(http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6698667/wings-of-a-dragon-with-megan-mullally-and-nick-offerman)

She’s back on “Happy Endings” tonight (Wed., Jan. 11, 9:31 p.m. EST on ABC), and we’ve got an exclusive sneak peek above at what Dana’s up to. When she last visited earlier this season, she was going through a break-up, and the Hartz ladies did a pretty fabulous duet of “Torn.” At the time, Mullally told us she’d love to come back for more “Happy Endings”: “I feel like it’s been one of the funniest things I’ve done in a while.” Now it’s happening, and Dana’s found a new man — Dave’s (Zach Knighton) dad, played by Michael McKean. Awkward much? Maybe it’d be better to sing about it.

I caught up with Mullally at the Television Critics Association winter press tour — where she was promoting her new stint on Fox’s “Breaking In” — to talk all about her song-filled return, and whether or not her new job will keep her from coming back to “Happy Endings” for more.

VIDEO: (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/11/megan-mullally-happy-endings-exclusive-video_n_1197792.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003) NOT AVAILABLE OUTSIDE US

“Well the good news is, it’s Sony — it’s a Sony show, and so is ‘Happy Endings,’ so I think I’ve got that covered,” Mullally said. “I love doing ‘Happy Endings.’ It’s so much fun, and I love working with Casey. We have a chemistry like Sean Hayes and I had. We can read each other’s minds — like we can sing, and sing the same thing at the same time, and we’re just making it up. They wrote me the most amazing episode. I did another one [airing Jan. 11], and Casey and I, again, have a really funny little singing moment.”

Here’s ABC’s official description of the episode, “Meat the Parrots.”

Dave’s father, “Big” Dave (Michael McKean), comes to town to introduce his new girlfriend, who shockingly happens to be Penny’s mother, Dana (Megan Mullally). Penny couldn’t be more thrilled that her thrice divorced mother has a new man in her life, but Dave on the other hand reacts childishly to the news. Meanwhile Alex, who is feeling lonely at the shop, decides to adopt an adorable parrot that turns out to be not so charming, spewing nonstop racist and homophobic rhetoric. And Alex enlists Brad and Max’s help, as she is convinced the Chinese restaurant next door is a front for a brothel.

Executive producer Adam F. Goldberg decided to revamp the comedy a little– to reel it in for season two and focus these thirteen episodes on the inner workings of Contra Security and the team assembled there, rather than spend the full twenty-two minutes out in a new location, on a new case each time.

“Basically we just wanted to feel more like an office show, and I think that meant building more people into the office that could be funny. And one thing that, to me, was missing was a foil for Oz,” Goldberg shared with critics in Los Angeles.
And who do you get when you need a funny, smart actress who can come into a show and revitalize it in new ways? Megan Mullally, of course! Even though she has a million jobs (she guest stars on Parks and Recreation, Happy Endings, and soon Up All Night, in addition to co-starring in Childrens Hospital and appearing in the Party Down movie that John Enbom is currently writing), she was happy to move onto another comedy.

“There aren’t that many shows on network television that I find funny,” Mullally admitted. “If there’s a show that most of the people in the milieu think is funny, then say yes. I say yes a lot, you may have noticed.”

Perhaps the freedom to create the character along with Goldberg helped, too, though. Since the character was brand new, and Mullally is so trusted, Breaking In writers and producers are actually working with her to flesh out this woman.

Who is she? Well, she is the aforementioned foil to Oz (Slater), who “comes in and kind of takes over,” Mullally previewed.

“I’m the big conglomerate that takes over the small company [and] I’m adorkable,” she half-joked.

She’s fitting into the FOX family already, isn’t she?

Breaking In returns to FOX on March 6th at 8:30pm.

(http://www.examiner.com/tv-insider-in-los-angeles/fox-tca-talk-megan-mullally-and-adam-f-goldberg-preview-the-new-breaking-in)

The Party Down movie is a go.

After being canceled in 2010 and having hints of a film continuation dropped by series star Adam Scott, Megan Mullally confirmed the project was moving forward while addressing reporters at the Television Critics Association winter press tour.
“I will be doing the Party Down movie,” she said. “John [Enbom] is writing it right now.”
After the panel, where Mullally appeared alongside other actors and showrunners from Fox’s Wednesday comedy block, the newly minted Breaking In star relayed more details about the movie to a scrum of reporters.
The entire cast is coming back, with the possible exception of Jane Lynch, who she was not sure about. And she believes the story will pick up just where the second season finale left off.
Prior to Enbon fully fleshing out the script, Mullally says he turned in an outline that was “enthusiastically approved” by investors.
“I think we’re going to see Lydia’s ex-husband — Ed i think is name — who was really racist and a misogynist,” Mullally said of her character’s possible story in the film outing.
Party Down followed a hapless group of Los Angeles caterer-waiters and ran for 2 seasons and 20 episodes. It was created by Enbom, Veronica Mars scribe Rob Thomas, Dan Etheridge and Paul Rudd.
Mullally says filming will take place in the late spring or early summer.

(http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tca-party-down-movie-megan-mullally-279512)

On the wall over his desk hangs a picture of Northlight Theatre artistic director BJ Jones and his old pal, Megan Mullally.

