Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
The actor: Conchata Ferrell first made her mark as an actress in the theater, earning acclaim—as well as a Drama Desk Award and a Theater World Award—for her work in The Sea Horse, but it was her performance in Lanford Wilson’s The Hot l Baltimore that first led her to step off the stage and in front of the camera. Ferrell has worked both in film and television, shifting between drama and comedy with relative ease, but it’s the latter that’s kept her gainfully employed for more than a decade now, thanks to the role of Berta on CBS’ Two And A Half Men, which kicks off its 12th and final season this week.
Two And A Half Men (2003–present)—“Berta”
Conchata Ferrell: The best story about Berta is my audition. I think they wanted her to be the ethnic character. They asked me to come with an Eastern European accent. I liked the material very much. I love playing women who have the nerve to do things that I don’t have the nerve to do, and Berta is certainly one of those. So I worked it like they wanted, but I also worked it in my own voice, and I thought to myself, “You know, this really works better for me in my own voice, so what I ought to do is ask them if I can do it both ways.” So I planned on that. And then I got there, and there were 32 women auditioning for this role. It was supposed to be a two-part arc, and my character was going to quit because Alan and the boy were moving in.
So, anyway, I looked around, and I thought, “My God, they are never going to listen to this twice.” But then I thought, “If you want this role, go in there and do it the best you possibly can… and the best I possibly can do is in my voice.” So I went into the room, and I said, “I know that you’re looking for, like, a Russian or a Polish accent, and I’ve got a pretty good Russian. However, I bring my own ethnicity to this, and I’ve worked this material. It works better in Trailer Park than it does in anything else.” And Chuck [Lorre] just laughed and said, “Well, do whatever makes you happy.” And I did it, and it was really funny, and I left thinking, “Well, if I don’t get it, it’s not because I didn’t do the best I could.” And it turned out that he really liked the idea of this woman being a trailer-park person.
He also added things to it as it went along, like the fact that she was a Deadhead, an old hippie. It just turned out to be a really wonderful character because I am a lot of those things. I wasn’t a Deadhead, and I didn’t follow a band around, but I definitely was an old hippie. I was a political hippie. So it was so comfortable. I’m from West Virginia, and she just grew into somebody who I could’ve gone to school with, or rode the school bus with. I’ve really liked walking with her and walking in her shoes.
The A.V. Club: And to think it was originally only going to be a two-episode arc.
CF: Yeah, I was supposed to quit because of Alan and the boy. But it was set up in the back storyline that I had taken care of Charlie for almost 20 years, and that we were really good friends, but neither one of us ever talked in terms of that. And I really liked working for him. I liked his lifestyle, I liked the fact that he lived the way he lived and he said what he said and he did what he did. [Laughs.] I liked him because he was a classier version of me, I thought. Now, These are my thoughts, not theirs.
But I remember coming home after the second show and saying to my husband, “Boy, I hope they’re thinking what I’m thinking, because I really fit there.” Then they called me in to do a third show, and when they did, they said, “I’m going to bring her back.” And I went, “Well, I really hope you do, because I really like her.” And they said, “I like her, too.” So that first year, I think I did eight or nine shows—I was a guest star all year—and then the beginning of the second season, he just put me in the house. He liked me in the house. And I loved being in the house. [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you have a favorite Berta-centric episode?
CF: You know, they don’t do a lot of Berta-centric things. They never have. There’ve been a couple that were, like, focused on my granddaughters. Megan Fox came in as my granddaughter once. But I think my favorite episode for Berta was the episode where Chris O’Donnell came on [“An Old Flame With A New Wick”], and he was playing Bill, a man who had once been a woman—Jill—and had dated Charlie. And I had my own opinion of Bill, but I looked at the pictures that Charlie had of Jill and figured it out—and then he started dating Evelyn. Berta spent two days sleeping in the laundry room because she didn’t want to miss anything. [Laughs.] It was better than any soap opera I’d ever watched. I loved that episode.
AVC: Do you think this season is as good a time as any for the series to wrap up?
CF: Oh, yeah. But, you know, it’s been good with Ashton [Kutcher]. I really think Ashton came along and saved us. I think we were over. And I think it was a surprise for Chuck when he met with Ashton that he liked him so much and knew that he could work with him. And they made the decision not to make him into Charlie. Yeah, we’ve fumbled around a little bit, but I think for the most part we’ve just done a whole different show, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I do think Ashton came along and saved the show. We all kept working because of Ashton. [Laughs.] But Jon [Cryer] has also been a revelation to work with. He’s funny, but he’s also just a nice guy.
