NEW YORK, NY.- This month, actress Kaitlin Olson was in her Los Angeles kitchen slicing a lemon.
“I was really cutting it hard,” she said. “I put 100% of my effort into it.”
The knife slipped, nearly severing her pinkie, which explained why, on a morning a few days later in Manhattan, Olson, 49, had accessorized her black silk blouse and black pants with a black finger splint. (She also wore an array of diamonds, one the size of a kumquat.) The look was working. A waiter asked if she was in town for fashion week.
There are few things that Olson — tall and emphatically blond, with screwball energy — does lightly. As concerns comedy, physical stunts and also apparently cooking, her approach is full contact. On the set of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” the cheeky FX comedy she has co-starred in for nearly 20 years, she has broken her foot, slashed open her calf and suffered at least one possible concussion. “Definitely worth it,” she said of the scene.
This wasn’t her first food-prep injury, and she skipped the emergency room. She didn’t have the time. In addition to “Sunny,” she is a guest actor on the HBO show “Hacks” and the star of a new ABC procedural, “High Potential,” in which she plays a cleaning woman with savant-like tendencies who consults for the police. It premieres Tuesday.
While it is not Olson’s first series lead (that would be Fox comedy “The Mick”) or her only chance to flaunt her aptitude for drama (see also: “Hacks”), “High Potential” showcases her dizzy, daffy, sardonic gifts. Which Olson appreciates.
“Nothing feels as good as saying something and making people laugh or doing something physical with your body that makes people laugh,” Olson said. “There’s nothing like that. It’s a very selfish high. It’s all for me.”
At this point, the waiter came over and took her order for a green juice. He asked her if she had any allergies. She confessed to a kiwi sensitivity. “My throat closes,” she said to me. “It’s exciting!” But what’s a little anaphylactic shock in the service of a bit?
“Oh, we should do that,” she said, eyes gleaming. “It’d be a fun part of the interview.”
Olson grew up mostly in Portland, Oregon, the baby of a supportive family. She discovered theater in elementary school but stepped away when she was in a devastating bike accident the summer before starting junior high. Walking the halls with a shaved head and a disfigured face, she had her first experience of feeling like an outsider. “I just wanted to disappear,” she said.
She regained some confidence in high school and went out for plays again. Having discovered a gift for physical comedy, she enrolled in the theater program at the University of Oregon and moved to Los Angeles after graduation, taking classes with the Groundlings, a celebrated improv troupe. After a couple of years she began landing paid work: a part in “Coyote Ugly,” an arc on “The Drew Carey Show,” a couple of hidden-camera series, which she hated.
“We made a lot of people cry, and I was like, this is not why I got into this business,” she said.
In 2004, she auditioned for “Sunny” and was offered the part of the bartender Sweet Dee. But when she received the initial scripts, she learned that the lines she had read at the audition were intended for a male character. Dee was written as bland and colorless, a killjoy.
Olson could have used the work — she was juggling three part-time jobs. But she told Rob McElhenney, one of the creators, that she was out. “Why would I be the worst part of a really incredible show?” she recalled saying. “Like, I would just sit there and watch you guys be funny, and I would just be miserable.”
McElhenney asked her to reconsider, telling her that the writers just needed to learn to write for a woman. Olson told him they should just write a funny character regardless. “And I will just bring the woman, because I am a woman,” she said.
McElhenney agreed, and the writing improved. But Dee’s heedless, highly physical, bet-the-farm ethos? That’s all Olson.
“The most difficult part of making ‘Sunny’ is trying to keep a straight face when she’s on,” McElhenney said. Reader, she married him. They now have two sons.
In 2017, John and Dave Chernin — writers on “Sunny” — created “The Mick” with her in mind. Olson enjoyed headlining a network comedy, but her character, a lovable dirtbag stuck caring for her sister’s children, was close in spirit to Dee, a caricature. No one seemed to trust Olson to play a human woman.
That changed with “Hacks.” Showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky created the part of DJ, the only daughter of Jean Smart’s neglectful comedian mother, just for her. “She has this liquid funny that stood out to us as kind of supernatural,” Aniello said.
Aniello didn’t know how Olson would handle the more emotional moments. But what she found was a skilled dramatic actor, able to conjure complex emotional states.
“There’s something very raw and honest about her performances,” Aniello said. “You feel like they’re coming from her gut.”
Olson embraced the challenge of playing a real woman with real wounds. “People are going to be like, ‘Wait, hold on a second, she can have an emotion,’” Olson said. This was also her first experience of prestige television, which felt good, as did her two Emmy nominations for outstanding guest actress. (She lost to Jamie Lee Curtis of “The Bear,” which she described on Instagram as a relief: “Had I won, I would no longer be able to complain loudly and widely about never winning an Emmy.”)
A procedural in the vein of “Columbo” or “Murder, She Wrote,” “High Potential” is an adaptation of a French series. Drew Goddard, the showrunner, wrote the character of Morgan for Olson, knowing the show would live or die by its star. He needed an actor who could swing from broad comedy to high drama, and he intuited that Olson, whom he had admired on “Sunny,” could handle it.
“It’s really hard to push yourselves to the edges of comedy while maintaining an empathetic humanity,” he said.
Morgan, like the other women in Olson’s repertory, is scrappy and intense. But Olson had never played a character so smart — Morgan has an IQ of 160 — or so self-confident. Olson found that there was plenty that she could draw on.
“I don’t have a 160 IQ, but I know what it’s like to not be able to turn your brain off,” she said. And she loves finally playing a mother, though she thinks that Morgan could stand to multitask less.
Olson does not, however, think she would be a great detective. “I would get bored,” she said. “I’ll do a puzzle for a while, and then I’m like, ‘You know what? You guys go ahead.’”
Now, with three series, Olson doesn’t have the luxury of boredom. “Hacks” has been renewed. “Sunny” will begin shooting its 17th season later this year. She would like to do several more seasons of “High Potential” and hopes that “Sunny” lasts forever. (She has big plans for menopausal Dee.) And, yes, that is a lot of multitasking, but it’s also her way of moving through the world. It’s how she deals, headfirst, with discomfort, uncertainty, injury.
“When in doubt, I’m like, OK,” she said, “I’m going to make you laugh.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
