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Super Bowl MVP: Jane Lynch talks 'Glee' and her memoir

By April MacIntyre Feb 7, 2011, 0:39 GMT

01/30/2011 - Jane Lynch - 17th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards - Arrivals - The Shrine Auditorium - Los Angeles, CA, USA © Bob Charlotte / PR Photos

Super Bowl Sunday sees Gridiron showdown between the Steelers and the Packers but our MVP is Jane Lynch from "Glee" and many other films we adore.

Lynch has a book coming, a painfully honest memoir, and is continuing her breakout starring role as Sue Sylvester, the coach of McKinley High who has a bee in her bonnet for the Glee club.

Monsters and Critics joined other journalists on a phone conference call for the Super Bowl "Glee" episode, with Sue Sylvester herself: Jane Lynch.  The Super Bowl episode, airs Sunday, February 6th at 7:30 pm PST, 10:30 pm EST. 

On Sue in Glee are influencing young women today the way Burnett influenced Jane:

J. Lynch Oh, well that’s an interesting question.  I hope that girls see what’s possible for them.  That they don’t have to play a stereotype, and what is Sue is not a stereotype.  But basically, maybe we all are.  I guess we all start that way and we hope to humanize them.  But, I also see that you don’t have to be anything anybody tells you that you have to be.  You can find these really crazy characters out there and that there’s more possible for you than maybe you’re led to believe.

On the Super Bowl's masculine nature and Glee's gay-centric limits, and when these two things can actually come together and work:

J. Lynch Well that’s funny, I never looked it that way, but you’re absolutely right.  It all remains to be seen, but I think it’s wonderful that the Super Bowl, football is very masculine and basically, to me, anyway, a metaphor for war.  You’ve got your air game and your ground game.  And then you’ve got these “light in your loafers” guys, and I’m talking about even the straight guys, singing and dancing.  I think it’s a terrific world we live in and I love seeing these two things come together.

On one juicy little tidbit from her book:

J. Lynch Well basically, how it came together is I’ve been giving speeches at gay banquets – and not even just gay – but people wanting to know more about it.  I started writing things down and I was telling a friend about it, she’s a writer, and she said, “There’s a book in there.”  So I kind of sat down and looked at it, and I thought, you know what, there is a book in there. 

I think a little tidbit I can give you is I grew up basically with everything handed to me.  Not my career.  I worked for that, but I had a really good family, I was brought up with a lot of love, but still I chose time after time after time to suffer over so much.  And that mental component of suffering is the thing I think, if I can look back on my life, is a choice.  And to this day I still would choose maybe the angst over something when I really don’t have to.  And how to kind of …your life slow.   I know it sounds new-agy and granoli, but it’s truly what I’ve come up with that you really need to trust that you’re on your own path and as long as you stay true to it and you show up; showing up is 90% of it.  So basically that’s kind of what I’m saying.

On Sue Sylvester possibly being meaner than usual on Super Bowl Sunday? 

J. Lynch She does.  We’re kind of doing an episode of Glee that is on steroids and writ large.  Sue Sylvester is a little bored with her routine, even though she has kids riding around on BMX bikes and jumping through fire.  And this one routine with Katy Perry’s California Girls she wants to top herself, so she finds out there’s a human cannon in town, she buys it and wants to shoot Britney out of it.  …doesn’t allow it…  And she has a hissy fit.  She has two hissy fits where she just rips two rooms apart.  So it was definitely Sue Sylvester on the war path.

On being surprised by her character's story arc:

J. Lynch Well, of course the addition of my sister, having a sister with Down’s Syndrome took me completely by surprise.  Carol Burnett coming on as my Nazi hunter mother took me by surprise and I was also very surprised when I said my mother was a famous Nazi hunter that that was true.  It turns out that there’s so many things that I’ve said that I’m like, yeah, sure, I smoked out Noriega with Special Forces.  And I’m sure we’ll do an episode where maybe an old war buddy of mine comes back and indeed that was true, too.

