Call her the
female Bill Murray. Jane Lynch doesn't sweat to be
funny; she gets laughs just by being. If you
don't yet know her name, you surely know
Lynch's screen persona. Tall, pretty, and
self-possessed, she reads as a proper lady from the
country club. Except she's really twisted.
Picture Lynch as the unnerving electronics-store manager
who's hot to deflower Steve Carell in The
40- Year-Old Virgin. (Sidelong whisper:
"Ever hear the term...'fuck
buddy'?")
Considering that
Lynch is gay, it's strange that she's never
been interviewed in The Advocate. But Lynch
assures us that the delay hasn't been about any
reluctance on her part. "I'm way, way,
way out," she says.
It was a lesbian
role, in 2000's Best in Show, that put
Lynch on the map. As a long, tall poodle trainer with
an eye for trophy wife Jennifer Coolidge, Lynch deployed
deft timing and an undercurrent of wistful neediness
to steal every scene she was in. She has since
continued to work with Show director
Christopher Guest, earning her place in the unofficial
repertory company that performs his ensemble comedies.
"Jane has
an unbelievable intelligence, and it really goes to strange
and dark and great places," Guest tells The
Advocate. "She's always surprising to me
and always exactly right on the mark."
In Guest and
company's last outing, 2003's A Mighty
Wind, Lynch played a porn
star-turned-folksinger. In his new Hollywood
spoof, For Your Consideration, she's an
Entertainment Tonight- style TV
personality cohosting a show with Fred Willard.
Says Guest:
"I thought it would be fun to have her opposite Fred,
who is a force of nature. Jane is one of the few
people who can stand up to that. Fred's a steamroller,
which can be a challenge, and she could just wipe the
floor with him if she wanted to."
Raised in a
suburb on the south side of Chicago, Lynch attended Illinois
State University--"In Normal, Ill.," she
notes--before joining the graduate acting
program at Cornell. After a brief stint in New York City,
she headed back to Chicago, where she appeared with
the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Steppenwolf
Theatre Company, and--maybe most
significantly--the Second City Touring Company as well
as playing Carol Brady in the cult hit The Real
Live Brady Bunch. But it was a role in the
feature film The Fugitive that brought her out to
Hollywood, where she began landing numerous TV guest spots.
Despite the
recent uptick in her profile, Lynch seems to have maintained
a decidedly un-Hollywood manner--warm, open, and
unpretentious. She has accepted the mantle of
"gay in Hollywood" with grace and ease. Active
with the Los Angeles- based networking organization
Power Up since the group's inception, Lynch has
donated her acting services to the film projects
sponsored by the group. She was named to its 2005 list of
"10 Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz." It
was at a Power Up event that she met L Word
creator Ilene Chaiken, which led to Lynch's recurring role
on the series.
If Lynch is
currently enjoying the kind of moment most actors (at any
age) hope and struggle for, she is still taking full
advantage of all available opportunities. She filmed a
small role as Amelia Earhart for Martin
Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator
that ended up on the cutting room floor. Supporting
roles in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky
Bobby, the Lifetime Network series Lovespring
International, and upcoming roles in Boston Legal
and Help Me Help You personify the old
cliche of the hardest-working woman in show
business. We sat down during her cover shoot on the one day
she was in Los Angeles (the interview itself was
rescheduled from the morning to the afternoon due to a
last-minute voice-over session). Merely a brief
stopover before she flew to Vancouver, Canada, to film
another episode of The L Word.