AVC: It seems I have him to thank for this conversation: Didn’t he pitch Random Roles to you after I mentioned it via Twitter as an offhanded suggestion?
CF: Yeah, he did. He really liked [Random Roles], so when he spoke to me about it, it was an easy sell.
AVC: Is there anything Berta hasn’t yet done on the series that you’d like to see her tackle this last season?
CF: Well, I think they have a plan for me, but they don’t ever tell me what it is. [Laughs.] Berta has always had connections. I mean, if Charlie was hurting and needed something… There was an episode when he hurt his back, and he was talking about needing pain pills, and I said something like, “I’m not holding, but I can make a phone call.” And as it’s gone on, I think I’ve become a real dealer, particularly of grass. I’ve said a couple of times, “I need to get out of here, because I’m carrying 10 to 15 in my purse.” So it’s very likely that they could send me to jail! I don’t know that I really want to see that, but it could be an interesting thing to play. They really use my character more as far as how she impacts the household, and how she’s impacted by the household. It’s very rare—maybe one a season—when there’s actually an episode that’s Berta-centric.
AVC: Yet, you still manage to steal scenes all over the place.
CF: Well, she’s that person I wish I could be, and someone I think all of us kind of wish we could be: someone who can just say what’s on her mind and not worry about it.
AVC: It appears that your first on-camera role was playing Rita Valdez on an episode of Maude.
CF: Yes! Florida [Esther Rolle] was leaving Maude, and Norman [Lear] had come to see Hot l Baltimore in New York. I was in the play. And he brought me out, again looking for an accent, but it was a Spanish accent, and it was a woman who was pretending she spoke with a Spanish accent, because Maude was the kind of person who would hire somebody who needed a job more than somebody who just had been looking for a job. I did one episode, and… it was funny, because I went back to New York, and I watched the episode with Lanford Wilson, who wrote Hot l Baltimore, and he said, “This is really interesting: Your whole impetus here is to get off that camera.” [Laughs.] It was an uncomfortable character, and both Norman and I agreed that it just wasn’t going to work, that it starts out being false and it wasn’t going to work. So it was just a one guest-shot thing. And then he brought me back when he decided to do Hot l Baltimore as a sitcom.
The Hot l Baltimore (1973–1974) / Hot l Baltimore (1975) —“April Green”
CF: April Green is my favorite character of all time.
AVC: Funnily enough, I just did a Random Roles interview with one of your cast members from the original play: Judd Hirsch.
CF: Oh, yeah? We just went back, because somebody’s doing a project of— You know how there are books on tape? Well, they’re doing great American plays on tape. It’s almost 40 years ago that we did Hot l Baltimore, but it was, for most of us, the best time of our lives. Those of us who are still alive just went back and did Hot l Baltimore, and it was a wonderful week. Judd was there, and Jon Hogan. It was just fabulous. It was a wonderful thing. And April turned out to be maybe the best friend I ever had, because I found things in me that I had no idea were there, and it was just something Lanford wanted to see me do. She’s my favorite of all time, and there’s a little bit of her in just about every character I do.
AVC: How did you come to do the play? Did you know Lanford prior to that?
CF: I knew Lanford just because he was around the theater group. We weren’t, like, best friends or anything like that. But I wrote a little one-act play in the Circle Theater Company, and they’d give you 100 dollars and the theater for a weekend to stage a workshop. The play was about 25 minutes long, and I needed something to make the evening longer, but Lanford said to me the first time he ever met me, “I’ve got a one-act that you’re perfect for,” so I called him and said, “Can I add Ludlow Fair to the bill, and we’ll have a workshop!” And he said, “Absolutely!”
I found Trish Hawkins to be in it, and Trish turned out to be Lanford’s favorite actress. He wrote everything for her. But he came to see the dress rehearsal—he didn’t come near us until the dress rehearsal—and like I said, it was about a 25-minute play, but he said, “I have an hour and a half worth of notes. You can go or stay.” We both stayed, and I have to be honest: I was an actor when he left. He was the best coach I ever encountered. But it was the sound of our voices. Trish was a soprano, I was an alto, and it was the sound of our voices and the comic exchange that gave him the foundation for Hot l Baltimore: The Girl—Trish—and April. Lanford wrote musically, and we were the first voices that he heard.
He liked reading his plays to people, and I remember him coming to my Christmas brunch. By then, we were getting to be friendly, and he came, and he said, “Do you have a minute? I want to read something to you.” I said, “Sure, I always have a minute to listen to what you’re reading.” And he read April’s entrance into Hot l Baltimore, and it’s a boffo kind of entrance. He said, “What do you think of her?” I said, “I think she’s wonderful. She’s funny, she’s ballsy… all those things I’d liked to be and I’m not.” And he said, “Well, listen, I have no idea where she’s going, this may be the only time we see her in the play, but whatever she is, she’s yours. Merry Christmas.”
