I honored to be able to maintain partnerships with incredible people who work in PR. Without these amazing people, such as Sheri Goldberg, I would miss so many wonderful shows and films. I first connected with Sheri last year due to her connection with Home & Family, the Hallmark Channel’s daily feel-good talk show. And when Sheri mentioned Mimi Kennedy to me, I was well aware of who she was due to her recent segment on Home & Family. However, I was previously unaware of her popular show, Mom, a faux pas I have not long ago rectified. While Mom has ended for this season, in light of the fact that is has been renewed for two more seasons, I am quite pleased to share the engaging chat I enjoyed with Mimi a short time ago with all of my readers today.
Photo by Bjoern Kommerell
RH: Mimi, how nice it is to chat with you this afternoon.
MK: Thank you, Ruth, I’m happy to chat with you as well.
Home & Family
I actually saw you recently on Home & Family, and that was the first I had heard of you. I try to keep up with TV, and while I’m pretty sure I saw some of your stuff when I was growing up, I was not familiar with you and your work.
I’m glad you were able to watch that interview, Ruth, and it’s always nice to meet someone new.
You’ve had quite an extensive career.
Yes, I have, thank you. I remember when Robert Ulrich from some time in the early 2000’s when they had written about him and they said, “He holds the record for being in eleven series.” I thought to myself, “I don’t think so.” I counted up my series, and I think I was at twelve at that time.
That is just amazing, Mimi. You know, usually, I’m the older person interviewing the younger people. I’m going to be forty-five next month, and usually, the people I chat with are in their twenties or thirties. But I honestly love getting the opportunity to interview veterans of the business like you! I don’t get to do it as often as I like.
3 Girls 3
You know, I sometimes feel like I was there when television began!
{laughs} So how did you get started in acting?
Well, I thought acting was theater when I was a little girl. Television was something different back then. I didn’t have fantasies about being in movies or television, but I definitely needed to get on stage. I did so as a child at the community theater and in my school. I loved it, and I was good at it. So I just thought I’d be a theater major in college. After all, my parents wanted me to go to college, no matter what I decided to do for a job. They thought I needed something to fall back on.
I went to New York City. I had friends that were in the theater at Amherst. It happened that I had a friend who had gone to Mount Holyoke and was an award-winning playwright. We were all struggling in theater and off-Broadway. Through these friends, I met the man who someday would be my husband. We had been perfect computer match mates as college students, but had never met each other. And as it happened, I was very funny and I made everybody laugh. I wrote my own material and never did it for anybody else except our group. I ultimately auditioned with it for Saturday Night Live. I also got into the college tour of the National Lampoon Show. I became known as a comedienne. I had also done Grease! on Broadway. At the time, I didn’t realize that becoming known as a comedienne for television meant you were bound for a career in television. This was the Golden Age with Norman Lear, and there were all sorts of jobs and plenty of creativity. I remember driving to LA with my husband. We had just been married.
Did you have the typical experience of going to LA and being the struggling artist?
No, I actually came to LA as a star. I came as the new kid in town.
Oh, that’s awesome! That’s a real blessing. I’ve heard the stories about how the actor comes to LA and has to sleep on someone’s couch for six months.
No, I never slept on couches. But New York was where I shared bedrooms with stewardesses and I was not a star yet when I lived there.
But when I came to LA, I was picked up at the airport in a Cadillac and after I dropped my things off at the exclusive hotel, I was driven to Michael Douglas’ birthday party. It was a great introduction to LA.
So what was your first big role in LA?
3 Girls 3
It was 3 Girls 3. It was with Debbie Allen, Ellen Foley and I. We beat out two hundred fifty Broadway musical stars who were cute, beautiful, gorgeous women. The idea was three nobodies become the stars of their own variety show. It only ran for four shows. It was like a miniseries. It was memorable and got a huge review in the New York Times. They called us “overnight sensations.” Um, don’t believe everything you read, right? We got great press, but it just didn’t go. There are reasons for it, and they’re kind of sexist reasons. If they were going to have girls on this network, they wanted to have beautiful girls. They were all about Las Vegas showgirls and the like. That was the lay of the land so to speak in 1977.
Yeah, you would have been entering during a time when there weren’t a lot of great roles for women.
No, it was during the time of Charlie’s Angels. We were the answer to Charlie’s Angels. You had to have great hair and be in jeopardy and wear bathing suits. Instead, we were singing and dancing. It was more of a Broadway-style show. You’ve got Debbie Allen. And Ellen sang on the Meatloaf record; she has a great voice. And I was doing comedy. We were the new kids in town, and we got to go to amazing parties, but then it all went away. So I went back to New York City and decided to be a theater actor.
