She's Quite the Character
The Boston Globe
BY CHRISTOPHER WALLENBERG
July 05, 2006
Original Article

NEW YORK Amy Sedaris may be coming to the end of a long day of press interviews and photo shoots to promote her film "Strangers With Candy," opening Friday and based on the Comedy Central TV series, but her famously frenetic energy hasn't abated. She remains as indefatigable as Tom Cruise in a couch-jumping, Brooke Shields-bashing frenzy.

Of course, Sedaris suggests, the PR blitz could be worse.

"What if you were promoting `The Woodsman'?" she says, referring to the 2004 Kevin Bacon film about a child molester who's released from prison. " `So, let's talk pedophiles,' " she quips, slipping into the mocking voice and grotesque overbite of her singular "Strangers" character Jerri Blank. "I mean, how would you do that? That would be hard, right?"

It's exactly that kind of ludicrous observational humor and skewed outlook that has swelled Sedaris's fan base since "Strangers" first became a cult favorite during its run from 1999 to 2001. The brainchild of longtime collaborators Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert (whose own fame is reaching stratospheric heights these days), "Strangers" was a caustic parody of 1970s after-school specials that hinged on self-proclaimed former "boozer, user, and loser" Jerri Blank. A 46-year-old ex-con and former junkie-prostitute, Jerri returns to her family to make amends after 32 years on the lam. Picking up where she left off, she decides to re-enroll in high school, where she learns all the wrong lessons along the way.

"She's the queen of misfits," says Sedaris. "She's someone who's unattractive but thinks she's attractive. And I think that's why people are drawn to her."

While her repulsive character is saddled with a flabby butt, a swooping mass of matronly hair, and a wardrobe of turtlenecks and stretch pants, Sedaris is known for her un-Jerri-like beauty and unique style. Holding court in a suite at the W hotel in Manhattan, the actress is clad in a summer party dress designed by her friend Mary Adams, made from a vintage fabric of yellow flowers and green rickrack. And she's sporting a pair of electric green Manolo Blahnik heels, a gift from David Letterman. She's 45 but looks at least a decade younger, with olive skin (thanks to her Greek heritage) and a wide, extraordinary smile that she flashes frequently.

Although her current form of dress-up may be a tad more sophisticated, Sedaris says that she's been creating costumes and performing for as long as she can remember. As a kid growing up in Raleigh, N.C., she and her siblings who have been famously chronicled by brother David in his best-selling books used props, wigs, and disguise kits to put on shows for the family in their living room and backyard.

"If someone was coming over to the house and they hadn't met my mom yet, I would dress up and convince them that I was my mother," she says. "I'd do makeup. I'd do hair. I'd do the dress. The heels. And I would convince them that I was Mrs. Sedaris. I must have been good at it because I convinced a lot of people. And I was only 14 years old."

Dinello, the film's director and Sedaris's onetime boyfriend, says that regardless of the stakes or the stage on which Sedaris is performing, it's all the same to her she's just putting on a show as she and David did when they were kids. "I don't think there's a big difference between her doing a feature film or entertaining guests at a party. . . . It's almost like her whole life is a performance. . . . Put her in front of an audience, and she's off to the races."

While the success of the "Strangers" series made Sedaris a celebrity among a certain circle of obsessive fans, it was her semiregular appearances on "The Late Show With David Letterman" that beamed her into living rooms from Peoria to Providence.

Whether she is talking about her cheese ball- and cupcake-baking business, her beloved pet rabbit Dusty, her stints as a waitress at Mary's Fish Camp in the West Village, her imaginary boyfriend, or any of her other quirks, Sedaris is nothing if not refreshing.

"I don't think of her as a comedian because she doesn't really tell jokes," says Dinello. "She inhabits her character so completely and it's such a transformation that it's like watching a magician at a children's party . . . And there's no pretension about what she does. She doesn't consider herself an artist, or consider the art of what she does, although I think other people do."

While Dinello and Colbert are the writers who keep things on track and mold their free-flowing ideas into a coherent plot and story structure, Sedaris operates on her instincts.

"It's almost like she doesn't know what her character is going to say or do. When she is in character, she can tell jokes or do bits that would never even occur to her as Amy," he says. "She has a really great ear for the character's voice, and for keeping dialogue raw and real. So if she says that a character wouldn't say something, I always take that as gospel."

Sedaris's natural comedic instincts were honed at Chicago's legendary Second City improv theater. Her older brother David persuaded Amy to try out there. (Brother and sister Sedaris later teamed up to stage plays under the moniker of the Talent Family.) It was at Second City that Sedaris met Dinello and Colbert. They were all hired on the same day in August 1987 and have been collaborators since.

The idea for "Strangers" was hatched when Sedaris suggested a satire of the after-school specials of the 1970s. Dinello had just seen a "Reefer Madness"-style documentary about a woman named Florrie Fisher, a former drug addict and prostitute, who would travel around to schools and tell her story of getting clean.

"The funniest thing about it was that she sort of spoke like a '50s hipster, but she looked like somebody's Jewish aunt," says Dinello. "She had this goofy black hair and this trampy makeup. But she looked sort of sweet in a way. And she would say stuff like, `Drop a dime on a friend.' Or `I was living in the gutter, cooking up my breakfast in a teaspoon.' So it was a wonderful odd mixture of things."

Eventually, the trio shaped the idea into a pilot and then a full-fledged series. "Strangers" found a new life when it was released on DVD, and it was then that Sedaris, Dinello, and Colbert began work on a feature film based on the show. Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants, helped finance it, and they recruited a flock of famous friends to participate from Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ian Holm.

The film functions as a kind of prequel to the series, with Jerri heading back to her childhood home after years in prison, only to learn that her debauched life of crime caused her father to slip into a coma.

The film premiered at Sundance a year and a half ago, but its release was delayed after a change of distributors. Although she's excited about "Strangers" finally making it to the big screen, Sedaris is still uneasy about the cult series reaching a wider audience and potentially alienating the fans who first embraced the show's oddball charms.

"Now that we've done a movie, those people who discovered us might be like: `I discovered it, and now you're showing everybody. And now I don't want to play anymore,' " says Sedaris. "So it's a very tricky thing to do. But the TV show is a TV show, and that's a whole separate thing. The way I look at the film is: It's different."