Why A Beastie Boy Told Bridget Everett To Embrace The Silly

Bridget Everett — New York's queen of ribald comedy, alt.cabaret and physical theatre — premiered in Australia at 2011's Adelaide Cabaret Festival in the ensemble production Our Hit Parade. "It wasn't what I was expecting," Everett, fighting a virus, recalls cautiously. "I think the Cabaret Festival is a little more conservative and I'm a real wild person on stage [laughs]... But mostly Adelaide was a little more country than I was expecting." Now an even bigger star, Everett will make her Oz solo debut at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival with Pound It ("I'm really excited!").

"Lena's incredibly smart. She was not feeling all that great, and her uncle was dying, but she's a total pro."

Everett knows all about "small towns", hailing from Manhattan, Kansas, its history entwined with the Civil War. "I have a feeling that a lotta people I grew up with are voting for Donald Trump," Everett says (she wryly calls Trump "a wrecking ball, but not the right kind of wrecking ball"). The youngest of six, Everett was "a wild kid". "By the time I came along, my mom was just like, 'Ah, do whatever you want'." Though she had friends in 'the Little Apple', Everett says, "I could not wait to get out." This music teacher's daughter studied opera at Arizona State University on a scholarship. She eventually moved to NY with high career hopes, but struggled. Yet Everett found fresh inspiration in the city's counter-cultural cabaret scene, blossoming into a punk Bette Midler.

Bonding with Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz while playing communal softball, she formed the band The Tender Moments. Horovitz guided an album, Pound It, encompassing Everett's infamous Titties. "He really encouraged me to embrace the things that I think are funny and kind of silly. He's like, 'Hey, listen, The Beastie Boys — 'silly' worked really well for us; it's gonna work great for you.' And he was right."

In the interim, Everett began to land acting roles, cameoing in 2008's Sex And The City movie. She befriended Amy Schumer en route to Montreal's Just For Laughs, the comedian today her champion. Everett appeared on Inside Amy Schumer, leading to parts in Trainwreck and Lena Dunham's Girls — the latter of which was "really fun", according to Everett. Dunham allowed Everett to "improvise". "Lena's incredibly smart. She was not feeling all that great, and her uncle was dying, but she's a total pro."

In the upcoming indie rom-com Permission, Everett plays the lesbian prospective mother-in-law of Dan Stevens — the Brit actor best known as Downton Abbey's Matthew Crawley. "We'll be doing some scenes together and his eyes — it's like a little kiddie pool that's dancing in the sun, they're just really beautiful," she laughs. "He's so handsome!" When Stevens passed by Everett's show, her celebrity pals swooned.

Astonishingly, Everett only quit her day job in 2014. "I waited tables for 25 years, so it felt like a real victory! It was really intense, to let that go. I think I probably held on a little bit longer 'cause there's that comfort in knowing that you always have a job to go to — just in case... But, at some point, you just have to take a chance on yourself and cut the string, and that's what I did and, ever since I did that, things have really taken off."