Lisa Ann Walter on Mother’s Day, Her ‘Abbott Elementary’ Bond With Sheryl Lee Ralph, and That Bette Midler Idea

On this week’s episode of Abbott Elementary, Lisa Ann Walter shares a look with her costar Sheryl Lee Ralph that speaks volumes. The episode finds Ralph’s Barbara hosting her annual Mother’s Day–themed gathering while still struggling with grief over losing her own mom. Walter’s Melissa, Barbara’s no-BS colleague, takes part in the celebration like always. But she can see her friend hurting. It’s a small but poignant moment for the sitcom—and its weight can be attributed to Walter and Ralph’s relationship off-screen.

The two veteran actors are enjoying career highs off Quinta Brunson’s elementary-school-set comedy, which has taken them to every awards show under the sun and offered a kind of job security that neither one felt until now, with season four announced by ABC earlier this year. When they started working on the show together three years ago, Walter and Ralph instantly bonded, particularly over the recent loss of their mothers. In conversation with Vanity Fair, Walter explains how that connection reflects what the show means for her as a whole: a chance to create both great work and lasting friendships.

Vanity Fair: Your relationship with Sheryl Lee Ralph is really central to your Abbott journey, both on and off-screen. Can you put that into context a little bit for me with this “Mother’s Day” episode?

Lisa Ann Walter: We both have a really long history in the business, and we both have lost our moms within the last few years. When we first met, we bonded over being single moms, raising our kids in Los Angeles, and how expensive that is—how much it worries you, making sure that they get a good upbringing—and then she had lost her mom a few years before mine. When I shot the [Abbott] pilot, my mom was getting quite sick. In between when we shot the pilot and when we came back to work, she passed. One of the people that was the most supportive to me was Sheryl, because she knew. She knew how important my mother was in my life and how sad it made me that she was not able to see me do the show. Sheryl is very much a woman of faith, just like Barbara Howard on the show, and she said, “Your mother sees you.” She gave me a lot of comfort during that time.

And in the show, we see you supporting Barbara through her grief over the loss of her mother.

Being able to play it from the other way around. If what you’re playing isn’t real, and if it’s not based on truth and authenticity, it doesn’t affect people. It’s a sitcom, but most of the characters are just being who they are, and it’s situational. It’s funny because you know the character, and once the audience starts to love you, they start laughing before the lines come out because they’re like, Oh my God, Melissa—that’s going to make her crazy. They’re just waiting to see what your character does, this person that they feel they know.

Sheryl Lee Ralph with Lisa Ann Walter in Abbott Elementary.

Gilles Mingasson

How would you describe Sheryl as a scene partner? What’s unique about your dynamic as actors?

Well, we choose to do projects together when we’re not doing Abbott. We go to each other’s events. I’ve handed her so many awards—it’s the thing that gets me out of the house. We’re playing best friends of 20-plus years, but we’ve become best friends over the last three years. That part is the stuff that you don’t have to act because people see it, and they feel it. They feel our affection for each other. It’s the unwriteable stuff. It’s just chemistry. It works when you see people in love. You either have or you don’t, and Sheryl and I have it.

Did it feel different filming this episode at all, given the reversal in your dynamic and the connection you have over the loss of your mothers?

Quinta knows that I have readily available emotions. In any scene where crying is easy for me, I can access it. When they wrote this, they knew that if we had to play that we had both lost our mothers, that it would be battle of the network tears. I don’t need to play that every time. [Laughs] So they gave it to Sheryl, and of course I could feel what her emotions were, but my character wasn’t feeling it. Melissa was intent on noticing what was happening and saying, “I see what’s going on, and you need to take a little step back. You’re hurting.”

Do you feel more comfortable making suggestions for your character now that you’re in season three and have more of a dynamic with Quinta and the writers? How has that evolved?

Always, from the beginning, it’s like working with a great repertory company. When I was coming up as an actor, doing the Greeks and Shakespeare, I thought I was going to be a stage actress. I thought I was going to go work at Arena Stage or go to New York and do off-Broadway. That’s what I thought I would do my whole life. I never saw TV in it. This [is] like the best repertory company I’ll ever get to be a part of, and playing with them, every episode is just beyond my wildest dreams. With Tyler [James Williams], who plays Gregory, he and I have done a couple of things together where we just feel it—we know what each other is doing, and we’ll just look at each other like, Yeah, let’s do that again. It’s the finding of it in the work. Sometimes it’s just that, or sometimes you say to the writer on set, or Quinta, “Hey, can I do this?” Sometimes she’ll say yes. Sometimes she’ll say, “Well, no, because you don’t know, but in two episodes, X is going to happen.”

But you know the character; you’re living inside of the skin of that person. I do come from a Sicilian family. I do know how they behave. And the more I’m living in that world too, the more the writers understand that—that we’re an incredibly pessimistic people. [Laughs] We believe that the worst is going to happen because we were invaded by every country in Europe and Africa for 1,000 years.

Watching the “Mother’s Day” episode, I was thinking about you rattling off Melissa’s many siblings’ very specific names. The audience gets information about Melissa in the best, most chaotic way.

That was actually a good example. They had names—and I knew what they were going for with the joke—but I said to someone, “We wouldn’t name two people in our family Anthony. In the same family, you would have 18 Anthonys, but it would be Anthony, Tony, Big Red. Everybody would have their own name.” [Laughs] So I adjusted the names just a little bit to make it make sense.

We’ve got the male Tony and the female Toni in the final cut.

Yeah, exactly. I’ve gotten invited to somewhere where there’s an Antoinette and an Anthony, but you call them Tony. In my personal family, we have three Dominics. Oh, wait a minute—four, I forgot. One of them just had a son, and he’s Donnie. But the grandfather was Dominic, then there was Dom, Dommie, and now Donnie.

As you alluded to earlier, Melissa’s mother is still alive, and we do not meet her in this episode. I assume you saw that Bette Midler had said she would love to play your mother. The door is still open!

That’s exactly right, and who knows when or if that’ll happen. I’m not in charge of those storylines. But a girl can hope! It was certainly a big compliment to have that come from the Divine Miss M. I sent her a note through Sheryl, because Sheryl just did a movie with her, telling her how incredible that was. As someone who grew up going to her shows—what was I, maybe 14 the first time I saw a whole Bette Midler show? Dolores de Lago, the Toast of Chicago, and Sophie Tucker. I repeated all the jokes on the way home. There’s nobody like her. She’s amazing. I’m rooting for it.

You said recently that Abbott’s season-four renewal marked the first time you’ve felt safe in your career. Can you say a little more about that?

We don’t stay rich from projects like [The Parent Trap]. We have to keep working. If you don’t work, you’re not paying your bills—and it is expensive to live in Los Angeles. I am not kidding. Sheryl and I bonded over that. It wasn’t easy, and then you make choices. I have four kids, and the last two were in high school when their dad was not as involved—and I needed to be there to make sure that they weren’t going to wind up in jail. I made a decision to not be on the road, to not go on location, and to go work in radio for three years so that I could drop them off at high school and pick them up every day, and make sure their room didn’t smell like pot every single day.

It’s the life of any working actor. That’s how I always viewed myself. And I’m lucky enough to do the job that I love, which makes me incredibly lucky. But then to come to this success at this point in my career? What you need for comedy is confidence—you have to believe the joke’s going to work. That’s true on the show as well. I have had Quinta call me on a number of occasions, especially toward the end of this season, and just say, “Lisa, you’re such a good actor.” It really is meaningful to me. She picked up the phone last week and said it. Then the tears come. I’m like, “Stop, you’re making me cry.” She’s like, “Everything makes you cry!”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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