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A Comprehensive Guide to Prince on the Anniversary of ‘1999’

Though it was his fifth album, “1999” put Prince on the map. Shondaland celebrates the legend he became — and always will be — with a retrospective of his incredible career.

What becomes a music legend? A multitude of awards? The ability and agility to play all your own instruments? A commanding stage presence? A career of sold-out tours and a generation of fans? Masterful and infectious writing, for himself and other artists? Hundreds of songs that explore everything from sex and love to the end days to even the complicated music business, with an intense magnetism? Prince had all of this and more — indeed, a legend who sold more than 100 million albums during his lifetime and who, even after he passed in April 2016, sold more music than any other artist that year.

Prince used his formidable talent to etch his work into the zeitgeist, forever to be savored as a celebration of love, horniness, spirituality, equality, and his unique ideas of exalted living. A tireless virtuoso who could do splits in heels while executing a flawlessly innovative 20-minute guitar solo, he released 42 studio albums during his too-short life and fought relentlessly for his rights as an artist along the way. His accolades, of course, are endless: He won something like 32 awards, including seven Grammys (with more than 42 nominations), an Oscar (for Best Original Song Score for Purple Rain), four MTV Video Music Awards, and a Golden Globe. And lest we forget, Prince also garnered countless American Music Awards and nominations, 11 ASCAP Pop Music Awards, inductions into various Halls of Fame — the man was basically the Mozart of our time.

Prince’s trajectory may have seemed predetermined, but his eventual ascension to becoming a musical icon had to start somewhere. One moment that arguably served as the springboard to what would become his breathtaking career occurred 40 years ago today on October 27, 1982, when his fifth studio album, 1999, was released. Though Prince already boasted hits like “Controversy” and “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” 1999 ushered Prince’s special brand of racy funk out of the R&B charts and into the mainstream. It was his first top 10 album, reaching No. 9 on the Billboard 200, and came in at No. 5 in its year-end roundup of albums. The success of singles like “1999” (No. 12 on the Billboard chart) and “Little Red Corvette” (No. 4 on the Billboard chart) changed the momentum of his career, setting Prince on a course toward the stratosphere. Even after Prince tragically passed away on April 21, 2016, 1999 recharted on Billboard and made it to No. 7, a higher position than when the album first charted.

To celebrate the man and the catalog of music he left behind, we bring you a brief overview of his brilliant and sadly truncated career.

Precocious beginnings

A proud Gemini born on June 7, 1958, Prince Rogers Nelson (yes, that was his actual first name) was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a hometown he cherished until his passing — he once said, “The cold keeps the bad people out.” At only 5 feet 1 inch, a young Nelson loved basketball and played in high school. It’s said his musical ability was preternatural, and he eventually learned to master 18 different instruments. As aspiring musicians are wont to do, he made demos, scored a manager, and shopped his sound around to labels. At just 19, Prince signed with Warner Brothers, beginning what would be a tumultuous relationship he’d struggle with for the next 18 years. For his first album, Prince refused an assigned producer and insisted he do it himself.

The birth of the artist known as Prince

His debut record, For You, was released in 1978 and featured nine tracks that Prince produced, arranged, composed, and performed — as impressive as it gets for a debut artist. His namesake record, Prince, followed, with the hit single “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and the original version of “I Feel for You,” later covered by Chaka Khan. Glancing across these record covers — all portraits of him — the evolution of Prince’s relationship with provocation begins to take shape.

While For You and Prince only hinted at a sultry, sexualized artist, the cover of his next album, 1980’s Dirty Mind, featured Prince in nothing but a blazer, thigh-high heeled boots, and black underwear. Every track oozed sex, with six songs marked “E” for explicit except for, ironically, “Head,” which is a celebratory anthem about the act.

Prince, Performing in Detroit, Michigan in 1980.

Leni Sinclair//Getty Images

Controversy, the record that followed, integrated deeper questioning not only about sex but also sexuality and identity. On the album’s title track, Prince pontificates, “I just can’t believe all the things people say/Am I Black or white?/Am I straight or gay?/Do I believe in God? Do I believe in me?” He concludes by reciting the Lord’s Prayer over his unique brand of funk, new wave, and synth-pop, calling for a nonjudgmental society: “People call me rude/I wish we all were nude/I wish there was no Black and white/I wish there were no rules.” Libidinous jams like “Sexuality,” “Private Joy,” and “Jack U Off” keep the party going, but “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” reflects an almost punk, snarling, guitar-driven awareness of impending nuclear war — reflecting a cognizance of the times that would pervade Prince’s next few albums.

