An interview with Renée Elise Goldsberry proved to be a fitting end to this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, which reflected on Chicago’s best picture victory nearly 20 years ago. While Goldsberry has yet to lead her own movie musical, she’s no stranger to a sing-along. The 50-year-old won a Tony for her performance as the never-satisfied Angelica in Broadway’s Hamilton and has earned raves for playing the theatrical Wickie Roy in Peacock’s Girls5eva.
Vanity Fair’s Hillary Busis spoke to Goldsberry via Zoom about how she acclimated herself to the late ‘90s and early aughts girl group environment created by Meredith Scardino and Tina Fey. According to the Tony winner, she only had to reach back as far as her career’s start for inspiration. “Well, one of the things I threw against the wall was just agreeing to be a part of a girl group that was trying to get signed to a record label,” Goldsberry recalled. “We were not successful, but we were fabulous.”
In other Little Gold Men happenings, Chris Murphy joined Richard Lawson, Katey Rich, and Joanna Robinson to honor the movie that sparked his love of the Oscars. The crew also brokedown the Daytime Emmy nominations before Richard previewed two of summer’s new releases—Cruella and A Quiet Place Part II. Then Katey spoke to Kathleen Turner about season 3 of The Kominsky Method, which is airing now on Netflix.
Give the episode above a listen, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. We’d also love to hear from you via text, which you can sign up for here.
Read a partial transcript of the Renée Elise Goldsberry interview below.
So did it feel difficult at all to kind of form that bond, especially with your three main co-stars because of pandemic restrictions or anything—because of not maybe being able to spend as much time together off set?
I think to have endurance in this business, I’ll actually quote Busy Phillips: “You have to be able to generate goodwill.” That’s the way she says it. So all of us, Paula (Pell), Busy, Sara (Bareilles), and I have been around a long time. And if there’s no story about us lingering somewhere that would make Tina Fey not want to call us, we probably have figured out how to generate goodwill. They’re all three really wonderful human beings—extremely talented, extremely accomplished, but really wonderful human beings that would have been a joy to work with, even if it was not a global pandemic. From the moment we met, we were madly in love with each other and the show isn’t shooting currently. And we are still on text every single day, celebrating every victory, crying together through everything that happens. You know, every challenge we will remain close. That’s the beautiful thing about this industry I found, though. I have these families that I’m in that are always there for you, like my Hamilton family.
Do you have a group text with each one, there’s a Hamilton one and them?
In the world that we live in, don’t you? We have so many group text families and they rally for the members of the family, no matter what they’re doing. If Jasmine Cephas-Jones gets an Emmy nomination and a win, we all feel like we just won. And if Lin-Manuel Miranda has a new movie coming out, In The Heights, we feel like, even though we’re not Anthony Ramos starring in the movie, we feel like we’re in it. That’s the way that so many people are in this business and it helps tremendously, not only professionally, but personally, to have those kinds of relationships always there for you.
That’s a great thing about Wickie too, is that she is this, like I said, kind of a larger than life character, but she’s not a jerk. Like, she’s not—she’s self-centered in an entertaining way, but not in an unpleasant way. And so, I just want us to talk to you more about kind of forming the character, like how you approached her?
I love that you just said that. Cause it really is a wonderful segway into talking about Wickie and the journey that she’s on. People ask me a lot: “What’s the difference between you and this character?” And there are some glaringly obvious differences, I hope.
Your house is not decorated in purple expensive.
And it’s not sliding down a hill. I think I innately understood the value of allies. I’m always showing up with a pretty tremendous learning curve in front of me. No matter what I’m doing, I feel like I’m surrounded by people that know a lot more than I do. So it’s always strategically important for me to make good friends so they help me out. Wickie didn’t figure that out the first time. Wickie is that person that didn’t get the memo. And she was always auditioning for her own stardom. She could not wait to break off. She was not trying to make friends and influence people. She was trying to be a star. She didn’t realize that those two things were synonymous and what she gets is a second chance to figure out how to be there for other people. She realizes, “I need these women and so I’m going to have to figure out how to see somebody other than myself.” And it’s hard for her.
Like she’s kind of becoming a real girl.
She’s trying to become a real girl. And it’s important as an actor that no matter what character you play you find some way to have a rooting factor for the character. I think they wrote the rooting factor in for Wickie in the first episode where she starts singing about how destined she feels to have been famous and how painful life is with this gift of a voice. If it doesn’t happen for her, I think everybody understands how cancerous a gift can be unfulfilled, unaccomplished. I think everybody understands that. And so I think she gets a little leeway. I think she gets forgiven for a lot of mistakes because we recognize that. Most importantly, she recognizes very early on that she is not an island and she needs to figure out how to love other people.
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