On what was her favorite evil scheme that Sue has ever pulled?

J. Lynch Let’s see, oh, I think when she forced Schuster to get the monkey …and she turned a sneezing …right into his face.  Oh no, she didn’t do that.  She did that to Figgins to get him sick.  I didn’t have anything to do with getting, but getting Figgins sick so I could become the principal.

On which kind of episode do you think Glee does best and her character is showcased best? 

J. Lynch I think what I love about this show, and maybe with the exception of a couple every episode is kind of a big deal; they do something outrageous or a song or someone has an outrageous moment.  I look forward to getting the script all the time and these shows, where we’re doing Britney or Madonna or Super Bowl where it’s special, they’re very fun as well and there’s always a lot of anticipation. 

I know they have a lot of production meetings for certain songs and certain episodes are heavier than others in terms of preproduction, but I like them all.  I really don’t feel like we have a run, maybe we’ve had two run-of-the-mill that were like, ah, but I can’t even think of what they were.  And you know what?  I wouldn’t tell you.

On a love line for Sue in this episode?  Also, who was Jane's own first love?

J. Lynch I am not in that next episode, so I will be finding no love.  I’m on the bench, to use a football metaphor, for that next Valentine’s episode.  And …if I take Donovan.  My first love, like you mean in my head or actual?  My first love in my head, believe it or not, was Ron Howard. 

On what we will see coming up for Sue and for Glee in the second half of the season?

J. Lynch Let’s see, we’ve done a couple more after the Super Bowl episode.  Sue has a devastating summer, suffers a devastating loss with her …after the Super Bowl episode and she becomes very, very depressed and she becomes kind of dangerously depressed, where she’s more violent than usual.  They get her to join the Glee Club to lift her spirits and they find that raising her voice in song kind of lifts her and she gets out of her depression.  So I’m actually in the Glee Club for a while.

On what Glee has done for her career: 

J. Lynch Well, I found out like in the middle of the first season that we have employment for three seasons, so that has never happened to me before, so that is different and that is wonderful to know that I will be employed, barring a big catastrophe, for the foreseeable future.  And I haven’t had that in my life and it’s a huge psychological relief. 

Then I’ll probably go back to job hunting, like I always do.  I think I’m starting to become more popular and the character has become iconic.

On what the love child of Sue Sylvester and Opie be like:

J. Lynch Oh my God, schizophrenic. 

On the show getting too farfetched?

J. Lynch Every script I read I go, “You’ve got to be kidding.”  And that’s why I’m glad I’m not writing the show.  It always goes too far.  It’s always ridiculous.  Some of the things that I do, look at how mean I get and how everybody lets me get away with it, it’s all ridiculous and I love it, and I’m glad I’m not writing it.  Because I would have made it more realistic and I would have given her kind of altruistic motivations.  It’s a good thing I’m not writing television.  Let’s just put it that way.

On her Super Bowl pick:

J. Lynch You know what, people have asked me that and I say Green Bay because I’m from the Midwest.  But really, I don’t care.  I hope somebody wins and is happy about it.

On the best piece of advice that you could offer your 17-year-old self?

J. Lynch Oh, wasn’t that sweet?  I actually took that premise and wrote a little something just the other day.  I would tell myself, if I could go back to myself, to not suffer.  To don’t sweat it. Don’t try to control things and just let your life happen.  Show up, do your best everywhere you go, but there’s no reason to beat up on yourself.  That’s what I would say.

On how she will celebrate the Super Bowl:

J. Lynch I won’t be going to the Super Bowl, I won’t be drinking and I rarely watch it, but I’ll watch it this year, just cause, and we’re on after it. 

On where she is going with her book:

J. Lynch It’s really not deep dark.  Either you read it differently or it was misleading.  Basically what I’m going to do is, of course I have my own deep, dark, but I guess the message coming out of it is that it’s all a choice on whether you suffer through your life or if you, because the same things are going to happen to you for the most part.  You’re going, but do you have to have that mental component of suffering, and that’s kind of the point of the whole thing.  I mean, I definitely was depressed and I thought everything was dark and hopeless, but that was a point of view that I didn’t have to have.