1999 and becoming a household name

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you/I only want you to have some fun,” Prince coos over an electronic voice modulator as the beat kicks into the title track of 1999, his fifth studio album. “1999” is a hopped-up funk jam, but it’s also an exuberant anti-nuclear protest song: “I was dreaming when I wrote this/Forgive me if it goes astray/But when I woke up this morning, could’ve sworn it was judgment day/The sky was all purple/There were people running everywhere, trying to run from destruction/You know I didn’t even care.” Written in 1982 at the height of the Cold War, the track proved to be a pivotal record that inspired us all to dance and cut up, just in case, you know, we were all blown to smithereens. Nearly 20 years later, the song found a new, if obvious, resonance when the entire world was fixated on what would happen when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, ushering in a new millennium — and all those Y2K fears.

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But back in 1982, the message penetrated Gen X anxiety and ethos so much that the album sold more than 4 million copies, with both critics and fans devouring a pounding, percussive sensibility driven by synths and drum machines, which would become the blueprint of a groove-heavy Minneapolis sound that would prevail over the airwaves for the next decade. Prince also became an MTV mainstay, with the all-music, all-the-time channel (remember those days?) playing “1999” and what would become Prince’s first top 10 hit, “Little Red Corvette,” on loop. From November 1982 to April 1983, Prince took the album on what was then his longest-running tour, the 1999 Tour, which stopped in almost 80 cities across the United States.

Purple Rain and Prince’s parade of hits

If 1999 brough Prince into the mainstream, it was Purple Rain — both his sixth studio album and the accompanying feature film — that affirmed Prince as an icon when it was released in 1984. The album would eventually sell a staggering 25 million copies worldwide and become the best-selling feature film soundtrack of all time. The film is said to be a somewhat autobiographical dramatization of his life, and every track is etched into the annals of pop culture, including “Let’s Get Crazy,” “When Doves Cry,” and of course, “Purple Rain.” His band, the Revolution, also jelled during this time, but every success comes with at least a little setback: the subject matter of the Purple Rain track “Darling Nikki”— a song about a girl Prince met in a hotel lobby “masturbating with a magazine” — ticked off Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator Al Gore, so much that her ire and campaign against the song is what eventually led to Parental Advisory stickers being placed on albums with explicit lyrics.

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For all his flamboyant self-expression, however, Prince was notoriously shy. In 1985, it’s said he was invited to join the recording of “We Are the World” — the massively successful fundraising track recorded by a who’s who of celebs who made up the supergroup U.S.A. for Africa — but he declined. Still, he remained prolifically productive, driven to release roughly an album a year until his passing. After Purple Rain, Prince turned around and gave us another No. 1 album, Around the World in a Day, which veered away from his heavy funk and moved more toward blatant pop psychedelia. The album spawned hits like “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life,” and it was also the first record released under Prince’s own label, Paisley Park, which was distributed by Warner Brothers.

But fans loved the sexier side of Prince, so the following year, he released the critically acclaimed Parade, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart and featured the huge, high-octave hit “Kiss.” The track served as part of the soundtrack to Prince’s second film, Under the Cherry Moon, a romantic film about a couple of gigolos that was panned by critics — though it did feature the debut of eventual Oscar-nominated actress Kristin Scott Thomas.

Soundtracking the times

Despite obvious commercial success as a musician and artist, throughout his career, Prince was undoubtedly dedicated to making the music he felt like making when he wanted to make it, and was always unpredictable in his topical explorations. Following Parade, Prince released Sign o’ the Times, which reached No. 6 on the Billboard chart in 1987. The title track was a time capsule of a hit that addressed man’s propensity for self-destruction via societal pain points like the AIDS crisis, gun laws, mass murder, and pervasive crack addiction, and mentions the space shuttle Challenger explosion. It also gave us hits like “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “U Got the Look” (with Sheena Easton), and “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” He pared down his instrumentation on the album, often favoring a simple drum machine, and at this point, he’d dissolved the Revolution, though he continued to work with guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman, who both appeared on the album and still work together to this day.

Prince plays his Sign o The Times concert at the Palais Omnisports in Paris on June 13, 1987.

FG/Bauer-Griffin//Getty Images

While Sign o’ the Times would go on to be Prince’s most critically acclaimed record — a film of his tour supporting it was also heavily praised — toward the end of the decade, Prince put out Lovesexy, which, in its contemporary R&B explorations of themes of good versus evil, vacillated between incredibly bright and optimistic to slightly dense and obtuse. It was largely met with mixed reviews, with only a single commercially successful track, “Alphabet St.” Follow-up singles “Glam Slam” and “I Wish U Heaven” didn’t even chart.

Even so, Prince pounced on an unexpected opportunity. As a kid, he used to play the Batman theme on the piano, a tale that reportedly led to Prince being tapped to write the soundtrack to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film. It was Prince's 11th studio album and his first foray into soundtracking for a film he didn’t make — and fans ate it up. The album was No. 1 on the chart for six weeks, and “Batdance,” composed of film dialogue samples set to trademark Prince grooves, was his first No. 1 single since “Kiss.” Though Prince’s music continued to be featured in many films throughout the decades, including Risky Business, Happy Feet, and Pretty Woman, he’d go on to compose only one more soundtrack for a non-Prince film, Girl 6, a 1996 Spike Lee film about a phone sex operator.

