Tony Award winner and Broadway darling, Annaleigh Ashford, is an incredible comedic force. If you take the sensibilities of Goldie Hawn and Jane Krakowski and add a dash of Anna Faris, you get an idea of how fearless she is as a performer. But Annaleigh Ashford is a singular talent, and I’m thrilled that she has two huge chances for you to fall in love with her this year.
The second season of CBS’ nimble comedy, B Positive, is airing right now, and she stepped into the shoes of Paula Jones for the third installment of the American Crime Story saga, Impeachment. While Gina and Paula Jones are planets away from each other, Ashford expertly utilizes her voice, body, and spirit to give voice to women who are desperate to prove something to everyone, including themselves.
Normally change is bad, but when you’re taking a strong comedy in an even stronger direction, it’s a good thing. In the premiere season of B Positive, the sitcom was centered on Thomas Middleditch’s Drew, a divorced dad in dire need of a kidney transplant. Ashford’s Gina doesn’t bat an eye when she offers Drew one of her organs, but how many seasons could you keep telling medical jokes about the same surgery? For the second season, they retooled the story and built it around Gina, one of the show’s most winning aspects. It was a drastic turn that Ashford was eager to tackle.
“When we started the second season, there was, for me, such an important focus on making sure that this character had a transition that made sense and was believable. One of my favorite things about Gina is, without knowing it, putting people before her in her life. Before she met Drew, that was a negative thing. After they met, she found a positive way to harness that energy and found a positive way to give to somebody. I think that’s when it really started shifting and becoming a good thing in her life. So that was a big piece of the puzzle. The other thing, about the show shifting so dramatically, was that it was bound to happen at some point because he had to get a kidney. I always knew that we had a big shift coming around the corner, and when Chuck Lorre decided to kind of go down this path, I was delighted and thrilled because I also love intergenerational storytelling. Golden Girls is one of my very favorite shows in the universe. And one of the things that I love about Golden Girls and why it worked so well besides the epically genius cast is that we’re not focusing on them getting older all the time. We’re focusing on them living life and the contrast of their age and the experience they’re going through is what sometimes creates the comedy because it’s conflict. For that reason, I was very excited to go back and deeper into the assisted living facility because it’s one of my very favorite topics, and some of my very favorite actors have joined us.”
While Gina used to be more of a party girl, she is focused in season two. She used to work part time at a senior center, but when one of the residents passes and leaves Gina a huge sum of money (a paltry $38 mil), it changes the course of Gina’s life. With her money troubles behind her, Gina can really flourish and challenge herself. The first season was about a kidney, but season two wisely banks on Ashford’s innate ability to open Gina’s heart.
“The girl that we meet in the pilot of B Positive is a completely different human than the girl that we’re seeing in the second season. Sometimes we’re like, ‘do people change that fast?’ or ‘can they change?’ and I believe they can, especially when they have a purpose. When somebody has a goal and a reason to live and a reason to make the world better, then usually the rest of the pieces of their life follow suit. I think that’s certainly true with Gina. She still has this zany outlook on the world and the way that she comments and reflects on her past is delightfully uncomfortable, but I think what she’s always had, at her core, was a gift with people. I’ve always connected with people who are in a different generation than I am. There’s just something about them living in a different time that makes me want to know more and hear the stories. I’ve always connected with the older souls around me. Gina is one of those people. Through experiences with my own relatives, people who work in these spaces or people who work in these communities, they often are really gifted with knowing how to handle really intense, heartbreaking life moments like loss. Specifically, people who work in hospice care. I feel like it takes a really special heart and human to navigate that kind of loss and also still have empathy and sympathy but continue to be strong for those people. The same for ICU nurses or anybody who works in a position where they’re dealing with a lot of death and loss. They have to have a special heart to support and be strong for those that are experiencing it. I drew upon some life experience there, and I think that it was just a lovely opportunity to explore that in a medium where we don’t usually explore stuff like that.”
