The longest gap in Laurie Metcalf’s résumé since making her professional stage debut 50 years ago is—by far—the three years between the pandemic shutting down her Broadway production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and her return to Broadway in 2023’s Grey House. A charter member of Chicago’s venerable Steppenwolf Theater Company, she’s buttressed those 50-something roles with two Tonys, an Oscar nomination, and four Emmys. Now, Metcalf is tackling one of the greatest American plays, Death of a Salesman, which opened the same day Big Mistakes, a Dan Levy-led comedy in which she stars, dropped on Netflix.
Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece is an intimate play, but Metcalf and co-star Nathan Lane fill up the massive, 1,600-seat Winter Garden theater with sheer talent and force of will. Still, it’s a beast of a play, and Metcalf tells Vogue it represents one of the first times she’s used a microphone onstage. “I’m so old and old-school that I’ve only just started to wear a microphone. It’s the first time that I’ve worn a mic that’s actually doing the real heavy-lifting. If we were having to work without them and just project, nobody would have a voice left by now.”
The deluxe production is a career milestone that Lane and director Joe Mantello had been dreaming up since the ’90s, folding Metcalf in about a decade ago. Since then, it’s been a game of waiting, maneuvering, and, per Metcalf’s strict rules, not watching any performances of the play.
On the eve of her two major premieres, just months after opening in Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road this same Broadway season, Metcalf candidly told Vogue about playing roles written for her by generational fans, the joys of being miscast, and what it takes for her to feel comfortable in front of a camera.
Vogue: How do you carry the knowledge, for 10 years, that you’ll be playing a role someday?
Laurie Metcalf: I penciled into my calendar, “Do not go see a production of Salesman.” That was number one, because that’s going to get stuck in my head and I’ll never forget it. I wanted to come at it as fresh as I could, even though it’s a 75-year-old play. I’ve never seen it—ever. I knew it was one of those bucket-list roles that I would age into—and past [laughs]—so I always stayed away from it. Beyond that, no, I wasn’t pulling it out of a drawer and reading it once a month or anything. I wanted to postpone all of that and wait for the workshop that we did for about four days, when we knew the cast. That’s when I really started digging in, and then luckily I had about a month break to actually learn the lines. I appreciate that what Nathan is bringing to it eight times a week is enormous, but even for me, memorizing took forever.
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