The ’90s

The ’90s were something of a transitional period for Prince, both businesswise and personally. 1990’s Graffiti Bridge found Prince assembling a new band, the New Power Generation, or NPG, who also recorded the soundtrack for the Graffiti Bridge film that he released the same year. Though critics loved the album, it didn’t spawn a huge single. Prince had better luck with 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls, whose hits — like “Gett Off” and “Cream” — led to Prince signing, at the time, the biggest record contract ever, with Warner Brothers, allowing him to release an album a year for six years, with a $10 million advance per record, a whopping 25 percent of the royalties, and the establishment of his Paisley Park as a joint venture instead of an imprint. However, things quickly soured with the label. According to Billboard, Prince wanted to put out records whenever the urge struck him, even if they were only three songs long. Warner Brothers pushed back, setting up frequent tête-à-têtes between Prince and the label about who ultimately controlled his music.

As a result of the tension with Warner Brothers, Prince, on his next album, Love Symbol, changed his name, though not to another moniker but rather a Mercury-meets-Venus-meets-Mars-esque glyph symbol that befitted his long-established explorations with binaries in sexuality. In a statement, Prince said, “It is an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It’s all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency,” but in reality, he just wanted to stick it to the label. Hard to market and write about in the press, “the artist formerly known as Prince,” as he was called, saw slumping record sales and plenty of backlash. Love Symbol and his following albums, 1994’s Come and The Black Album, marked both the height of Prince’s dispute with Warner Brothers and a continued lack of interest from fans as Prince tried to fulfill the terms of his contract with less-than-enthused label albums.

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But by 1996, Prince ended his distribution deal with Warner Brothers and won the rights to all of his master recordings, and in 1996 released a record called Emancipation to celebrate. He also resumed the use of his name, which led to the launch of his own label NPG. During this time, Prince became notoriously reclusive, recording at his home studio Paisley Park in Minneapolis and refusing to be interviewed. But he was writing and recording on his own terms, and, with NPG, Prince would go on to release 22 more albums, most devoid of singles or hits, given that he spent the first 10 years of the 2000s releasing some of his own music online to subscribers instead of opting for a record deal. Nevertheless, Prince would still collaborate with established artists like Q-Tip and Kate Bush, as well as continue to experiment with his sound, implementing horns, smooth R&B, and heavier guitars into songs that were still undeniably Prince.

Ever the musicologist

The early 2000s saw Prince take experimentation to places he hadn’t quite gone before, with 2001’s The Rainbow Children getting lost in some jumbled jazz, and 2003’s N.E.W.S. leaning far too deep into instrumental meanderings. But in 2004, Prince returned in true Prince fashion. He opened the Grammys with Beyoncé, performing a medley of hits. He was elected into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and, later in the year, at his induction, delivered a searing guitar solo in tribute to George Harrison on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Prince, ever the one to buck industry rules, also released Musicology in a one-off NPG deal with Columbia Records (he would go on to release one-off records with EMI, Arista, Universal, and even Warner Brothers). He reverted to his old-school tastes, and the record reestablished what we always loved about Prince — the funk, the psych-pop, as well as the pointed references to society, the Bible, war, and corruption in a post-9/11 world — and eventually reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 2000, becoming his most successful album since Diamonds and Pearls.

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Musicology would go on to earn five Grammy nominations and two wins, for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance for “Musicology,” and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for “Call My Name.” He toured extensively, playing for a grand total of 1.47 million fans, which was the highest-grossing tour that year. The momentum of the album would last for years, with Prince performing the halftime show at the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami, putting on one of the most memorable performances ever in heels. In 2010, Time named Prince one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

The final days

While things slowed down for Prince after Musicology, in his final year Prince put out two albums, Hit n Run Phase One and Hit n Run Phase Two, which were available to stream on Tidal before being released on CD. Ever the collaborative guru, he also dedicated himself to cultivating young artists, like one of his backup singers, Judith Hill, and a young Lizzo at Paisley Park.

In support of Hit n Run, Prince began to tour in early 2016 but stopped after a couple of months due to bouts with the flu and walking pneumonia. It is said he lost consciousness on a private flight to Minneapolis on April 15, 2016, after which the plane had to make an emergency landing. A week later, Prince died due to an accidental fentanyl overdose at 57. Friends have said Prince suffered from chronic back and hip pain and often took prescription painkillers, and it was reported that the pills he took on April 21, 2016, were laced with the deadly drug.

Today, Prince’s home recording studio, Paisley Park, has been transformed into a museum that houses his archives. Though we mourn the loss of Prince to this day, he left behind a body of work so extensive and unique, we will certainly continue to discover and celebrate the music he gave us for decades to come.

Kristen Schaal’s Voice Carries

The talented actress speaks with Shondaland about starring in “The Mysterious Benedict Society,” how much there is to learn from comedy, and the kind of role she dreams of playing.

