Being Malcolm's Mom
Originally printed in the Summer 2000 issue of the Insider
What kind of mom turns the kitchen sink sprayer on her kids to break up a fight, and threatens to smash the family TV with a mallet when her boys won't confess who's the culprit of their latest misdeed?
In the madcap world of "Malcolm in the Middle," the Fox network's smash-hit sitcom, it's all in a day's work for Lois, a.k.a. Jane Kaczmarek '79. The former UW-Madison theater major plays a mom who's struggling to raise four mischievous boys, hold down a job, and hold it all together without much help from her hands-off husband.
The comedy, which premiered in January, quickly became Fox's highest-rated production, and it's promising to breathe new life into the flagging sitcom genre. "The word on the street is that all the networks are developing these wacky family shows now, kind of using our show as a model," says Kaczmarek.
Malcolm, played by Frankie Muniz, has an older brother whose behavior has landed him in military school. This leaves Malcolm in the middle between his youngest brother, Dewey, who is "trapped somewhere between toddler and hamster," and his older brother, Reese, whose "fists work exactly twice as fast as his brain." Lois and her husband, Hal, are just trying to "hold on until the last one turns eighteen." The daily chaos of this quirky family is epitomized by an infamous scene where Lois shaves the hair on Hal's back at the breakfast table, and is punctuated by a mom so distracted that she's been known to answer the door several garments short of an outfit. But despite the disorganization and their mother's militant tactics, the kids know that they are loved.
The comedy's creator, Linwood Boomer, describes Kaczmarek as "the engine of the whole show." She and co-stars Muniz and Bryan Cranston (who plays Hal) were on the cover of TV Guide in March. And the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel featured Kaczmarek and her real-life spouse, Bradley Whitford, who has received his own critical acclaim for his role as Josh on NBC's "The West Wing," describing them as "TV's 'it' couple."
Some might be tempted to attribute the unexpected success of "Malcolm" entirely to the blessed absence of a laugh track, but it actually deviates from the standard formula in a number of ways. The scenes are shot like a movie instead of a sitcom, using a single-camera format instead of several cameras shooting a set.
This makes it more realistic, albeit more expensive to produce, at $1 million per episode. And we view the family through the eyes of ten-year-old Malcolm, who has just been discovered to have a genius IQ. Malcolm speaks in frequent asides directly to the audience, making them his confidante about the antics of his loopy family and the ignominy of having suddenly been transported to a class of brainy misfits.
"Also, you just know where you stand with these characters," Kaczmarek adds. "These characters are not the kind of people who sit down with their children and say, 'Honey, how do you feel about this?' Lois lays down the law, and I think there might be something comforting in seeing people who are just so deliberate in the choices they make with their kids."
Some might be tempted to attribute the unexpected success of "Malcolm" entirely to the blessed absence of a laugh track, but it actually deviates from the standard formula in a number of ways. The scenes are shot like a movie instead of a sitcom, using a single-camera format instead of several cameras shooting a set.
This makes it more realistic, albeit more expensive to produce, at $1 million per episode. And we view the family through the eyes of ten-year-old Malcolm, who has just been discovered to have a genius IQ. Malcolm speaks in frequent asides directly to the audience, making them his confidante about the antics of his loopy family and the ignominy of having suddenly been transported to a class of brainy misfits.
"Also, you just know where you stand with these characters," Kaczmarek adds. "These characters are not the kind of people who sit down with their children and say, 'Honey, how do you feel about this?' Lois lays down the law, and I think there might be something comforting in seeing people who are just so deliberate in the choices they make with their kids."
