‘It’s Coming Out of Me Like Lava!’: 15 Trivia Tidbits About Melissa McCarthy on Her Birthday
She’s played a CIA agent who will absolutely kick ass without even trying. She’s performed one of the funniest gross-out scenes involving food poisoning ever. She’s been a Ghostbuster, a fraudulent writer, and one of the most iconic Disney villains on screen, and still, it feels like Melissa McCarthy is just getting started. The Groundlings alumna has proven not only to be a bankable comedy star but also the versatility to command the screen in other genres. On her birthday, let’s dive into some trivia about her Goth background and that time she played one of the best characters SNL has ever delivered…
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She Had a Goth Awakening in The ‘80s
McCarthy grew up on a corn and soybean farm in Plainfield, Illinois, and she’s said that her younger years were overwhelmingly boring. That is until she went to her first Goth bar in Chicago in the ’80s. “It broke my brain,” she told The Guardian. She immediately dyed her hair black and blue and started to dress differently, saying it was her first taste at playing around with and transforming into characters. “I remember being like, ‘This is the single greatest thing I’ve ever done’ — seeing who else I could be, and how that changed how people perceived me. But,” she added, “the second I opened my mouth, the jig was up because they were like, ‘Ah, it’s only Missy McCarthy.’”
She Was in ‘The Life of David Gale’
Universal Pictures
Folks and fans alike might not remember that before she became the comedy goof we know her to be, McCarthy had a supporting role in the 2003 thriller The Life of David Gale. McCarthy played “Nico the Goth Girl,” the tour guide of the “murder house” in the movie.
McCarthy and Her Husband Wrote ‘Tammy’ in Their Car
McCarthy explained that when she and her husband, Ben Falcone, started working from home early in their careers, they didn’t have any proper space to be productive. “When we started, we didn’t have an office, and we couldn’t work in the house,” she explained. “So we basically wrote the movie Tammy in our car on napkins and the kids’ weird unicorn stationery.” They eventually bought a Spanish colonial close to their home and turned it into their work office.
She’s Won an Emmy For ‘SNL’
While never an SNL cast member, McCarthy did kick off a string of guest appearances in 2017 as former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Her portrayal of Spicer was so good that it won her an Emmy award. “My friend Kent Sublette, one of the head writers at SNL, he called and said, ‘Would you ever come in and do Spicer? I wrote something that I think you can play,’” McCarthy explained to NPR. “And I was like, ‘What the what? I can’t play him. I don’t do impersonations. I’m not a man. I have no interest. It’s not in my wheelhouse.’ Then, I believe the next day, I saw another rather insane press conference (with Spicer), where I thought, ‘Well, this is weirder than anything I could actually do. We can’t even match it on SNL. It’s so absurd. Okay, I’m going to come in and read it and talk to you guys about it.’”
She Almost Ditched Her ‘Bridesmaids’ Audition
McCarthy, who had been playing Sookie on Gilmore Girls and had just gotten the lead in Mike & Molly, said that she was looking for more in her career when the Bridesmaids audition came along. She told Rolling Stone, however, that she almost chickened out on audition day due to her nerves. “Yeah, I almost didn’t do it, but then I said screw it, pulled my hair back, didn’t wear any makeup and went in.”
McCarthy added that she came up with the dolphin bit during her improv audition with Kristen Wiig and that it was much more sexual than what made it into the movie. The actress berated herself while driving home afterward, thinking, “Well, you dumbass, you did it; you fucked that up. There’s not one thing you could have done to seem any stranger. Sex with a dolphin? Handplay with a dolphin! You just could not have been any weirder.”
The Pandemic Helped Her Understand Ursula From ‘The Little Mermaid’
McCarthy fought to get the part of the delicious villain in Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. “Having just gone through COVID, I was like, aha, this is a character who has been in isolation for long enough that she is not in the healthiest mental state,” she said during her interview with The Guardian. “I started to love her in a whole new way. And she’s also been alone for years with two eels? She’s not solid on her tentacles, so to speak.”
She Loves Renovations and Interior Design
So much so that she stars in a home renovation series called The Great Giveback with Melissa McCarthy and Jenna Perusich. It also appears that her oldest daughter shares her passion. “Ben walked in, and Viv and I were trying out a new bedspread I got,” she once shared, “and Viv’s like (thoughtfully), ‘I just think it might compete with the headboard.’ And I literally got weird; I got goosebumps. Ben just turned around and went, ‘Oh my God, I can’t have two of you.’ This must be what a Texas dad feels like when his boy plays quarterback.”