That was a magic time for all of us. I mean, it certainly wasn’t Judd’s first time. Judd had already done Barefoot In The Park and everything. But Judd took a small role and turned it into the male lead. So it was a great time.
And then, of course, Norman took it and put it on television… and it was his first failure. [Laughs.] We did 13 episodes, and I loved it. It was wonderful finding the balance between not being able to say “fuck,” but knowing you were playing a hooker. You couldn’t go, “Oh, gee…” I think I played the first episodic hooker!
AVC: As you say, the material featured some topics somewhat controversial for network television at the time. Do you think the adaptation was as faithful as they could’ve made it?
CF: It was as faithful as they could make it, yes. And he made it very political. Lanford’s plays were political, you just didn’t quite know it until you were walking down the street after you saw it. But, yes, I think it was as close as they could get. But the thing about it was that they wouldn’t even carry it in Baltimore! They wouldn’t admit to having hookers in Baltimore. [Laughs.] It never bothered me that she was a hooker. She was such a great character. And there was a gay couple in the hotel that hadn’t been in the play, and Jamie Cromwell was the desk clerk. It was a good 13 weeks.
AVC: How involved was Lanford with the adaptation?
CF: Not at all. Lanford felt that we were all doing the devil’s work out here. [Laughs.] He was strictly a theater man. But his agent also believed in making a living, so when it came to selling the thing, he sold. But he didn’t come and write. He wasn’t unhappy with it, but he didn’t come and write. I remember when I moved back out here after Hot l had closed, and I’d gone back to New York. I’d had two hot plays in New York, and I’d been in Network, but the only work I was getting in New York was television work or going back to typing for a living. So I made the decision to come out here.
I remember calling him one day, because I was very lonely, and telling him about an adventure that I’d had. You know, you go into Beverly Hills here, and it’s just instantly beautiful. And I went to an audition, and it went very well, and just as I was leaving Beverly Hills, I said to myself, “Oh, God, I want to live in Beverly Hills!” And Lance said, “Well, of course you do, darling. Nobody ever said that the devil was unpleasant. He wouldn’t get anybody that way!”
AVC: How did you find your way into acting in the first place?
CF: Nothing else worked. I had a father who worked in a factory, and he loved his job, because the factory saved him from the mines. And he told us—I can’t tell you how many times I heard this in different versions—that we were working-class people, we were always going to have to work, and what was really important was that we liked our work, that we couldn’t spend our lives doing something that didn’t make us happy. Now, if digging a ditch made you happy, then that was fine. And it was perfectly all right to take a job until you found your work.
So I’ve done just about everything. I went to college—the first person in my family to go—and I worked as a waitress, as a desk clerk at a hotel, on a factory line. In New York, I worked in offices and things like that. But I was looking. And I think, like most women my age at that time, I was also looking for somebody to marry me… and that didn’t look like it was going to happen. But then somebody put me in a little thing at a college. They needed a Mama Cass type. [Laughs.] And they wrote a little thing for me, where I was wearing a wig and jewelry, and it was a wonderful, funny little skit. And I got on stage, I started it, the laughs started coming, and every pore in my body opened up, and in my head I went, “This is it.” Thank God I was so stupid that I didn’t realize how hard it was gonna be, because in two weeks, I was packing and going to New York!
I went with another girl from West Virginia, and we worked in offices. I knew a man who was part of that newly formed theater group, Circle Repertory, and he took me there. I wouldn’t say they made me a member immediately, but they let me hang around, and I ended up getting a walk-on role in The Three Sisters, because we started out doing classics. They ended up being producers of new American plays. But I got the role of the maid in The Three Sisters, which let me go to class with everybody else. Marshall [Mason], who was the artistic director, didn’t believe that we all had to work in the same way, but he did think we all needed to speak the same language about theater, so we took classes together. Everything I am as an actress came through that theater. I worked five years there, working a job in the day and working at the theater at night, and at the beginning of the fifth year, we did Hot l Baltimore, and it was a major hit. I couldn’t believe it was happening, so I kept my day job. [Laughs.] I did 380-some performances of Hot l Baltimore, but I kept my day job, and they gave me Wednesday afternoons off so I could make the matinee.
AVC: Did you always have a desire to shift from the stage to in front of the camera, or did it just kind of happen?