It’s a publicity shot from the 1979 Chicago production of “Bagtime” a musical starring Jones as a Treasure Island bag boy. Mullally played the teenage runaway he beds.

Stare at the photo long enough and you realize there’s something positively striking about it.

The two actors gaze over their shoulders at the camera, their foreheads gently touching. Mullally, a Northwestern undergraduate who was 20 at the time, looks young and preppy as can be, with a curtain of long dark hair parted in the middle and pulled back with a headband. A Mona Lisa smile plays on her lips.

But it’s the expression in her eyes that draws you in — so ambiguously coy — and it’s hard to imagine that two decades later, the same woman would go on to play Karen Walker, the boozy, snarky, pill-popping socialite on “Will & Grace.”

“She was 20 years old going on 40,” Jones says of his then collegiate co-star. “I remember, after our first day of rehearsal, walking down the stairs of the theater and saying to her, `I got you, sister. You’re an old Broadway hoofer.’

Years before Mullally hit it big and won an Emmy in 2000 for her efforts on the NBC sitcom, she was just another actor plying her trade in Chicago. She returns Saturday to perform a benefit concert — yes, she sings, too, and quite well, at that — with her band, Supreme Music Program, to raise money for Northlight Theatre.

But, getting back to “Bagtime.”

“That was like the first real show I did in Chicago,” Mullally says, “and there’s actually a cool story about how I got cast.”

Chance meeting

In between her sophomore and junior years at Northwestern, Mullally was in a record store near campus, looking through the stacks.

“Some guy comes in,” she says, “and starts talking to the guy behind the register about how he was trying to cast this musical and he needed someone to play a 16-year-old runaway. And he says something about how he wished he could find the actress who played Anita in the Northwestern production of `West Side Story.’ And I stood up and was like, `Uh, that was me.’”

But Mullally had reservations about doing the show, directed by Bob Falls for Wisdom Bridge Theatre, a company no longer in existence. This, of course, was long before Falls became artistic director at the Goodman and started winning Tony awards.

“I was kind of skeptical about it,” Mullally says, “and then I went home and told my boyfriend, Brad Hall” — another Northwestern alum, now married to Julia Louis-Dreyfus — “and he was like, `You’ve got to do this!’ . . . But, I mean, I had never even heard of this theater, and the auditions were in this scary neighborhood. I thought it was creepy — I didn’t know if they were going to sell me into white slavery, or what.”
She did end up taking the role, but only after Falls told her, “I have never offered a part to anyone on the spot. Don’t you get it?”

The musical, inspired by a series of fictional newspaper columns by Paul Galloway and former Tribune columnist Bob Greene, had a long local run.

Full-time job

Based on that success, Mullally decided against returning to school, and began acting in Chicago theater fulltime, a span in her career she says she remembers “very vividly because it was a very formative time for me.”

She performed in numerous shows at Northlight, including a production of the sex farce, “What the Butler Saw,” with John Mahoney.

“We shared a dressing room,” Mullally says. “I liked John so much — I had a big crush on him — and I used to ask him to marry me all the time.”

This is just one of the many Chicago anecdotes Mullally happily shares during a recent phone interview from her home in Los Angeles.

Another is the “Risky Business” story. If things had turned out differently, Mullally might have gotten her first big Hollywood break back in 1983.

“I was still living in Chicago at time,” she says. “They flew me and [Steppenwolf ensemble member] Kevin Anderson out to L.A. It was my first screen test and it was a big deal for me.”

Mullally was up for the lead, opposite Anderson. But the studio had other ideas, and Rebecca De Mornay and Tom Cruise won the now iconic roles.

Mullally wasn’t left completely out in the cold. “They threw me in as a call girl,” she says, although “they cut the few lines that I had, so I ended up basically as an extra.”

Experiences like this are practically a showbiz cliche, but Mullally is philosophical about it.

“I wasn’t really ready,” she says. “I was 22 at the time and I had some insecurities. Had I gotten a big thing like [the movie], I might have self-destructed.”

This was also around the same time that the Steppenwolf Theatre Company emerged as a force to be reckoned with.

“They were a clique,” Mullally says of original members such as John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. “But that’s what made them cool, ya know? I mean the kind of theater they were doing was insane and electric.”

Though Mullally never performed in a Steppenwolf production, she spent many a night tossing back drinks with the ensemble.

“We always used to hang out at the Gaslight, across from the old Steppenwolf,” she says.

When talk at the bar turned to the subject of career aspirations, “everyone was anti-TV and anti-movies,” Mullally remembers. “I mean, that’s pretty funny. I laugh about Billy Petersen (the last name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text).”
Petersen, co-founder of another defunct Chicago troupe, Remains Theatre Ensemble, is now a full-fledged TV star thanks to his role on the CBS crime drama, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”

Mullally eventually left Chicago and moved to Los Angeles in 1985. But not before she was offered a part in “The Revenge of the Nerds.”

“I had been offered the role of the nerdy girl in that movie, and I remember standing at the bar with Terry Kinney and he was like, `Let me read the script.’ He took one look at the title and was like, `Pass.’”

