Alex Borstein gives Lois Griffin a nasal patience that gives way about once an episode, and the giving way is where the laughs are. She has built a career in sketch, animation and live action on knowing exactly when to let go.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to Lois Griffin for a minute before anything happens. Alex Borstein pitches her nasal and level, the sound of a woman who has explained the same thing to the same husband for years and expects to explain it again tomorrow. Then, roughly once an episode, the level breaks, and the voice goes up into a shriek or down into something flat and dangerous. Borstein has said of where the sound came from: "The voice that I was doing was this very slow, very methodical sounding and annoying thing, and it was just fresh in my mind." Slow and annoying is the joke; the break is the punchline.
She came up through improvisation at ACME Comedy Theatre and through writing for animated series, and joined MADtv in 1997 as a performer and writer. Family Guy followed in 1999, and she has written and produced on Seth MacFarlane's series as well as voicing Lois, Tricia Takanawa, Loretta Brown and Barbara Pewterschmidt. The programme was cancelled twice before it came back in 2005, so a fair part of her working life has been spent on a show that was officially dead. Live action arrived in smaller pieces: Sally in Catwoman (2004), a run on Gilmore Girls, then the lead in Getting On from 2013 to 2015 and Susie Myerson in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from 2017 to 2023.
The animation is where we can judge her, and the judgement is good. Of the Griffins, Lois is the hardest to voice, because she is the one who has to be sane, and sane is rarely funny. Borstein makes her funny by rationing the break. We laughed harder than the line deserved the first time Lois turned on Peter, and it was because the patience had been held so long and so evenly that the crack landed like a dropped plate. In a programme that cuts away from any scene the moment it threatens to become dull, hers is one of the few performances that earns its laugh by staying put.
On film she has had less luck. Catwoman is a poor picture and Sally is a small part; nothing in it tells you what she can do. Television has served her better. In live action she plays tough, no-nonsense women, and the largest of them, Susie Myerson, was written by Amy Sherman-Palladino, who had already used her on Gilmore Girls and Bunheads. We have not reviewed Maisel and will not judge it here, except to note that Susie is written to be no-nonsense from the start, which is the side of Lois that Borstein usually has to keep in reserve.
If you want to know what she does, start where you cannot see her. The years spent as the one adult in a house that never listens to her are still the fullest record of what she can do, and the trick has not worn out.
Biography
Alex Borstein is an American actress, voice actress, writer and comedian. She is best known for voicing Lois Griffin and other characters on the animated series Family Guy (1999–) and for her work as a cast member on the sketch comedy series MADtv (1997–2002).
Borstein was born on 15 February 1971 in Highland Park, Illinois. She graduated from San Francisco State University, where she studied rhetoric, and trained in improvisational comedy at the ACME Comedy Theatre in Los Angeles. She began her career writing and voicing characters for animated series including Casper and Pinky and the Brain, before joining MADtv.
Her film credits include Sally in Catwoman (2004), roles in Bad Santa (2003) and The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003), and voice work in Ted (2012) and The Bad Guys (2022). She has also appeared in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–2023) and written episodes of Shameless (2011) and Family Guy.