But unbeknownst to me, you know what television is. They want you in the next pilot because you’re in the world. My managers and I finally understood that. One of them once said to me, “Hey, Mimi, on Broadway, you go from play to play to play. You never think, ‘Oh I don’t want to do one for a while. People will get tired of me.'” I had wondered if TV was like that. I mean, why would I do another pilot or series right away? But they explained how you go from one to the other. I realize looking back now that I think that was good. It was a learning curve the whole way.
with David Paymer in The Five-Year Engagement
I know you were on a lot of shows. I am pretty sure I saw you on many of them without even realizing it.
One of the shows I was on was called Family Man. Not the cartoon series. This came before that. But my show was so much not watched that no one thought twice when another series came along with the same name! Richard Libertini was in that, and it ran for a year. It was supposed to be the first thing that Fox Network was doing back in the day.
Oh, I remember when that happened and Fox was just starting out!
Dharma & Greg
This was before The Simpsons. They paid for this show, and then they went, “Nah, we don’t want it.” So ABC picked it up. It was done for a year on ABC, and that was the end.
Dharma & Greg was where I was known for playing Abby, the hippie mom of Jenna Elfman’s Dharma. That was the thing I was most known for before Mom. Dharma & Greg was a Chuck Lorre project. I really liked his comic sensibility, and I liked the way he guided his writers.
Dharma & Greg
When he does male, he does male. That was Two And A Half Men. And when he came to do Mom, I thought, “Okay, he’s really addressing it now.” He’s not gonna hold back. He’s not gonna pull punches and not have a fear of women and if they’re nice or if they’re mean. And he was willing to show how mother-daughter relationships work. And how 12-steps works. It’s very healing for him and everybody involved. I love our writers, and I think it’s a solid show. I think it does reflect reality more than anything else in the comedy sphere right now.
It is a great time for television. I mean, sure, I love some of the stuff from back in the day. I grew up watching oldies TV. I used to watch all the black-and-white shows.
Did you like Topper?
Yes, I did actually!
I loved Topper. And Roy Rogers.
Oh, I was an old Hollywood person. I missed a lot of the current stuff from my generation.
How did you get a hold of all that old stuff?
I was one who once we got a VCR, I would watch for the TV schedule in the newspaper and set up to record movies in the middle of the night. I just loved stuff, especially from the 50s and 60s.
Like what shows?
Oh, The Dick Van Dyke Show. Jack Benny.
Loved Jack Benny!
George Burns and Gracie Allen. And, of course, I loved I Love Lucy.
The Big Show with Steve Allen
You know, it’s funny. I Love Lucy was never my favorite. I thought she was too broad. Isn’t that weird? I was already judgmental. Like, Jack Benny, to me, was subtle. George Burns was subtle. Gracie Allen was subtle. But with Lucy, for some reason, she just came across as too broad for me. Who am I to judge? And Jackie Gleason. People loved that show! And I couldn’t watch it because it was everybody yelling at everybody.
Yeah, the only part of The Honeymooners that I really loved was Art Carney. My dad loved Jackie Gleason, but he kind of turned me off too. Oh, and I loved Jerry Lewis too. He would just crack me up. Then I watched the mystery shows like Perry Mason.
Oh, me too. Oh, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Pictured Left to right: Mimi Kennedy as Marjorie, Anna Faris as Christy, and Jaime Pressly as Jill. Photo: Monty Brinton/CBS é2016 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Oh yes! Love that show! That was my childhood, I admit. But TV nowadays continues to amaze me. In fact, I finally had the opportunity to watch your show, Mom. I had heard about it, and planned to look it up, and I am so glad I did. Seeing you on Home & Family was the reason I looked it up. I don’t know why I hadn’t heard of the show before.
It’s a ridiculously well-kept secret with all the content out there. Have you known anyone who has had to struggle with Al-Anon or an addiction of their own? Maybe somebody in your family?
Yes, I sure have.
Mom
Then you’re familiar with what they have to learn in those meetings and that there’s definite step work that you have to do. There’s meetings every episode. You never get far from: “I have met a problem I can’t deal with” or “Here I go again” or “I have no idea how to deal with this. I hate this person.” There’s always a way to at least get through the day, one day at a time. The idea is that you can do this without blowing up your life again. I just love the show. I get hugs in the parking lot from people going, “I’m in the program. I’m so grateful for your show.”
Well, it sounds like a show that once I saw, like I did recently, I know it would be something worth watching.
Veep
You know, I used to be on Johnny Carson and Mike Douglas, what I call “Career one-point-oh{1/0}.” That was when I was kind of up and coming in the medium. And I think that maybe I came into a lot of living rooms that way. Johnny Carson was so good to me. He always loved having me on, and he already treated me with such civility. He understood me, I think, more than a lot of other people. Like I said, Charlie’s Angels wasn’t for me. I was doing community theater. During that time, I had these talk show people thinking I was great, and they were always willing for me to come on and talk about anything. Interestingly enough, I didn’t understand the value of those shows. I mean, why would anybody be interested in what I had to say? But I would always come on if I had something to say.
