Issue date: Aug 1, 1999

In this article:
The leads that got away
No need to be mean
Quotable Garofalo
A few stats

aneane Garofalo travels light. You see her coming down the block, arms swinging freely, unencumbered by the usual baggage of the show-business female. No outsized purse lugging cell phone and PalmPilot and makeup stash. All she carries, she carries in a small black DKNY fanny pack. She wears old sweatpants, their "Athletic Dept" lettering shriveled and cracked, and a worn gray Comedy Central T-shirt. She walks energetically, not because she's late (she's early) but because she enjoys walking.

The impression that accompanies her through the door of the West Hollywood Starbucks is of a woman who knows herself, likes herself and has no plans to change herself to meet someone else's fool expectations.

In the entertainment industry, this can work for you, and it can work against you. It has done both for Garofalo, who in the new ensemble comedy Mystery Men plays a superhero whose power is bowling. ("If I tried to explain it, it wouldn't make sense.") Best known for roles in The Truth About Cats & Dogs  and HBO's Larry Sanders Show,  the self-deprecating Garofalo represents a new side of young Hollywood rarely seen on magazine covers. Her I-am-what-I-am candor propelled her to the forefront of the stand-up scene, for what is comedy but telling it as you see it? In 1997, it landed her her first lead, in The Matchmaker,  a cute comedy that went nowhere.

"When I went in to meet the director, I said, 'This dialogue stinks,' " recalls Garofalo, 34. The director agreed. "A lot of actors think you should just agree with everything, and then, when you get the part, you fight about it. But the thing is, a lot of times you don't get the opportunity to fight for something. So my thing is, you go in and right off the bat say, 'I'd like to work with you, but this dialogue is unacceptable.' Which is what I did yesterday at a meeting for a film that, um, I won't be in." What did she say, exactly? "I told him, 'There's not an actor in the world that could make this sound natural.' He wasn't too thrilled."

Garofalo's frankness has backfired before. At Saturday Night Live, she got herself canned by marching into producer Lorne Michaels' office and challenging his dictum that actors must work from cue cards instead of memorizing lines - not to mention publicly decrying the humor of then-cast member Adam Sandler as childish.

Garofalo's wear-what-I-like, say-what-I-think attitude gets her branded as an outsider, a label she rejects. To her mind, she isn't an outsider. She simply refuses to, in her words, "suck it up." This is mostly done out of principle. In part, it's because she's tried playing the game, and it doesn't necessarily get you where you want to be.

She once went on a crash diet to get a lead role a director had intimated she could get if she lost 25 pounds. She lost the weight, and someone else got the part. "When I inquired, they said, 'Oh, you were just too old.' Even though I was five years younger than the male lead. Which just went to show me: It's always something."

Did she gain the weight back? "And then some. In, like, a minute and a half."

Which wasn't, to her mind or mine, a bad thing. "At 99 pounds, I looked [bad] and I felt awful." Whereas now, at 125, she looks fine. I tell her that I'd rather have her body than mine, that I think I'm too scrawny. Garofalo is wearing dark sunglasses, but I know what look I'm being given. "I'm sure it's hard," she says. "It's real hard."

arofalo isn't especially troubled by the leads that got away. "As a character actor, you can get to a certain point and live very well and have a lot of fun," she says. "The lifestyle I have and the income I have, as a single woman in a one-bedroom apartment [in New York], is fine."

No desire to be a big star? "It wouldn't happen," insists Garofalo. "You have to have a lot more dedication to what I'll call the machine. I have 20% dedication. What's needed is 110%. You can't have it with the level of apathy I have."

By way of evidence, she cites this week's agenda, which consists mainly of hanging out with her boyfriend - Craig Bierko, who starred in this year's The Thirteenth Floor  - and her two dogs, who prefer L.A.'s sun-dried heat to Manhattan's cloying humidity. In between, she's reading scripts; doing voice-over work for David Spade's Sammy, an animated show in development for the next TV season; and enduring press interviews for Mystery Men.

Garofalo says her apathy level would change if she had children, which, up until recently, she thought she would do. The baby fever "went away when I got my dogs." Everybody, she says, "should have dogs before they have kids. Everybody."

And if she did up her level of dedication to her career and one day win an Oscar, would she suck it up and wear a couture gown to the ceremony? She would not. "There's a let-them-eat-cake quality to the fashion that bothers me. I can't in good conscience read in the paper about a Bosnian rape camp and then put on an $8,000 Versace dress. Something seems wrong. If I were to go, I would probably wear some sort of conservative, basic black moderately priced thing that I could wear again."

Which is what she did at the 1996 Emmy Awards, garnering acid-tongued abuse from Joan Rivers and her sidekicks on some network TV after-blather. One of them actually called Garofalo a pig. I offer her the chance to get back at Rivers in print. She thinks for a moment. "I'll just say this: She's lucky that other people are better-mannered than she is."

he hates meanness. To her mind, meanness is what drove Columbine High School students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to their rage, because they were "humiliated and emasculated on a daily basis." Garofalo sees it as a nationwide school problem and believes we need to take a close look at the individuals who are doing the humiliating. Their popularity and status, she recalls from her own school days, shield them from any real discipline.

But aren't comedians usually mean? Doesn't it go with the terrain? Yes and no. Garofalo thinks there's an all-too-common - and commonly false - assumption that female comics are mean. "I constantly get guys saying, 'Wow, I thought you were going to be such a b----.' Like any woman who gets onstage with a microphone is a b----. You don't hear guys going, 'Wow, I thought Dana Carvey was going to be such a [jerk].' The men are 'funny,' but the women are 'mean-spirited.' "

Asked whether she's ever mean to herself - whether her humor comes from self-loathing - Garofalo shakes her head. "I really am not full of self-loathing. People think that because the name of my company is I Hate Myself Productions. It's just a joke." As was her marriage to comedy writer Rob Cohen. ("A couple of writers from The Ben Stiller Show went to Las Vegas and we all got married. He just happened to be my boyfriend at the time.") And her relationship with Ben Stiller. "We just fooled around a couple of times when we first met." If she has emotional baggage, she's checked it somewhere far from this interview. Janeane Garofalo, traveling light.

Hillary Clinton:
"A strong, tough, great woman. I'm endlessly sorry for her that she has to suck it up so bad for the sake of her career and her daughter. I would like to see her in the Senate. I can't believe anyone gives her a hard time about anything."

Adam Sandler:
"He's tapped into the demographic that spends the money. I obviously don't have the same taste that adolescent ticket buyers have."

Jerry Seinfeld:
"A very well-mannered, unassuming, quiet kind of guy."

Falling in love with co-stars:
"The reality of working together under those conditions - the long hours, the actual unglamour of it - will put the kibosh on sexual tension pretty quick."

Whether God exists:
"For other people, yes. I don't have a particular allegiance to one."

On the walls in her bathroom:
"A picture of me from Cop Land, pointing a gun."

Family: Dad Carmine, a retired Exxon exec, and two siblings. Mom Joan recently died.

Education: 1982 graduate of Madison (N.J.) High School; class of '86 at Providence (R.I.) College, degree in history and American studies.

Won Showtime's "Funniest Person in Rhode Island" contest in '87; moved to Boston, then Houston, to work the local comedy scene.

Memorable performances: the big screen's The Truth About Cats & Dogs and Reality Bites; TV's Larry Sanders Show, Saturday Night Live and the finale of Mad About You.

Has eight tattoos.

Dogs: Kid (above)

PHOTO CREDIT: EJ Camp for USA WEEKEND
Mary Roach has profiled actors Tom Cruise and Nicolas Cage for the magazine.