CF: It happened mostly just because I wasn’t getting the work. I came up through a theater where everybody was talking about artistic values, so I had that in my head. But when I came out and did the series Hot l Baltimore, and it was one of those multi-camera sitcoms, with an audience, I thought it was the best mixture possible, because you still had the audience, which is vitally important, and it was so much fun. Most of the stuff that I’ve done has been fun. There have been a few that I would just as soon not mention. [Laughs.] But most have been really fun. And I’ve learned from my characters, so every time I do one well, she leaves behind a gift for me. A living gift.
So, yeah, I went back to New York after Hot l was canceled, like you’re supposed to do —or like the people that I knew were supposed to do—and I was really faced with going back to typing for a living. So I just went, “Well, there’s no artistic principle to be served by this, and I can make a living in California.”
So I came out, and I’ve made a living at it, doing different things at different times. For a while there, there were movies of the week, and I can’t begin to tell you how many movies of the week I did. I made a living on movies of the week, which was really good, because I had some comedy, but I also had drama, which allowed me to do something a lot of people hadn’t seen me do. So I never regretted coming. I miss New York, and I miss it something terrible. I miss the people. I miss having that family you have in a theater group. But in terms of my work, I’ve done well. I mean, I’m not a star, I never will be a star—I’m a character woman—but I’ve worked, and I’ve had roles as well as jobs.
St. Elsewhere (1983)—“Gina Barnett”
CF: Oh, God! That was fabulous! And that was my agent having a wonderful idea. She read it, and, you know, it’s about a woman who wasn’t super bright, but who took care of her father, who was an invalid, and she went to the emergency room one evening because she was in terrible pain… and she hadn’t even known she was pregnant! It had been written for a much younger woman, and my agent called the casting director and said, “Listen, you’re gonna think this is crazy, but I think Conchata Ferrell ought to do this. Now, she will come and audition—she always auditions—so all you’re doing is giving up an audition space, but I would just like you to think about how much more poignant this will be if this woman walks out of that hospital without that baby when you know she’s never gonna have another one.” And, oh, it was amazing to play.
AVC: Little did you know that, almost 30 years later, TLC would have an entire series called I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.
CF: No, I… [Suddenly realizes what was said.] No! Do they?
AVC: Well, they did. It lasted four seasons. But it’s probably fair to say your St. Elsewhere episode may have been a bit more poignant than the average episode of that show.
CF: Oh, it was very poignant. Yeah, it’s one of my favorites. But it’s not something I would’ve thought about. I would’ve read it and gone, “Oh, gosh, when I was younger, I would’ve really liked to have gotten hold of this.” But, yeah, I liked it a lot. She worked in a doughnut shop, and her father was an invalid, and all of a sudden she has this baby, which she’d wanted all of her life, but she had no idea that she’d been pregnant, because she was just really heavy and she just… didn’t know enough. And then to have the baby and go through the process of what would she do with the baby and how would she raise the baby when she’s taking care of her father. So she leaves the baby in the hospital. And it’s very sad.
But, you know, the wonderful thing about roles like that is that it gives you an opportunity to explore what could make you do that. I always like to play women who have something I don’t have, or who are maybe on the dark side, and maybe it’s a place that I wouldn’t let myself go, but I know it’s in there. The character lets you go in there… and then you don’t have to have pay for it. [Laughs.]
Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1998)—“Nurse Greenliegh”
CF: Oh, well, I didn’t last long in that. I got killed! [Laughs.] I was a victim in that one, so it was more of a job than a role. I have tried to treat jobs like roles, so that they come out with layers, but sometimes you can, and sometimes you can’t. The only thing about that that happened was that I found the script amusing. It’s really easy for me to slip into comedy. And I had to go back and re-film a couple of scenes, because they kept going, “It’s funny!” And, uh, that’s not what they had in mind for the character.
E/R (1984–1985)—“Nurse Joan Thor”
ER (2001)—“Mrs. Jenkins”
CF: Nurse Thor on the original E/R was a wonderful character. She tended to boss everybody around, and she was good friends with the doctor. She was a really good nurse, and she had a husband who was crazy about her. That was really interesting, because he would write country songs for her. [Laughs.] She was fun. I don’t know that I learned a hell of a lot from her, except for the fact that she was so much fun, and that she was a head nurse and in charge.
AVC: Clearly, Norman Lear had a thing for adapting plays to sitcoms.
CF: Well, E/R wasn’t Norman, it was Saul Turtletaub. [The series was, however, produced through Lear’s production company, Embassy Television. —Ed.] But it was a good sitcom setup. And George Clooney was in it, too: he played my nephew. So he was on both! But, yeah, it did come out of a play, which came through a theater in Chicago.
