Allison Janney’s Formidable Women

Welcome to The Dispatch, a column by Derek C. Blasberg featuring a mix of interviews and reports from the front rows of the worlds of culture, art, and fashion.

Allison Janney is famous for playing women who take up a lot of space. Fast-talking, tough-as-nails, frequently formidable women: C.J. Cregg, the White House press secretary turned chief of staff on The West Wing; LaVona Golden, the fur-coated, chain-smoking, bird-balancing nightmare of a mother turned antagonist in I, Tonya; and, most recently, Grace Penn, the vice president turned (spoiler?) president on The Diplomat.

In September, that last role earned Janney, 66, her eighth Emmy for acting, tying her with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Cloris Leachman, and Jean Smart for the most performance Emmys in history. (She also has an Oscar, which she won in 2018 for I, Tonya.) She’s six feet tall, a former dancer and figure skater, and statuesque in a way that has made her a red-carpet favorite.

Which is why I’m surprised when we take a stroll down New York’s High Line, the elevated park on a former railroad track on the West Side that has become a top tourist destination, on a sunny, crowded afternoon and nobody seems to notice her. There are zero selfie seekers. No stares. No craning necks and whispers of “Was that … ?” One of the most decorated actresses working today is strolling through one of the city’s busiest promenades undisturbed?

“The truth is, I’m a shy person,” Janney says. On screens and stages, she’s larger than life, but here in person, she very intentionally disappears into the scenery. Her off-duty look is determinedly incognito, with a beige jumpsuit, big sunglasses, and minimal jewelry, her blond hair half pulled back. “Maybe that’s why I love playing these types of characters, which push me out there. Maybe that’s who I wish I was,” she offers. “A therapist would have a field day with me, huh?”

We descend to ground level and settle in for coffee at Cookshop, a restaurant in Chelsea. Janney is in town to prepare to become another “bawdy dame,” as she puts it, in the new Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities. The play centers on Polly and Lyman Wyeth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ed Harris), a wealthy, prominent, politically conservative couple living in Palm Springs, California. Their daughter, Brooke (Lily Rabe), a novelist, comes home for Christmas with a memoir she’s written about a painful chapter in the family’s past, forcing the group, which includes Brooke’s younger brother, Trip (Joe Keery), and Polly’s sister, Silda (Janney), to reckon with it. What begins as a family gathering quickly becomes a fight over what really happened, what should remain private, and whose version of the past becomes the truth.

Through it all, Silda, a writer herself and a recovering alcoholic, emerges as the emotional conscience of the play. It’s a complex role that requires a rare mix of wit and honesty to pull off, which is part of what attracted Janney to it. She had also worked with Baitz before. “He was actually the writer of one of the only episodes [in the first four seasons] of The West Wing that Aaron Sorkin didn’t write,” she says. Other Desert Cities originally opened on Broadway, where Janney first saw it, in 2011. “It’s a brilliant play, and it’s amazing how much it resonates today, because it’s all about a family that’s torn apart by grief and by politics,” she says. “Especially the politics.”

Politics has become an unexpected theme in Janney’s career. Fun fact: Bradley Whitford, who played her deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman, in The West Wing, now plays her husband, First Gentleman Todd Penn, in The Diplomat. (The show just kicked off its fourth season.) Did she ever dream of being a TV president? “No, never. It was huge that I became the chief of staff on The West Wing!” she remembers. “Even I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ ” The day in 2024 when they shot the scene where her character on The Diplomat was sworn in was a surreal one. “Everyone felt emotional because the results of the last election had just happened,” she recalls. “People were very upset that we chose him over her. Again.”

The middle of three children, Janney was born in Boston. She moved with her family first to Cincinnati and then, when she was five, to Dayton, Ohio. Her mother had briefly been an actress and dancer; her father was a commercial real estate developer—and, fortuitously for his daughter, owned a building that housed an ice-skating rink. Janney spent much of her childhood there and dreamed of becoming a competitive figure skater. Her ambitions ended after a serious accident involving a plate-glass door when she was a teen.