On what she has learned in her memoir, looking back on it now?

J. Lynch Yes, I did.  In fact, that’s kind of how I came up with the title.  I went through my scrapbook, I went through photographs, and as I’m telling these stories, I’d just get that down with a tape recorder and kind of spoke all of this stuff.  I started to see, first of all, it’s a little more interesting than I thought it was and I also learned how I kind of made things much harder on myself than they needed to be.

On her favorite Sue one-liners: 

J. Lynch I love the monologue where I talk about the 1968 convention where Mayor Dailey punched his own wife in the face.  That was fun.  I like the one where I say, “Loving musical theater doesn’t make you gay, it just makes you awful.”  

On Katie Couric guest starring:

J. Lynch Yes, she was in the Super Bowl episode with us.  It was great.  Everybody that comes on set, they’re here because they love music and they love the idea of kind of ushering these kids through some of the toughest years of their life, hormonally or emotionally, with the power of music.  Gwenyth Paltrow is back.  She’s going to do a couple of episodes and she’s working with us this week, and she’s just the best. She’s great.  And she’s here because she wants to dance and sing and put a good message out to the kids.

On Sue's master plan for Glee club:

J. Lynch The thing I keep coming back to Sue that motivates all these different ways she goes after them is that she just wants an enemy. She’s looking for the next fight.  And sometimes it’s that fight to get these people to stand up for themselves instead of being so weak and wussy.  And other times it’s, yes, to destroy them because they threaten her spotlight in the Cheerios that she works so hard to make a world-class cheerleading squad and she doesn’t want anything in their light.  But I think she’s always looking for a formidable enemy.

I think she also has a fondness for Will and for who he is and how he’s genuinely just a good person.   In moments she hates him for it and other moments she has great admiration for him. 

On Sue Sylvester's multi-faceted personality:

J. Lynch I love when I get an equal dose. I like to get the variety.  I like the two, for Sue Sylvester to be firing on all cylinders.  I don’t like to stick to one thing for too long and the writers make sure of that, which is great. 

I can tie them all together.  She’s a human being.  She has all different colors to her.  But as long as I keep it rooted in some truth, anything really can work.  I have to keep it as truthful as possible at any given moment, whether I’m ranting or I’m helping somebody out.

On bigger fish for Sue Sylvester to fry, outside of McKinley High:

J. Lynch That could happen, but I think it is she wants to stay the big fish in a small pond.  Remember the last episode of the first season, Olivia Newton John and Josh Grobin are the celebrity judges with me and they say to me, “We’re flying back to LA tonight first class.  Where are you going?”  And the thing is that Sue will never be flying first class and she will never go to LA.  I think she has grand ambitions, but I think she knows that she will never be anything bigger than a Lime, Ohio coach and a terror at this high school.

On not being a fan of Twitter

J. Lynch Oh, I won’t be getting on Twitter because I really don’t understand it.  I mean, I understand it, but it’s too overwhelming.  And what else do you want me to do, say something to fans?  Keep watching Glee.

On working with Lauren: 

J. Lynch Lauren actually played my assistant.  Robin Trothe plays my sister.  They both have Down’s Syndrome.  Robin plays Jean and she is my sister and she lives in a home.  And Lauren Potter is my assistant, my field lieutenant. 
She has really good comedic timing.  She understands …  Nothing gets by her.  And she daily has a crush, a severe crush on some boy where she ends up singing, like…John Stamos.  She says we have to call her Mrs. John Stamos.  She finally gets somebody she’s in love with.

On the need to feel competitive considering the copycat shows coming to emulate Glee:

J. Lynch No.  We’re too busy to care what anybody else is doing, but it’s flattering and it sounds like a show I would like to watch.