Started From The Bottom Now She's Here

Comedic dynamo (and amy schumer squad member) Bridget Everett made her name as the go-to gal for raunchy laughs. Now she’s turned out a career-making performance in sundance darling patti cake$—and is trying to get comfortable with the view from the top. 

- Carla Sosenko

BRIDGET EVERETT HAS AN INFERIORITY COMPLEX.

For anyone who’s seen footage of her live performances—or her recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon—this is hard to believe. She is, quite simply, a force. An Amazonian beauty with a powerhouse set of pipes and a penchant for chardonnay, the woman known as the Cabaret Hurricane runs around the room motor boating and mounting audience members, whether they like it or not. (They usually like it.) The word confident could spring to mind, though it feels like a sissy of an adjective given the off-the-wall artistic cataclysm that is a Bridget Everett show. 

But when it came to playing the hard-living Barb Dombrowski in the drama Patti Cake$ (out now), she felt wobbly. “I basically did everything I could not to do it,” Everett says of writer-director Geremy Jasper’s invitation to workshop the script at Sundance Labs in 2014. “Not because I didn’t want to and not because I didn’t think it was a great opportunity, but because I thought I would bomb.”

Jasper had no such misgivings: “I’d been looking for Barbara Dombrowski, and I hadn’t found any actresses that seemed right for the role. Then suddenly I saw her face, and I was like, ‘That’s Barb.’”