Kristen Schaal has, undoubtedly, made you laugh. Maybe you’ve watched her as the hilarious cuckolding groupie on Flight of the Conchords, as the Guide in What We Do in the Shadows, opposite Will Forte as the last woman on Earth in The Last Man on Earth, or on 30 Rock as Hazel Wassername. Or perhaps you’ve heard her voice in The Bob’s Burgers Movie (as Louise Belcher), Gravity Falls (as Mabel), BoJack Horseman (as Sarah Lynn and Sabrina), or in the Toy Story films (she was Trixie). However you’ve found your way to her, her irreverent delivery and impeccable timing remain unmatched in the comedy world.

The Colorado native fine-tuned her comedic timing in the Lower East Side clubs of New York before going on to, clearly, find success as an incessantly hilarious character actress, but in a more dramatic turn, Schaal now stars as Number Two in the Disney+ series The Mysterious Benedict Society, a role she says allows her to “show another side” of her range. The series, based on the books by Trenton Lee Stewart, follows a group of orphans who are accepted into a special school due to their aptitude and intelligence — only to find out that there’s some serious (and troubling) brainwashing going on. Schaal recently hopped on a Zoom with Shondaland to talk about working on Benedict, how much there is to learn from doing comedy, and the kind of role she dreams of playing.

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VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: You’re playing Number Two in The Mysterious Benedict Society. Congrats! Had you read the books before joining the cast?

KRISTEN SCHAAL: I auditioned for the part and got it, then I read the books. I read the pilot, and I got excited because the role just seemed like something fresh for me to play. She was efficient and capable, and not totally just goofy and weird. It just seemed like I could show another side, so I was excited to play Number Two.

VMS: My kids were telling me more about the books, and there seem to be some wildly relevant parallels to what’s going on now. Isn’t that crazy?

KS: So crazy! When Curtain was sending subliminal messages to the world about the big emergency coming out, at that time Trump was president and was saying everything was fake news — “You can only believe what I say” — it was so creepy. And those books were written in 2007, [and] the whole thing about how easy it is to manipulate information to a whole society is very relevant.

VMS: It’s so interesting how some art portends the future. You studied acting at Northwestern but began your career doing improv, alternative comedy, and stand-up. Did you always have a hankering for comedy? When you were a kid, did you always like to make people laugh? Or did it come to you a little later?

KS: I think I always knew I wanted to be performing. Comedy kind of found me a little bit later, probably in high school when I was trying to read a poem or something serious in a speech-debate class and people were kind of laughing. I realized that me being serious is actually funny — what a tool that I can use! So, I kind of leaned into comedy and discovered that comedy is something that not everyone can do, so that makes it really special. Comedy is always something that’s always evolving and changing as time marches forward, so it’s never going to get boring to me. It’s always going to be a new skill to keep refining and learning.

VMS: I loved you in Flight of the Conchords. What would you say was your big break? Every actor’s perception of it seems to be different.

KS: Oh, Flight of the Conchords was it! I was doing stand-up comedy and improv in New York City. The HBO Comedy Festival was still happening back then in Aspen, Colorado, and I got a slot to perform there, and that led to their show. Having done hardly anything else, it really opened the doors for me to continue to work. It didn’t open the doors to me being an A-lister, which is for the best [laughs]. I got seen for stuff more and got my foot in.

VMS: That part showed you could commit to anything! Of all the roles you’ve played, which experience would you say was most pivotal, or helped you realize yourself, in a way? Think about your voice work too.

KS: I guess Conchords was great because I was allowed to play, and on a stage, with the big boys. So then, I realized, “Oh, you can do this!” So, that was huge. Last Man on Earth was my first lead thing. That one — every day I would walk onto that stage and just be like, “Thank you, thank you, that I’m here.” Everything for me is always just such a gift, and I can’t believe I get to do it. I take every job as “What can I learn doing this role and make myself better? And what can I pick up for the next role?”

VMS: If you could cast yourself in anything, what role would you play?

KS: I guess I would love to play … I don’t know what it is yet. If I did, I’d be writing and pitching it right now. I’d love to play someone who’s un-self-aware. Usually, a lot of my characters have that; someone who thinks they’re good at being a pop star was an idea that I had … the shenanigans! The best comedy roles are like Veep. Julia Louis-Dreyfus got to play a character who was very un-self-aware, but the writing let her be a virtuoso. She got to do things we’d never seen before to make us laugh. Even though they were over the top, they were still grounded because the writing was just so good, and she’s so good.

VMS: I know what you mean! She was able to show subtlety and then also slapstick.

KS: Exactly! Exactly. That’s a role of a lifetime; that’s a role of a generation! So, that would be what I’d love to see myself in someday. I don’t know if it’ll happen.

VMS: Listen, we’re manifesting! What’s next for you?

KS: Next for me right now is I’m in Toronto working on What We Do in the Shadows, which is a show on FX. It’s such a fun show.

VMS: Which artists inspire you? It could be music, visual art, anything.