When I tell her that I won’t make her retell the story, she puts a hand on my shoulder and sighs, says, “Thank you,” then looks to the sky: “Thank you, God!” But it’s well known. When she was 17, at a party, she ran toward a sliding door she thought was open and crashed straight through it. Her right leg went through the pane; the falling glass came down on it like a guillotine, severing an artery and some tendons. At first, she was merely embarrassed—she told the band to keep playing—until she looked down to see her leg squirting everywhere. She lost an enormous amount of blood and nearly the leg itself, underwent skin grafts, and spent almost two months in the hospital. No more skates.

She enrolled at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1978 and studied theater history. Paul Newman, a Kenyon alumnus, had returned to direct a play inaugurating a new theater on campus. “Incredibly handsome and just divine” is the way Janney describes him. “A true movie star.” She was cast and became friendly with Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward. They encouraged her to pursue acting professionally. She moved to New York to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse actor’s conservatory in 1982.

What followed was considerably less glamorous: a decade and a half as a jobbing actress, doing tiny Off Off Broadway productions—“booger theater” is how she refers to it—while scooping ice cream in SoHo and working at a recording studio as she moved from apartment to apartment. “There were plenty of tears on the subway,” she says. At one point, she became so convinced she should quit that she submitted herself to three days of aptitude testing, only to be told the career that best suited her: systems analyst.

Woodward would bring Janney into the Actors Group of New York—“a wonderful acronym,” Janney notes: AGONY—which helped her secure representation. “Representation was always so hard. No one will come see you if you don’t have an agent, but you can’t get anyone to see you. It’s a Catch-22,” she says. “I got a manager, and things started working for me because of Joanne’s dedication and her generosity in spending time with a bunch of out-of-work, nobody actors.”

Newman was like a father figure. “He would say I had one favor, which I could cash in for anything,” she says. “But I never used it, because I liked [having] it. I had a friend who’d always have a Valium in her pocket but never take it. She’d say, ‘Just because I know it’s there, I feel better.’ That’s how I felt about Paul Newman.”

In 1996, Janney won a role in a Broadway production of the Noel Coward comedy Present Laughter. She was in her mid-30s at the time. After years of working, it was her breakthrough. “Other than playing Ginger on Guiding Light, the soap opera,” she corrects. “I played a maid that wasn’t good at her job. I gave her a Brooklyn accent, which probably wasn’t a good idea. But I could pay my rent.”

Aaron Sorkin brought Janney in to audition for The West Wing after seeing her in Mike Nichols’s political satire Primary Colors. The show, which premiered in 1999, when she was almost 40, changed everything. She won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in the first season. “It was pretty spectacular because it was my first time being nominated—and unexpected. Who I thought should win was Nancy Marchand, who was in The Sopranos and had recently passed,” she says. “Then they called my name, and I felt guilty and I felt excited all at the same time.”

Tomorrow, Janney and her castmates in Other Desert Cities are back in rehearsals. It’s Louis-Dreyfus’s Broadway debut; everyone is wondering how their costar Joe Keery, of Stranger Things fame—he just finished a tour with his solo musical project, Djo—will affect the median age of the audience. “My entrance is something that’s scaring me right now,” Janney says. “I have to just come in and just own that space in a really wild way.” In the script, I was amused by a two-word description of her character’s vibe during the aforementioned scene: a mess. “She’s not afraid to hold the floor, hold the room, walk in, and own it.”

Turns out, Janney may not need a therapist. Playing these kinds of roles lets her work out a lot of things on her own. “I feel excited to get to say the things that C.J. Cregg got to say, the things that Grace Penn gets to say,” she says. Her character in Other Desert Cities is a truth teller. “It’s really empowering for me. I love it because I don’t feel comfortable doing that. I identify with those kinds of women because I feel like I should be that kind of woman,” she explains. “That’s who I was meant to be.”