I love it when people go on those types of shows and talk about more than just their work. I like it when they have the chance to talk about other things that interest them and who they really are. I think it’s great to be conversational. I like the way these kinds of interviews are handled on Home & Family. We really get to know the person and get a different perspective. And I strive on this site to show that actors are not celebrities, but they are just people who are actors by profession. That is their job.
I agree with you completely, Ruth.
How many seasons has Mom been on now?
We are going into our seventh season. We just finished our sixth season, and our show was renewed for two more seasons.
Oh, wow! Well, I definitely want to look the show up from the beginning. There are addictions in our family. Alcohol and drugs have affected our family quite a bit. And I like the fact that it’s not just drama. It’s a comedy. I’m so used to watching dramas that get really dark and heavy, but I like smart comedies that can deal with issues like this.
Then I think you’ll like our show, Ruth. One of the head writers/executive producers, Gemma Baker…her mother is an Episcopalian bishop. She’s one of the first women Episcopalian bishops. When I was young, it was news that the Episcopalians were ordaining women to be priests. That was in the late 70s. It shocked my Catholic religion. But then they moved pretty quickly over the next decades into ordaining bishops. So the daughter of one of those bishops is writing Mom.
That’s really cool! Now, remind us of the network where this show airs.
We have been on nine o’clock on Thursday nights on CBS. But you can also see our show on Hulu or CBS All Access.
Yes, I have added the show on Hulu so I can watch it from the beginning.
Enjoy it. My character started as a guest star and then moved into being a recurring character who was not on all the episodes. Then I moved into being on most of the episodes. Now I’m usually in every episode, even if only in one scene. I’m kind of the one who carries the veteran AA mother wisdom…kind of like the old brokerage firm that had an adage that said, “When so-and-so spoke, people listened.”
Oh, yes!
That’s kind of like how Marjorie is. When she speaks, everybody listens.
Now, I want to make sure. Do you have anything else coming up that you can mention?
Photo by Earl Gibson III
No, not really. I let my managers deal with all that. I find that if I say I might be in something, and then when it comes down to it, I can’t do it because I’m not available on those dates, then you know how it goes. So what I spend my time doing–when I’m not in the middle of television–I do a lot of writing. I do a lot of activism. There is a nuclear plant near us, and I try to make sure that it’s secure. And I try to make sure that the California coast won’t crack in an earthquake. Those are the causes that are important to me.
For those who might be interested, I have a memoir out that I published in 1996 only in hardback with a very small publicist. It’s about my career. They asked me to write about my career and how I did it. They thought I wrote so well, so that’s why they asked me to do it. It’s called Taken To the Stage. It was worthwhile, but I’d like to get a prequel and a sequel to it. I’d like to add chapters to it. And then maybe do a paperback. That is on my agenda for the next two years.
Well, I hope that happens.
Thanks!
I think your story is inspiring and interesting. The very fact that you’ve done this career for so many years means you’ve seen a lot of changes.
I appreciate that, Ruth. And thank you for taking the time to chat with me today.
My pleasure, Mimi. I hope everyone looks up the show Mom right along with me!
I don’t know how in the world I had never heard of Mimi until just recently, and I’m immensely pleased that she was willing to share a portion of her life and work with me in this fascinating conversation. As one who appreciates those who have unique experiences, I fully support her somewhat nontraditional path to becoming a respected veteran actress in the industry. I am also glad that I took the time to look up her show Mom, and I anticipate binge-watching it until it comes back next season. As one whose family has suffered from addictions on all levels, I find the main premise of the show resonates with me on a myriad of levels. But no matter how serious the topic may be on any given show, they always find genuine humor, and Mimi’s character, Marjorie, is invariably present to inject wisdom and laughter every step of the way.
I hope that everyone takes the opportunity to check out Mimi’s show, Mom, on whatever streaming service available as well as some of her past works (on my to-do list as well). Moreover, while you are enjoying the diversity and preponderance of her works, be sure that you visit all her links below and consider following her where applicable (there’s a wealth of information at all those links, and she’s an utter delight to follow on social media!). As one who appreciates the fact that women like Mimi have not retired from life and are still willing to contribute to the entertainment industry and society as a whole in such a real and wonderful way, I am grateful to be able to support her in all her endeavors. Thankfully, Mimi did not give up when things didn’t always go her way or weren’t as easy as expected, and throughout every experience in her life, she has remained a shining example that pursuing your true passions is the only way to live.
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