Pass she did. “I remember the director was driving me around L.A. and he kind of swept his arm around and said, `Don’t you want all this?’ And I was like, `Not at the risk of being in a cheesy movie.’”

The actress, who turned 45 earlier this month, clearly still has a strong affection for Chicago. So much so that just this past year — just hours before the Emmy awards — she married local actor, Nick Offerman, one of Defiant Theatre’s founding members.

Listening to Mullally reminisce about her years in Chicago, its hard not to detect a wistful note.

“I miss that feeling of community,” she says.

Jones said he recently asked a mutual friend for Mullally’s cell phone number after not talking to her for years.

“When people get famous, you don’t want to bug them. But Megan is very approachable,” he says. “I called her up and it was like 1979 again . . . she’s just as comfortable [to talk to] as an old shoe.”

———-

Megan Mullally and her band, Supreme Music Program, perform a benefit concert Nov. 22 at 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. at Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie. Tickets to the 9 p.m. performance include a post-show reception with Mullally.

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

WE LOVE TO LAUGH.

And we love comedy. We love performing it. We love watching it. And more than anything we love the community that revolves around it.

RIOT will be a weekend long comedy festival to take place along an entire city block of downtown LA in an eclectic set of venues. This festival is an opportunity to showcase some of today’s best comedic talent in the country to a wider audience—providing mass exposure to a thriving alternative comedy scene.

With your help, we can put on the best comedy festival Los Angeles has ever had. The funds we’re asking for will be used to provide YOU, fellow comedy nerd, with the best experience possible. We’ll use initial funds for the venue deposits. Next, we’ll pay for vendors, rentals, equipment, staff, food and drink concessions, and security—every dollar you give to RIOT will go toward making this festival amazing.

RIOT LA debuts in the fall of 2012. Why are we starting so early, you ask? We’re very serious about making this dream a reality, and the one thing we refuse to have is a lack of organization. Organization takes time, which we’ve appropriately given ourselves, and money, which we’re hoping you give to us.

We’re still in the very early planning stages, but this a grassroots, brick-by-brick community project. That’s why we’re coming to you. We’re asking you to bring a brick. Help us build the festival from the ground up donating, backing and supporting RIOT. Thank you!

So how did this happen?

Over the past three years, our executive producer Abbey Londer has immersed herself in this vibrant, underground comedy scene. She’s had the good fortune to meet and work with some of the most talented comedians around, and has given her uncompromising energy and talent to this thriving community. Abbey gives creativity to the comedy scene by producing in unlikely venues, bringing a Do-It-Yourself approach to a very team spirited group of people. She started at a tiny Chinese restaurant—a little room with a lot of heart—bringing in over 200 of the best comedians from Late Night, HBO, Comedy Central and more in just one year. Recently she produced a show that took place in the warehouse district of downtown LA. The production wasn’t only about showcasing amazing comedians. It was about bringing together local artists and creating something that everyone could participate in. There was a ping-pong table, a live DJ, a homemade photo booth, an art exhibition featuring local LA artists, drink and food trucks—it was a celebration.

Our commitment to celebration and community is why we’ve created RIOT. Los Angeles is home to some of the best comedy in the country, and we want to share that with as many people as we can.

The inspiration for this festival came from a casual conversation between Abbey and a few like-minded friends, Jeff Wattenhofer and Chris Register. about recreating on a large scale all of that mirth and madness that was captured that night in downtown LA—which continues to bubble over in so many unlikely venues all over the city. Comedians, this community and Los Angeles not only needs this festival, it deserves this festival.

We don’t see RIOT as just another comedy festival. It’s a celebration of underground comedy and everything that makes the community surrounding it so unique.

GIMME THE GOODS!

RIOT has some pretty awesome stuff to give you! As you know, we’re all about community here, so we’ve asked local artists and friends of RIOT LA to create the designs for all our rad rewards!

Every backer who donates, no matter what the dollar amount, gets his or her name on our OFFICIAL BACKERS POSTER, designed by Landen Celano. It’s your way of stamping your name on this festival and our way of showing appreciation for your generous support. Brick by brick! *This poster is available on Kickstarter ONLY and will NOT be available for purchase at the festival!*

In “Meat the Parrots,” Penny couldn’t be more thrilled that her mother has a new man in her life, but Dave on the other hand reacts childishly to the news. Meanwhile Alex (Elisha Cuthbert), who is feeling lonely at the shop, decides to adopt an adorable parrot that turns out to be not so charming, spewing nonstop racist and homophobic rhetoric. And later Brad (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Max (Adam Pally)’s help is enlisted, as she is convinced the Chinese restaurant next door is a front for a brothel.

On the topic of sexual education, Mullally seemed a bit surprised when Offerman started talking about his sex ed in a parochial school. “She would bring porn magazines,” Offerman said of the nun who taught this eighth grade class.

“What?” Mullally laughed at hearing this strange detail. When Offerman continued, particularly talking about expanding his sexual education himself as he came into puberty more, Mullally finally cut him off. “That’s probably enough,” she said.

“I got a great education,” Offerman said in summation.

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