How does Kaczmarek leave her newly remodeled home, her young children, and her real life to transform herself into Lois? She laughs. "I actually think that because of all those things, the character I play is working very well." As if to prove her point, the actress's two-year-old, Frances, interrupts with a question. "Yeah, you can come to work with me today," says her mother, "but right now, I have to talk to someone on the phone, OK?" She appeals to the toddler to go play with her babysitter, and resumes her analysis of the character of Lois. "She is always in a hurry, and they don't have many resources. She doesn't have anyone helping her raise those kids, so she tends to be very chaotic and very determined as to what she has to get done and when. And I kind of feel that when I go to work: I want to get those scenes right, I want to do my job, and I want to do it as quickly as possible, because I just want to come home to my own kids and my own life. And I think it translates into an element of Lois that really works for that character."
Frances tugs at her again with another question. "Maybe I'll go upstairs," Kaczmarek says, adding in hushed tones, "I'm running away from my daughter." After a brief pause, she's back, and she says, "I'm in my husband's office that has a lock on the door." Going into her comedy voice, she intones, "Oooooh, much more pleasant."
Frances tugs at her again with another question. "Maybe I'll go upstairs," Kaczmarek says, adding in hushed tones, "I'm running away from my daughter." After a brief pause, she's back, and she says, "I'm in my husband's office that has a lock on the door." Going into her comedy voice, she intones, "Oooooh, much more pleasant."
That, she speculates, is why people are so attracted to the Midwest. "I mean, living in Los Angeles now, you know, one of the greatest calling cards you can have is being from the Midwest. People think that there's something almost magical about Midwesterners in that they're kind of practical, funny, hard-working, enthusiastic people who aren't full of a lot of baloney. So I love being from Wisconsin and being from Milwaukee, and I love telling people I am, because I get a lot of positive response from that."
Sure, Los Angeles can be kind of a cutthroat place for a nice Midwestern girl, but she credits Whitford, a Madison native, with helping to smooth the way. She met him in New York on a blind date. Although both had decided that they didn't want to date actors because they thought they were too "nutty," they agreed to let a friend fix them up on the basis of their common Badger heritage. "I honest-to-God on our first date asked him if he knew what a cheese curd was," says Kaczmarek, "and he did."
The two share a similar value system, she says, with family at the center of their lives. "Although we work with very hectic schedules, our number-one concern in our life is our kids and being together. You know, it sounds corny, but he'll come home from work, and he plays the viola and the guitar, and he takes it out and we sing folk songs with Frances, and she knows all the words to 'This Land Is My Land.' A lot of the glitter and appeal of L.A. isn't what we partake in."
Appropriately, Kaczmarek's role in "Malcolm" came about in a "crazy" way. She had told her agent that she didn't want to audition for the spring pilot season, preferring to concentrate on her daughter, her recurring role in "Felicity," and taking music history classes at UCLA (she's become a huge Beethoven fan). But midway through April, her agent called and said there was one pilot that was requesting to see her, and that she should "Read the script - just read the script," says Kazmarek. "I thought, 'I don't want to do a TV series,' but I read it, and I thought it was just so funny." The show, of course, was "Malcolm."
The two share a similar value system, she says, with family at the center of their lives. "Although we work with very hectic schedules, our number-one concern in our life is our kids and being together. You know, it sounds corny, but he'll come home from work, and he plays the viola and the guitar, and he takes it out and we sing folk songs with Frances, and she knows all the words to 'This Land Is My Land.' A lot of the glitter and appeal of L.A. isn't what we partake in."
Appropriately, Kaczmarek's role in "Malcolm" came about in a "crazy" way. She had told her agent that she didn't want to audition for the spring pilot season, preferring to concentrate on her daughter, her recurring role in "Felicity," and taking music history classes at UCLA (she's become a huge Beethoven fan). But midway through April, her agent called and said there was one pilot that was requesting to see her, and that she should "Read the script - just read the script," says Kazmarek. "I thought, 'I don't want to do a TV series,' but I read it, and I thought it was just so funny." The show, of course, was "Malcolm."