KS: I’m so happy you asked me that! I was reading Ani DiFranco’s autobiography. I saw her in person in Pasadena a few years ago and never got a chance to read it. Finally, now I’m digging into it. Her journey and why I was attracted to her in college — and Björk, and Tori Amos, and those women — is they were just doing their own thing. They were like, “I don’t have a song in me, I don’t think the music industry is into it, and I’m going to make my own album.” Just reading about her process and her journey to get there is so inspiring. I just love remembering that doing art and being in this business comes from a drive inside of you where you can’t do anything else. To really honor that recklessness — that’s the clown! That’s the idiot in you that says you can’t do anything else, so I’m going to do this ridiculous artist’s path.

With Her Debut Novel, ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ Joanna Quinn Explores the Endurance of Chosen Family

The U.K. native chats with Shondaland about her writing process and creating art from the ruins of aristocracy and war.

Debut novelist Joanna Quinn was already fluent in the art of writing stories when she decided to take on a novel. The London-born, Dorset-raised scribe had already earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of South Wales. She then took on a job in “comms,” or PR, to fund her Ph.D. in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she tackled what would become her first novel, The Whalebone Theatre, submitting chapter after chapter each month in order to earn her degree.

In a recent New York Times review, writer Alexandra Jacobs deftly referred to The Whalebone Theatre as a “generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited,” and it’s a fairly accurate assessment, save for the very current, saucy adult bits Quinn weaves in with dexterity. The book is a natural page-turner as it delves into the complexities of the Seagrave family residing in Chilcombe, one of those great aristocratic houses, set in early-to-mid-20th-century Dorset, England.

In the novel’s early pages, we learn that 4-year-old Cristabel’s mother died in childbirth. Her still-mourning father brings home a stepmom, Rosalind, who will go on to have Cristabel’s half-sister, Flossie, as well as Cristabel’s cousin Digby, once Rosalind is widowed and marries her husband’s brother Willoughby. These adults like to party, so the neglected Cristabel, Flossie, and Digby take refuge in their creativity, imagining a theater out of — of all things — the bones of a whale beached on the shores of the English Channel. Despite the unorthodox location, the children coerce the adult creatives in their orbit to play along and make it legit. As they accelerate toward adulthood, however, World War II forces them to try to tether to one another and their fleeting inspirations as literal and metaphorical bombs drop all around them.

From her home in Dorset, Quinn recently Zoomed with Shondaland to discuss the process of writing The Whalebone Theatre, what inspired the whale, and how we use art as a means of escaping dire circumstances.

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VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: To begin, let’s dig into the simplest question: What inspired The Whalebone Theatre?

JOANNA QUINN: Many things! I live in Dorset, where the book is set. It’s still quite a traditional place in a lot of ways; there are still small cottages and traditional manor houses, so they’re kind of a familiar part of the scenery. I always wanted to write a novel, but I couldn’t think of a subject. I read a social history book, actually, which was about a small village in Dorset, and I just said, “Why didn’t I think about writing about my home county?” even though I never thought about it before. It kind of quickly went from there, really. I sort of instantly wanted to put it in a big house; I instantly wanted to put it in the beginning of the 20th century because it’s just an interesting time. I always like reading about the wars and the time between the wars. I wanted to write about women primarily. There are so many big house stories about men and boys, and the whole interior and exterior of the big house are designed to celebrate and promote men. I thought I’d like to write a big house story that has women in it.

VMS: Cristabel is such an inspired character. You do such a thorough job of setting her up and giving a real glimpse into the inner workings of who she is and what made her that way. The early chapters, like “Things,” explore the whole concept of patriarchy through a 4-year-old’s eyes. Did you always know you wanted to write historical fiction?

JQ: Before writing this, I wrote short stories, and those have jumped around all over the place. I’ve gone into the future, the present, and the past. In my head, I never differentiate between fiction and historical fiction — that doesn’t make any sense to me. Around 1900 until after the first World War is just a period of time that fascinates me. If you are going to look at a big house, that period of time is really the end of the aristocracy. It’s the end of those upper classes, from beginning to end, that 50 years. It’s just an obvious choice to me, really. As to whether I thought it was going to be feminist, I don’t think I made a conscious decision, but I think it was more of a natural instinct. I’m not the kind of person who would ever live in a big house, and my family isn’t that kind of family. I’m never going to write [a novel] that’s sort of in praise of it, so I’m always going to come in on the side of the underdog. In the case of that particular family, that’s always going to be a girl.

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VMS: What were some of the challenges involved in researching this era? You must’ve put a ton of time into it.

