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It’s not every day you get to interview Milwaukee Magazine’s January 1998 “Most Intriguing Milwaukeean” cover star.
Kristen Johnston burst out laughing.
You know the laugh. It’s the geyser that is at once a cackling honk, yet in its raw joy, somehow the warmest sound on Earth. You heard it on 3rd Rock From the Sun, for which she won two Emmy Awards. (Arguably as prestigious as her Milwaukee distinction.) It was the exact prescription the “laughter is the best medicine” sobriety comedy needed during her run on the CBS sitcom Mom. It’s been flavored with a bit of sweet tea to play Southern comedian Leanne Morgan’s sister on the Netflix hit Leanne.
“You guys went down the rabbit hole,” she said. “OK, I did that for my mother, who still lives in Milwaukee.” And don’t worry. Johnston is pretty sure her mother framed it, too. “She used to have tabloid covers all over her kitchen. Like, not flattering stuff like, ‘Look who got fat!’ And my mom has it on her fridge.”
Johnston is the first to admit she’s weathered a roller coaster of ups and downs, only occasionally buckled in, since those Milwaukee Magazine glory days.
At 3rd Rock’s peak, she was one of the most popular actresses on one of the most-watched TV series at a time when, if you can even remember, everyone watched the big shows: “I was like going to the grocery store one day, and then the show aired, and the next day it was crazy. I was like Elvis Presley all of a sudden.” She was in the smash sequel Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Clairol made her a spokesmodel. She dated Ryan Reynolds.
She also, starting in high school, battled an alcohol and pill addiction that provided a storm cloud backdrop to her ever-brightening Hollywood career, culminating in a near-death experience she describes in her 2012 best-selling memoir Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster.
The strength Johnston absorbed from her sobriety journey is the poignant undercurrent to our hilarious conversation in the new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast, a journey through her career that puts in neon lights the fact that she’s a singular talent.
Watch the full interview here:
For a gay millennial entertainment obsessive, interviewing Johnston is akin to ascending to a new plane of gay existence, I told her, which she received with a humble giggle. “You get your official gay card,” she said. “I’m so proud of you.”
It’s a happy moment—sure, not just for me, but because Johnston is back where she belongs. There’s something about the actress playing an uproarious, unapologetic, athletically gesticulating, elastically face-pulling scene-stealer that feels right. Natural. Like home.
About Leanne, which follows Morgan’s Leanne and her sister Carol (Johnston) embarking on new stages in life in middle age, Johnston has said, “Not every show has to be, you know, medieval dragons. There’s room for a couple of silly women in their fifties trying to figure it out.”
“I wish we all could live in happy sitcom land, I really do,” she told me. “It’s a great escape for me as well.”
She’s hardly surprised that Morgan has quickly emerged as one of the most successful comedians in the country, not exactly a common occurrence for a 60-year-old woman who started stand-up as a second act. (Like all important things in my life, I discovered Morgan through Oprah Winfrey, who is a massive fan and Leanne Morgan evangelist.) Likewise, it tracks that the show would have a large audience on Netflix.
“For the most part, the guys who run this town and a couple of gals really underestimate the power of women in their fifties and up,” Johnston said. “There are huge populations who are dying to see themselves represented, and they are dying to laugh and enjoy each other. There are a lot of shows out now that are starting to really understand how important that world is and how much money they’re willing to spend.”
In preparing for our conversation, I noticed a pattern where, in interviews, Morgan and Johnston are routinely asked what their advice for young women is, a promotion to elder sage for which Johnston doesn’t necessarily feel qualified.
“[Leanne] can really focus on family and stuff,” she said. “I’m more like, certainly my addiction, my past, my current sobriety, there are all sorts of things that I think people do ask me about. But in terms of advice for young women just starting out, I mean, God, I hope I just live by example. I hope that they’re inspired to just be as true to themselves as they can. And that goes for young men as well.”
To that end, Leanne is Johnston’s first regular comedy series role since Mom ended in 2020. The series focused on a group of women, led by Allison Janney and Anna Faris’ mother-daughter duo, in a sobriety group together, anchoring each other through relapses, triumphs, and the mundanity of everyday life that their addictions still define. Johnston was the only cast member who was sober herself, and working on the show was a visceral experience for her.
“The best part about it for me is, oh gosh, I might cry…” she said, pausing because she was tearing up. “Sometimes I cry when I talk about this. How many people have reached out to me to say they got sober by watching Mom and started to go to AA meetings because of Mom. Is there anything better in the world than that? I don’t think so.”
I asked her if she thinks her sense of humor changed after becoming sober.
“God, you know, I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that, and it’s such a good question,” she said. “I think it had. I think it did. I think it really changed. At least for me, it got me much deeper into what is comedy, and how it can always be super funny and big, but very real. I think I managed to somehow learn how to do that in recovery, which I didn’t know before: How to be real and funny. Not just funny, you know?”
A few days before our conversation, Johnston made headlines for sharing in an interview that she was a “hot mess” when she filmed her unforgettable guest-star role on Sex and the City: the relentlessly memed scene where her character declares New York “over” at a party and then falls out of a skyscraper window.
Of course, I asked her about that scene. What kind of gay TV fan would I be if I didn’t, especially after Johnston had so generously just bestowed me with my official card?
She had hilarious behind-the-scenes stories to tell about that, as well as how she became great friends with Sarah Jessica Parker, Andy Cohen, Amy Sedaris, John Benjamin Hickey, and the chicest downtown New York crowd I could imagine hanging out together in the late ’90s.
Naturally, we traded reasons why New York is O-V-E-R for us. Mine: $23 cocktails, all the diners are closing, and everyone is suddenly younger than me. “Look, for so long, I was the young kid,” Johnston said. “And then all of a sudden, you’re an old hag in the corner. So enjoy it while you have it.”
The conversation was peppered with anecdotes like that, about how unexpected 3rd Rock From the Sun’s success was and why it could never be revived today, to an unexpected memory of filming The Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas that sent me into a giggle fit.
When anyone asks what the throughline is between the characters that Johnston takes on—an alien military officer, a Russian assassin and model, a loyal sister, Wilma Flintstone—she typically says she loves playing “disasters.” But, of course, as she’s learned in life, that’s the richest role. It’s human. She’s been playing it her whole life.
“I was six feet at 12 years old, and I went to a very snotty Catholic grade school. And so I was made fun of a lot. Not super vicious, but like Jolly Green Giant stuff and a lot of very, very snotty girls,” she said. “And the only way I knew how to survive was to be funny.”
And it worked. Every time.
“You could not touch me with the funny pole because I really ruled that,” she said. “I think, initially, before recovery, it was a way to protect myself, to keep people kind of five steps away. And then after recovery, I started to learn a deeper way to go there, a deeper connection, a connection to being larger than life, but very, very connected to something real that I feel.”
Some people use comedy as armor. Some use it as a weapon. Kristen Johnston proves you can do both. The weapon part is more fun, though: “It’s a weapon to just sort of attack people through humor and connect to them. Like, I will make you laugh, you son of a bitch.”
