks, have photo shoots, do all things that bands do, but we just don’t play music.’
Winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in I, Tonya, March 2018
As she’s showing me many, many photos of her dogs – including one in which three of them are mounting each other in a non-PG-rated stack – she gets a text from Laurie Feig, the wife of the director of Another Simple Favor. She’s inviting Janney to dinner next week, and Janney immediately accepts.
She goes back to scrolling dog photos, but is distracted by a guy sitting at an outside table. His dog has a bad leg and she’s worried that it’s hurt itself and the owner doesn’t know. But he assures her that the dog was injured when he adopted him. Pleased to have talked to a neighbour and fellow dog lover, Janney walks over to her black electric Audi, saying she needs to get rid of it because it’s too low for her 6ft frame, although it looks a perfect fit to me. Then she slowly drives away, as if she’s calmly heading off to another suburban appointment. Which I know is an act. Because while her days begin ‘stale’, the party in a box never lets them stay that way.
Another Simple Favor is out now on Prime Video
A walk and talk with Allison Janney
Go-to karaoke song
‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.’
Last piece of clothing you purchased
The jacket that I’m wearing. I bought it two days ago. This is my first outing with it. It’s already got dog hair all over it.
Biggest Spotify song of last year
‘Kill Bill’ by SZA. [Singing] ‘I just killed my ex…’
The movie that makes you cry
Terms Of Endearment.
The last thing you took a photo of and sent to someone
This one was sent to me: a photo of a finished New York Times crossword including the answer ‘I, Tonya’. It’s from my friend Steven [Rogers] who wrote the movie.
Artificial intelligence: terrific or terrifying?
Terrifying.
Your idea of vacation hell
Planes getting cancelled. Cars not being there. Hotel screw-up.
The word you most overuse
‘I don’t know.’ I overuse that phrase. I say it to myself. I wake up and I go, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ And it drives me crazy.
Your go-to breakfast
I do intermittent fasting, so I usually don’t eat at this time. I should wait till noon.
The website you spend too much time on
I’m on Instagram too much.
Favourite swear word
It’s probably just ‘f**k’.
Styling: Tara Swennen at With Falcon.
Picture director: Ester Malloy.
Hair stylist and producer: Jill Crosby.
Make-up: Marie DelPrete.