JQ: I do read social history for fun — that’s the kind of Friday night I have! I had a broad outline. The challenges were kind of twofold, really: One was the more specific details to do with things like the Special Operations Executive, which was a real thing and women really were those agents, so I didn’t want to get that wrong in any way because I admired those women so much. I didn’t want to overpraise them or underpraise them or anything, but I wanted it to be as close to a factual representation as I could. Theater in Paris is really interesting. I found a tiny, little footnote in a book I was reading that was called And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. It was a tiny, little thing that mentioned the theaters were still open, and this particular play, Antigone, was on. Then, I really had to go quite deep during lockdown, trying to find pictures of this theater on Google Earth. I ended up being very grateful for some Ph.D. students who’d actually done studies of theater in Paris and then published their dissertations on the internet. They had nice details about things like the fact that there was no light in the theaters because of so many power cuts and rationing and all that sort of stuff. So, they had a skylight that light fell through, and they moved all their shows earlier so it wasn’t too dark and they still had light coming through. So, you can describe the scene. What you actually want is what was it actually like to walk into that theater.

VMS: One of the underlying themes of this book is how people escape dire circumstances and find joy through art. Was that something you always intended on?

JQ: Yeah, I think so. It kind of evolved with the kids because I always knew they were going to be neglected, and that they would put on plays and read books as a way of comforting themselves and a way of escaping into an imaginary world, particularly for Cristabel, and Digby when he’s younger. It’s something lots of kids do, but it’s also sort of quite telling of the environment they’re in that they have no other outlet, or comfort, or anything, really — despite being materially well off, they’re pretty much on their own. As it went on, it just became such a nice thread to pull through when they make their own theater when the whale arrives. Then, there’s the opportunity to bring in the theater during wartime and the theater at the end of it. I always think of Cristabel’s journey as someone trying to prove herself — not misguided — but she’s trying so hard to prove that she’s up to being a soldier and something that will be praised in that militaristic environment. Her return to the theater in the end and her acceptance of childhood imagination really is kind of the arc of the story in my mind. A nice full circle.

VMS: It’s her validation as an artist and a creative. In the early part of the book, you capture formative thinking so well. Was it easy or hard to toggle back and forth to a 4-year-old’s way of thinking?

JQ: It does take a bit of work, but I don’t feel I’ve changed a big deal in my time on this planet. I think I’m still exactly the same person. In a way, it’s recognizing you’re still there in that kind of fundamental form — just your knowledge of the world is slightly different. You just know a little bit less, but you’re still the same. Cristabel is very logical, and I was very similar as a child, not understanding why things are like this when they are so clearly unfair.

VMS: There’s one line early on that kind of portends the whole story — when Christabel asks, “Why aren’t there interesting women in stories?” And then she becomes an incredibly interesting woman in your story. I feel like the book is also about family and the strength of chosen family, as Cristabel, Flossie, and Digby are related, but loosely. Was chosen family important for you to explore as well?

JQ: Yeah, I think so. Kids that are sometimes left to their own devices do form a kind of gang, not only with kids but with other adults who show an interest in them. That sense of when you’re self-raising, you kind of form these really close, interlinked partnerships with people because there isn’t anybody else. I always wanted them to be a gang that weren’t quite siblings, and as soon as I thought that was interesting, I knew their parentage was going to be super-interesting. One of the first things I did was draw a family tree. Once you cross lines on a family tree, that feels really fun to me because you’ve got all those complicated, emotional crosshairs. I just liked the idea of complications about family and how that would play out within those different kids and their respective parents.

VMS: When you sat down to write it, did you outline it? Or did you just let it flow, and kind of channel the book?

JQ: I’d never done it before, so I didn’t know what I was doing, which is probably a good thing in hindsight. I had the idea that I wanted to do a post-Victorian childhood, the post-World War — I knew I wanted that. I knew I wanted some stuff in the 1920s that would be bohemian-ish, and I knew that I wanted something in Paris. So, I had three markers in my head, and I was going to try and fit them together. But because when I started to write the book, I was working full-time, and I’d just had a baby and [had] no brain space, really. So, I was up late at night doing stuff. I was working in chapter chunks, which was as far as I’d see. I was just shaping a single object rather than thinking of something that was a long chain. The work at the end of the book was putting stuff through to make sure there were through lines as well.

VMS: World War II seems like such a mammoth undertaking to have characters deal with. In one line at the end of the book, Cristabel says to Flossie that she always goes back to Jane Austen because she “tidies things up” for her. Does she tidy things up for you as well? Who are your biggest influences as a writer?

JQ: I read Jane Austen when I was pregnant. I was really, really anxious when I was pregnant, but nothing bad is ever going to happen with Jane Austen. No one is ever going to die horribly or suddenly; it’s just perfectly formed lovely stories. There’s a comfort in that. For this book, I think — and I think it was unconscious, but I only realized after I’d written it — there were an awful lot of books I read as a child in there. I didn’t deliberately do it; I think they just came out. E. Nesbit, a little bit of probably some Little Women in there, as well. There’s a writer named Lucy M. Boston — I don’t know if she’s well known in the States — but she did a series called The Children of Green Knowe, which was about children growing up in a 17th-century house.

VMS: Was it hard to make the decisions that you made at the end of the book with respect to the characters?