"If this kind of success had happened in my thirties or my twenties, when I was really hoping to have a big success, it would have been a much different thing," says Kaczmarek. "Because now my life is so focused on my kids and my husband and my family life, the show is like this wonderful ... hobby. It's not the be-all and end-all for me. It's this lovely little blessing that has happened in my life, as opposed to everything I've been living for."
Kaczmarek loves the character of Lois, and no, she didn't grow up with a mother like that - at least not entirely. "My mother is highly educated and a very classy, eloquent woman," she says. "But there is an element of Lois that reminds me of my mom, which is that she didn't have time to mess around. My mother raised four children with no help, as most of our mothers did. There's something about Lois that hearkens back to the fifties or sixties when women just raised kids, and nobody helped them, and they were always in a hurry. So this character comes very easily to me, because she's kind of a combination of a lot of those mothers that I remember in Milwaukee."
One of the things she loves about acting, Kaczmarek says - and this dates from her University of Wisconsin days - "is that you get to hang around with the greatest group of people. It's a lot of hard work, but it's also so much time spent with other people who are curious and intelligent, for the most part, and funny, and who are really committed to focusing their energy on creating something. And that's a really exciting group of people to be with." Some of her oldest and dearest friends are women she met in the theater department at Madison, she says, mentioning Marcie Freeman x'79, Tracy Gamble '82, and Nike Doukas '80.
Seventies alums may remember Kaczmarek from perfornances such as A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with the Madison Repertory Theatre, and Three Characters in Search of an Author, directed by theater professor Bob Skloot. Her favorite professor, Skloot was "funny, inspiring, and filled me with courage," Kaczmarek says. And this loyal WAA member has many other happy memories of Madison, including Plaza burgers, gyros, and feeling like Ali McGraw in Love Story while eating at the Ovens of Brittany on State Street, listening to Bach and watching the snow fall.
Seventies alums may remember Kaczmarek from perfornances such as A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with the Madison Repertory Theatre, and Three Characters in Search of an Author, directed by theater professor Bob Skloot. Her favorite professor, Skloot was "funny, inspiring, and filled me with courage," Kaczmarek says. And this loyal WAA member has many other happy memories of Madison, including Plaza burgers, gyros, and feeling like Ali McGraw in Love Story while eating at the Ovens of Brittany on State Street, listening to Bach and watching the snow fall.
Her idea of a good time would be to get "a great big, cold beer and sit on the Union Terrace and dream about the people and music that made the seventies such a marvelous time to be at the UW. The summers especially were magical - I'm still enchanted by the memory of folk dancing on Thursday nights around the fountain outside the library," she says.
How similar is her family to Malcolm's? The question generates peals of laughter. "My husband is much more hands-on," she says, "and I do tend to wear my clothes around the house a little bit more than Lois. And I'm very lucky that I have a lot more people helping me than Lois does. But I think I do tend to be very loud and rather opinionated, and I do have a very definite idea about the way children should behave, so I guess I am a little like Lois in that way."
But does she shave her legs in the car (with the seatbelt on) when she's running short of time? Rinsing her razor in her husband's cup of coffee because there's no water in the car?
"No, I don't think I would go that far," laughs Kaczmarek - but she admits to admiring Lois for doing it, "because she's so resourceful." In fact, says Kaczmarek, she insisted on wearing nylons under the shaving cream so her legs would look better, and she initially argued with her producer that in real life, she wouldn't shave her legs in the car, "because I would stay in the bathroom until they were shaved and let those kids wait for me." Lois would be proud.
But does she shave her legs in the car (with the seatbelt on) when she's running short of time? Rinsing her razor in her husband's cup of coffee because there's no water in the car?
"No, I don't think I would go that far," laughs Kaczmarek - but she admits to admiring Lois for doing it, "because she's so resourceful." In fact, says Kaczmarek, she insisted on wearing nylons under the shaving cream so her legs would look better, and she initially argued with her producer that in real life, she wouldn't shave her legs in the car, "because I would stay in the bathroom until they were shaved and let those kids wait for me." Lois would be proud.
