Judy Greer, hollywood’s favourite co-star, turns filmmaker

Judy Greer is the relatable star, the one who walks her own dog, pooper-scooper bags in hand, even when there are no paparazzi around to capture it, and lives for solo trips to Target, cruising the beauty aisles late at night to de-stress. The one time she went to the Oscars, she threw her Spanx out in the bathroom not long after she arrived. Onscreen, she has been best friend to Jennifers Garner and Aniston; offscreen, she texts with her real-life BFF, Janet, about gorging on Taco Bell and crying in airports and at Rust-Oleum commercials.

You know her, even if you don’t know her. That’s the way she wants it: As a blonde, redhead and the occasional mousy brunette, Greer has played more than 125 roles in TV and film (six movies this year alone), very few of them major parts. And if you ask her, that has given her just the right level of celebrity.

“Not being a movie star has been the greatest freedom,” she wrote in her 2014 memoir, “I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: My Life as a Co-Star.” A working actress since she graduated from theatre school, she has carved a busy, fruitful career in Hollywood’s second tier, for which she is preternaturally grateful.

But her ambition is something else. Don’t let her cheerily contented demeanour fool you: Of course she wants the lead. She loves the energy of being on set.

“I always think it’s a good idea to work, because every time I do something, I think it makes me a better actress,” she said recently, as we sat eating kale salads in her backyard here. We had picked up lunch ourselves, walking to a nearby cafe with Greer’s mutt, a small, mostly well-behaved black and white rescue named Mary Richards, after the (yes, ambitious) Mary Tyler Moore character, from her favourite TV show.

Garner, her friend since they made the 2004 rom-com “13 Going on 30,” remains in awe of Greer as a professional.

“She hustles,” Garner said. “It’s not easy to do what she does, to always be working, saying yes, to be so sought after in the kinds of roles that she does, and to bring an inventiveness to them.” Almost as a rule, critics say she is terrific but underused onscreen.

She’s beloved within the industry, said Paul Rudd, a fellow Hollywood MVP, who appeared with her in the “Ant-Man” movies (she’s the ex-Mrs Ant-Man).

“Judy is one of those people whom you’d always rather have around than not,” Rudd said. “Because one, she’s hilarious. And two, her energy improves the energy of everyone else in the room.” (She had a different explanation for her good reputation: “When you’re a co-star,” she said in her book, “you’re not really around long enough to get any good dirt.”)

Greer, 43, doesn’t personally want more stardom, but she does want the attention that opens doors professionally. In the cold calculus of Hollywood, she is hardly famous enough to get a movie made — even her own. Her feature directorial debut, “A Happening of Monumental Proportions,” a dark comedy, puts Garner in the part Greer might have otherwise taken.

The actress Judy Greer, now making her directorial debut with the dark comedy “A Happening of Monumental Proportions,” in Los Angeles, Sep 11, 2018. The New York Times

“Why would I play that role if I can get Jennifer Garner to play it, you know what I mean?” she said, brightly enough. (Greer’s paycheck for “13 Going on 30” provided the down payment on the house whose backyard we were sitting in.) “A Happening of Monumental Proportions,” out Sep 21, is an ensemble film with a half-dozen story lines; Greer does not appear in it at all.

Though many actor-directors do, she wasn’t keen on the prospect of staring at her own face in the editing room. “I don’t have that kind of self-esteem,” she said. “I could not ever watch a performance of my own while doing it and be like: ‘Oh, that was an awesome take. We can move on, I really nailed that.'”

Actresses of her generation, like Reese Witherspoon and Elizabeth Banks, have turned to producing and directing out of frustration with the parts available for women. Greer mostly wanted the challenge of making her own film — “really super-selfishly, just to see if I could do it,” she said.

The huge amount of good will she had with actors helped. Everybody is a somebody in the sprawling story, which chronicles a school career day gone wrong. The Venn diagram of movies that star Garner; the Oscar-winning rapper Common; Kumail Nanjiani, the Oscar-nominated comic; Bradley Whitford, an Emmy winner for “The West Wing” and “Transparent”; John Cho; Katie Holmes; and Keanu Reeves, among many others, could only have Greer, who has worked with and/or befriended most of them, at the centre.

“Her sense of joy is indomitable, almost,” said Allison Janney, who plays the school principal, and who agreed to the part, having barely read the script, after hitting it off with Greer when she appeared on Janney’s sitcom “Mom.” “On the set, every day was like a gift to her — she was so happy to be getting to direct a movie, and it was just infectious.”