JQ: I always knew who was going to make it to the end. One of them was going to have to go. It’s the nature of war: You can’t write a book about the Second World War and have everybody who starts it come out the other end. I was doing some research reading an autobiography of the painter Augustus John, and he had a great time during the war. He really, really enjoyed himself! And everybody else was drinking just as hard as he normally did. That felt quite [like] Rosalind, like she’d have a second wind.

VMS: I love how you sneak in sexuality throughout the book. It’s entertaining with the sensibilities of today.

JQ: There had to be that knowing quality in the book. If it was just children-y stuff, it would get tedious quite quickly. You needed to have sexuality and the darker stuff as well, from the get-go.

VMS: Finally, tell me what inspired the whale and making a theater out of a whale’s bones.

JQ: A lot of the things that came in the process of writing. I had a whale that washed up on a beach because I’d read this fact about whales and thought that works with Cristabel to be denied things, that she should claim something, but it’s not hers, and that fits. But I didn’t know what to do with it for ages and ages. It just sat there; my subconscious gave me a whale, but it took my brain an absolute age to think maybe I could make it into a theater.

VMS: What inspired that?

JQ: It was all about Kate Bush! I was doing an exercise with a writing teacher, and he said to me, “Write a scene that encapsulates what you want to talk about in your novel.” So, I read this fact about whales, which wash my whale up upon my beach, so I had that scene. I just had the whale sitting there, and I remember saying to my Ph.D. supervisor, “I have this whale, and it’s just rotting. I don’t know what to do with it.” I went to see the Kate Bush live tour in 2014 and was literally at the very, very, top. Nobody was allowed phones, so everyone was really, really engaged. In the second half — it was sort of acted and sort of music as well — there was this ongoing story about a boat being lost. On the [second] side of Hounds of Love, there’s all sorts of stuff about water and things. There was this stage set that looked like the ribs of a galleon or the ribs of a whale — it could’ve been either — under the sea. And I just went, “Ahh! I can make my whale into a theater!”

VMS: Very cool! Thanks, Kate!
JQ: I keep hoping she’ll read this somewhere and invite me ’round!

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Judy Greer Steals the Scene

The actress talks with Shondaland about “Reboot,” her career, her latest business venture, and why she has trouble saying no.

You know Judy Greer from somewhere — we all do. Back in 2014, she even wrote a memoir about getting recognized called I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star. Greer’s ubiquity comes from a résumé that unfurls like a CVS receipt, her long, fruitful career built by stealing scenes in countless film and TV shows like 13 Going on 30, Jawbreaker, Arrested Development, Wilson, The Wedding Planner, The Descendants, and way too many more to list. Most recently, you’ve seen her in Showtime’s Emmy-nominated series The First Lady, as Leah Askey in The Thing About Pam with Renée Zellweger, and as Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter in the latest Halloween film. And starting on September 20, you’re about to see her again, as Bree Marie Jensen in Reboot, an ensemble Hulu comedy in which Greer plays a leading actress in a reboot of a fictional ensemble Hulu comedy called Step Right Up — a concept so delightfully meta.

Despite the roll call of successes, Greer told Shondaland she sometimes worries the well will dry up, so in true Midwestern fashion (she’s from Detroit), she has a tendency to keep her foot on the gas when it comes to her career.

“I think sometimes my work ethic is a little too intense,” Greer says. “I think if I’m not shooting something or working on something, then I must be failing. That’s not how this business is meant to be, but for me, I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t I work every day? Most people work every day.’ As a woman, we’re all aging, and these great roles are coming my way, so I’m like, ‘Yes, yes, yes! What if I don’t get this again?’ My career seems to keep going in this really exciting direction, but it does make me feel the pressure to say yes to projects instead of saying yes to myself. I should try to plan a trip, but that doesn’t come naturally to me. Sometimes, my friends think I need to take a break and not say yes to everybody. That’s something held over from the Midwest, definitely. Not to generalize, but let’s say I’m frugal and find it important to save my money. I definitely brought that with me to Hollywood. If you’re not good at managing your finances, this can be a very difficult business.”

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Greer says she was about 10 years into her career when she realized performing was it for her. “I was kind of always eyeballing grad school,” Greer admits. “I was always like, ‘The jig will be up sometime; this isn’t something I can do forever. One of these days, I’m going to stop getting jobs, and I’ll have to figure something else out.’ I’ve always wondered, ‘When are they going to find out?’ But they haven’t. I love what I do! This probably sounds like a silly thing to say, but it was well into it that I realized this was for good. This is my job. This is my life.”

Now more about that life: Reboot is a thorough and effective, dead-on send-up of streaming TV culture — from pitch meetings to writers’ rooms, to trailer antics, to power plays, and everything in between — right down to the workaday obsession with lunch. “To speak specifically to my character, she’s struggling with being out of the business for 15 years, with aging, being worried about her talent, and impostor syndrome that I and so many of my colleagues feel all the time,” says Greer. “That was all really interesting to me and things I feel are universally relatable.”

