A high nasal voice, a sharp-tongued socialite who says the unforgivable thing and looks pleased about it, and a gift for giving unlikable people a child's delight in themselves. Mullally built a reputation on one character and has spent the years since finding smaller rooms for the same trick.
Fi1m perspective
The voice comes first, high and nasal and not the one she was born with. Mullally found it after the Will & Grace pilot, and the character came with it: Karen Walker, a sharp-tongued socialite who says the unforgivable thing and then looks pleased, as if she had passed someone the salt. What makes it work is not the cruelty but the joy underneath. Mullally gives unlikable women a child's delight in their own behaviour, and she does it with the whole body, a shoulder, a wrist, the way she edges away from someone along a seat. Her own account of how Karen began is telling: she decided Karen would not want to sit next to the woman beside her and started scooting away, and the writers saw it and ran over with a couple of lines.
The physical instinct was trained. She began ballet at six, and it shows in the way she holds a pose a beat longer than a sitcom scene needs. Before television found her she was on Broadway, in Grease in 1994 and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1995 opposite Matthew Broderick. After Will & Grace ended its first run in 2006 she went back to the stage for Young Frankenstein in 2007 and to cabaret with the band Nancy and Beth. A daytime talk show in 2006 lasted a season. On screen she has since mostly taken recurring parts: Tammy Two on Parks and Recreation from 2009, the wildly inappropriate ex-wife of Ron Swanson, and Lydia Dunfree on Party Down.
Party Down is where we have watched her most closely, and it shows both the gift and its limit. Mullally arrived in the second season, after Jane Lynch left, as a stage mother from the suburbs. She is good. She plays Lydia's hope for her daughter straight, which is braver than playing it for laughs. But Party Down runs on humiliation, and the show could not quite bring itself to humiliate her. We liked Lydia more than we wanted to, and we noticed the episodes around her going soft because of it; the meanness that made the first season sting kept flinching. When the series returned in 2023 she was back, and the problem had not gone away.
That is the trade. Give Mullally someone the script has agreed to despise and she will make them a pleasure to watch without once asking for sympathy. Give her someone the script already pities and she will be kind to them, and kindness is not what she is for. She has said that playing Karen was so satisfying it nearly cured her of acting. It did not, but it did set the terms, and the best of what she has done since is the work that dares to be as unkind to her as that show was.
Biography
Megan Mullally is an American actress. Born in Los Angeles, she studied at Northwestern University before moving to Los Angeles in 1985. She began her career in Chicago theatre and made her Broadway debut in the 1994 revival of Grease.
She is best known for playing Karen Walker in the sitcom Will & Grace (1998–2006, 2017–2020), for which she won two Primetime Emmy Awards. Other notable television roles include Lydia Dunfree in Party Down (2009–2023) and recurring appearances as Tammy Swanson II in Parks and Recreation (2009–2015, 2020). Film credits include Mrs. Sestero in The Disaster Artist (2017). She has also worked extensively in voice acting and hosted The Megan Mullally Show (2006–2007).
Mullally married actor Nick Offerman in 2003; the couple met while performing in a play together in 2000.