The actress Judy Greer, now making her directorial debut with the dark comedy “A Happening of Monumental Proportions,” in Los Angeles, Sep 11, 2018. The New York Times

“I’ve never had more positive feedback from a director,” she added.

She also costumed herself. “It was very Judy,” Garner said. “She decided that she would look the part of a director, so she wore jeans, a button-up and a blazer every day. It did make her seem like the boss lady.”

Greer, though, was nervous. She had directed only a short before. She somehow figured the confines of the script, by Gary Lundy, would help.

“I loved that it all took place in one day,” she said, “because, as a little bit of a scaredy-cat first-time director, I thought it would be easier to edit, because everyone was wearing the same clothes.”

Yeah, not quite. “Isn’t that so dumb?” she said. “It was very hard to edit.”

But in many ways Greer was well-suited to juggling the emotional arcs of so many characters in tailspin. She’s a crier herself, and if she sees you tearing up, “she goes right there, she’s in it with you,” Garner said.

Jason Reitman directed both of them in “Men, Women & Children” (2014). “There’s a reason we all feel so close to Judy on screen,” he said. “There’s an unspoken understanding and humour in the way she responds to life.” Directing, he wrote in an email, requires a sense of “rhythm, tone and human behaviour. These are qualities evident in all of Judy’s work.”

Her goal as a filmmaker was diverse casting, and keeping production for the 19-day shoot around Los Angeles, so her players could get home easily (and so they’d be more likely to take the job). And she wanted to highlight every actor’s performance. “Having played small supporting roles for my whole career, I was like, I want each one to have a nice moment,” she said. Even the school security guard (Mary Birdsong) gets a chance to shine.

That guides her when she’s picking her own parts, too. She has now graduated from the wry rom-com best friend to the mostly put-upon ex-wife (currently, in the Showtime series “Kidding,” where’s she’s estranged from Jim Carrey). When she reads a script, she said, she has her own co-star scale.

“Am I always in the kitchen on the phone, is first what I look at now,” she said. “Like, I think you could pretty much rename most of my roles ‘exposition.’ That’s something I look for, how much explaining does my character do? Are you furthering the plot or explaining the plot?”

Then again, she said, “some things are like, yeah, I’ll talk on the phone for that paycheck.”

In a two-hour-plus conversation, she was candid about the hurdles for women in Hollywood — she had been vocal about pay inequity in the industry long before Time’s Up existed. Lately, she’s been asking insiders to name her male counterpart, a veteran actor who’s as busy and versatile, yet still at lower billing. They always draw a blank, because, she said: “If I was a dude, I would be a movie star. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’ve done great supporting funny roles. In another business, I would have been promoted to the top at this point.”

She was silly, too. “Farts!” she said, over and over — her Midwestern way of swearing. She grew up in a suburb of Detroit, the only child of a hospital administrator mother and an engineer father. After she married Dean Johnsen, a TV producer, in 2011, and became a stepparent, she tried to keep her language clean. You can sense her less prim side though: Describing how the tennis world has treated Serena Williams, she called it total bull, “covered in pee with hobo barf on top.” (And this was before the US Open loss.)

The actress Judy Greer, now making her directorial debut with the dark comedy “A Happening of Monumental Proportions,” in Los Angeles, Sep 11, 2018. The New York Times

Though Hollywood is making strides in its treatment of women, she doesn’t believe the industry will become totally egalitarian in her lifetime. But getting angry is not going to serve her, she said, “because I also really love what I do, and I don’t really want to sacrifice my own joy.”

Among the projects she’s looking forward to now is David Gordon Green’s much-anticipated update of “Halloween,” out Oct 19, in which she plays Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter. It was scary to shoot, she said.

“Really weirdly, it makes you feel very open to stand in front of strangers and scream your bloody head off,” she said. “I felt as vulnerable screaming as I did, like, being naked.” Like sex scenes, it’s better to get it all out in the first take, lest you be asked to repeat it. “I was told I was a very good screamer,” she said.

For her many admirers, Greer’s path to stardom as an actor or director is still open.

“She certainly has the talent,” said Janney, another performer who found her groove after years of being underutilised. “And she’s immeasurably watchable. I would go see anything she’s in.”

Greer is up for it, as long as she doesn’t have to sacrifice her regular-people freedom, and the vantage it brings. “If you can wait in line at the DMV,” she said, “you can pretty much play any role.”

© 2018 New York Times News Service