She Once Had a Physical Reaction to a Hostile Movie Set Environment
“I did work for someone once who ran such a volatile, hostile set that it made me physically ill,” McCarthy revealed to The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. “My eyes were swelling up; I was absorbing all of this nuttiness,” she recalled. “There were people weeping, visibly so upset by this one person.” She added that “to get to me, this person would fire people I loved, which kept me quiet. It was very effective.” The horrid experience made her realize early on that she didn’t want to operate like that in Hollywood. “One day, I was like, ‘It stops today!’ I just kept saying to them, it stops, it stops. And I know now I’ll never keep quiet again.”
The Thing That Makes Her Uncomfortable When Acting
20th Century Studios
“I feel awkward a little more than I put out,” she admitted to Rolling Stone. “Like, sometimes I just don’t know what to do or where to put my hands. That’s why I like pockets in my dresses. They give you somewhere to put your hands. They’re like a security blanket.”
Her Debut Movie
McCarthy made her feature film debut in 1999 with a minor part in Go as Sandra, Jimmy’s goofy sister.
She Wants to Star in a ‘Ma’ Sequel With Octavia Spencer
McCarthy told Entertainment Weekly that she would love to reunite with her Thunder Force co-star to do a sequel to Spencer’s 2019 psychological thriller, Ma. “I would do anything with Octavia, for Octavia, in the ballpark of Octavia, if there’s a picture of Octavia in the background at one point in the script — I would do anything for that glorious woman,” McCarthy answered when asked whether she would “avenge Ma’s death” in the rumored sequel (with Spencer returning). “She’s a better person, she’s the funniest human I know, she’s the kindest, smartest person I know. We’ve been friends for over 25 years.”
She Loves Trying to Get Rose Byrne to Break Character
Mcarthy and Byrne first worked together on Bridesmaids and later teamed up as one of the many hilarious duos in the 2015 action comedy Spy. “She’s so sweet, and she’s so beautiful that it’s really fun to try to verbally destroy her,” McCarthy said about acting opposite Byrne. “When we did Bridesmaids, I really, really always went after Rose because she’s a big laugher, and she’s also a terrible laugher because she will just completely break down in a scene. Fully, out loud, shoulders shaking. We’re like, ‘Rose, you know we’re on camera?’”
She Used to Perform As a Drag Queen
Before joining the Groundlings and kickstarting her career, McCarthy studied fashion in New York, where she would do her first stand-up as Miss Y, a drag queen who liked to live large. “It was me there with my lovely gay guy friends, and I was dressed like a big old drag queen,” McCarthy said during her Rolling Stone interview. “I had a gold lamé swing coat on, a huge wig, big eyelashes. I talked about being incredibly wealthy and beautiful and living extravagantly, and the first night worked great. It was such a happy, good feeling, and it gave me such confidence.”
When anti-drag legislation started popping up in the United States earlier this year, she posted her support for the right to drag. “I hate any kind of injustice,” she told The Guardian. “And people attacking someone for just trying to be who they truly are. What does it matter to them? Do no harm, be kind – if everyone just followed those two rules, we’d be fine.”
McCarthy and Barbra Streisand Recorded a Song Together
In 2016, McCarthy got to record “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” with Barbra Streisand. The song is included in Streisand’s album, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, which also features tunes sung by Patrick Wilson, Chris Pine, Anne Hathaway, and Jamie Foxx.
On That Famous Scene in ‘Bridesmaids’
“The intention was never ever to be like, ‘Let’s do this gross thing and let’s make it gross,’” McCarthy said about the food poisoning scene in her interview with NPR. “It was more for us to study in the worst thing in the world is happening to you. What is the embarrassment level, and what is the shame level? I’m not one for bathroom humor or stuff like that. I think sometimes there’s that horrible and wonderful feeling you get where you’re so embarrassed for the character, and I think that’s showing the character kind of going through such a vulnerable humiliation that we can all laugh at it because, in some way, we’ve all done it: We’ve all fallen, said the wrong thing, had some shaming thing done, and I think at least for myself, that was the connection, too. That’s a real human experience, even if that particular action hasn’t happened to most people.”