When asked what drew her to the role of Bree (a role she tackles with aplomb), a star stepping back on the set of her long-defunct, long-running sitcom after a stint as duchess of a fictional Nordic country, Greer immediately mentions the opportunity to work with showrunner Steven Levitan, who also mined sitcom gold with shows like Just Shoot Me, Modern Family, Frasier, and plenty more of note. “He is a genius. And he is a weirdo. He is so funny,” Greer says. “I knew he was a genius before I met him. But having spent so much time with him, it’s been really interesting to get to know what he’s really like. He’s quieter, more thoughtful, and more cerebral than I would’ve anticipated. He hears everything, so be careful what you say, or it will end up in an episode!”

She also mentions she couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with the formidable cast of the show, namely co-stars Keegan-Michael Key, Paul Reiser, Rachel Bloom, Johnny Knoxville, Calum Worthy, and Krista Marie Yu. “So many heavy hitters in comedy land! Everyone has acting chops. I fall in love with shows because of the people, and I root for the characters. We made a really funny show, but you do end up, at least the hope is, that you root for these people,” says Greer.

Even from the first episode, it’s clear Greer is having fun with Bree — a byproduct of the Reboot writers’ room, she says. “This was a really easy job — I mean easy in that it all came very naturally. It was hard work, but I was so excited to go to work every single day, I would show up early. It’s always fun to make people laugh, definitely. The scenes are so perfectly written. Our writers are so incredible, the way they’re able to get so much in and so succinctly in such a short amount of time. We always have Steve [Levitan] and another writer on set throwing out alt lines, so it’s almost like they’re improvising for us. What do I think I can do better?”

Greer’s tenacious work ethic also has roots in her pre-acting life, when she trained as a ballet dancer before attending Chicago’s prestigious Theatre School at DePaul University. Her formal training reinforced the basic tenets of the craft, but there are some things, she says, you can only learn on set. “I learned to be nice to everyone, all the time,” Greer says. “Not only can people keep getting promoted and become your boss or a director you want to work with someday, but also your crew takes care of you. They’re people, and they deserve to be treated well. Sometimes, I’d see people not being so nice to the crew, and I learned early on they could make your life a living hell.”

Though she makes acting easy, and she doesn’t have to audition for every role she’s cast in anymore, Greer admits to one aspect of her work that can be challenging. “A couple of times in my career, I just haven’t had great communication with the director. It’s really difficult to either decipher what it is that they want or talk to them about a character because they have one idea, and I have another,” she explains. “You can go into a project that you’ve been offered and have never really communicated with these people about what you’re bringing to the character. If I can’t figure out what my director wants, it makes the days on set really hard.”

Given that Greer is already a published memoirist, the question of whether she has another book in her is met with an enthusiastic “Yes! I do have another book in me! I love writing,” she says. “It was much more time-consuming [to write it] than I thought it would be. I wrote that book while I was shooting movie after movie and traveling a lot for work. I love my book; I’m really proud of it. If I was to do a book again, I would really want to take time off to focus on it. It’s hard enough to read a book while I’m shooting, but to actually be writing one, I don’t know. I used to do so much at once, and I’m trying really hard to get back to a one-thing-at-a-time kind of vibe.”

True to her need to keep going, going, going, she’s also recently managed to add a side hustle to her repertoire: Greer is co-founder of a company called Wile, which makes supplements, powders, and tinctures for “grown women” in midlife. When approached by close friend and former publicist Corey Scholibo, Greer couldn’t resist the opportunity to start an important conversation about menopause. “We have this twisted idea of the word ‘menopause’ — it’s a bad word, it means you’re old, society doesn’t want you, and you’re not valid anymore,” Greer says.

Her desire to get into the women’s health space was inspired by her own personal experience. “Menopause can happen any time in your 30s; it’s totally natural — it’s just a hormonal shift,” Greer explains. “The more we can manage those symptoms, the happier we’re going to be in our lives. It’s a space I was excited to talk about because I felt like no one was talking to me about it. I went to three gynecologists before I found one who would really talk to me about these symptoms. All the ones leading up to her were like, ‘Maybe you should go on antidepressants; maybe you should go back on the pill.’ I’m like, ‘Why are you putting me on antidepressants? You’re not addressing the issue.’ So, with Wile, in addition to providing a great product that I take myself, I’m just hoping to start this conversation so that women don’t find themselves in the position my friends and I found ourselves in.”

Acting-wise, up next for Greer is something decidedly unfunny: a dramatic film called Eric LaRue, Michael Shannon’s directorial debut. It’s based on a 2002 play by Brett Neveu, and Greer plays the mother of a boy who shot three of his classmates, depicting the aftermath of the trauma. This swing from something so light and funny to something so tragic is a true testament to Greer’s versatility, but there is one type of role she has yet to play — an action hero. “I’d love to be in an action movie — that’s something I’ve never done,” Greer says. “I want to jump out of a helicopter!” At this rate, it won’t be long before she does.