Paula Jones sometimes gets lost in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After all, she wasn’t an intern at the White House, and she only had one encounter with Bill Clinton before he because the president. Ashford’s involvement is one of the most inspired pieces of casting of the series’ history. I thought I knew the story of Paula Jones, but I admit that she is only a piece in this vast scandal. I didn’t know about the Penthouse shoot, and I certainly wasn’t aware of her rocky relationship with her husband, Steve, played by Taran Killam. The media never gave her a chance (evidenced by a recreated Newsweek article with “Should She Be Heard?” scrawled near her face). Did Ashford view Jones’ story as a tragedy?
“Once I started doing my research, absolutely. Before I did my research, unfortunately, like most of America, I was very swayed in my opinion of her by two things. One was the media coverage of her throughout the 90s, which was very complicated and really disheartening. Everyone was so cruel to her. The other part of her public life that also swayed my view of her was her involvement in the 2016 election. One of the things that American Crime Story does is they authentically reenact events that happened that were so unbelievable that there’s times where you say, ‘Well, that can’t possibly have happened…that can’t be true.’ That headline that you’re talking about was recreated word for word. I remember standing in a room somewhere, taking this picture and trying to recreate what she looked like. Because if you wrote it, people will be like, ‘This is too outlandish. That’s not real.’ The tragedy of her story feels so shocking. One of the things that surprised me most of all is when I started digging is that he was just trying to please her husband. That’s the core of everything. It’s just another comment on the patriarchy that this woman was demoralized and villainized and continues to be. All she was trying to do was please men around her all the time.”
Throughout the entire season, Jones’ eyes seek approval–from her husband and from the lawyers trying to make a dent in her case. In one of the season’s most powerful scenes, Paula stands up to Steve when she realizes that her own husband won’t believe her about the allegations with Clinton, and her face is still wearing the bandages from a nose job. She is literally broken and healing and the man who should stand behind her is too cowardly to stand behind her.
“It’s thrilling to watch a woman stand up for herself, especially somebody like that, who, I would say, would absolutely be like a rock bottom moment for her in her life. I always imagined it as the turning point. That was the day where she’d said no more and you won’t treat me like this anymore. Her voice is so high pitched that I worked with an awesome dialect coach, and I chose to not always really talk the way she talks. Sometimes it can take you out of the story, and her voice is so specific. There was an interview that she did where she wasn’t amazingly pleased with the show, which I totally understand. I just hope she watched the whole thing. I also hope that she maybe read a little bit here and there about how people were so touched by how her story wasn’t told properly, because I think she would agree that she was really taken advantage of. This showed her in such a good light. I always imagined that she did have that moment in her life, and she did stand up for herself. In some interviews after she got that nose job there was a shift. You see a woman who’s so tired of fighting for herself. made e a really deliberate choice to ground my voice in that scene. For most women who talk in a higher pitch, especially in the South–it’s very subconscious. It’s a people pleasing tactic. It’s a feminine way to be softer and warmer. And I thought it was interesting if she dropped in in that moment.”
B Positive gives us a little jolt of Ashford’s singing prowess when she sings the opening titles. Last year became the Year of the Movie Musical, and we need Ashford on our big screens singing her heart out. She’s been on stage in Legally Blonde, You Can’t Take It With You, and Kinky Boots, but she wants a Stephen Sondheim renaissance.
“I’d love to do Sunday [in the Park with George. Especially with the recent passing of [Stephen] Sondheim, I’ve really been curious about what it would look like to have, in my opinion, some better representation of his work on film. Into The Woods was one of the last more acclaimed ones, but there’s not been very many of them. I think he enjoyed them and wanted to see them flourish. We’re at, I think, the beginning of a new era of people being invested in making good movie musicals and figuring out what that is. There’s a technique and an art form. And I’m happy to see too that there’s more crossover that some of our Broadway folks are getting to direct in that space. Certainly, Lin [Manuel Miranda] and Tommy [Kail] and Rob Marshall all come from our space. Keep letting in the Broadway people.”
B Positive is airing now on CBS and can be found on Paramount+ and Impeachment: American Crime Story is available on Hulu.
