Laurie Metcalf, currently starring in the hit Broadway revival Death of a Salesman co-starring Nathan Lane, speaks emotionally about the show’s producer (and her frequent collaborator) Scott Rudin in a lengthy New Yorker profile out today.
“It’s so touchy,” she tells writer Michael Schulman, who notes in the profile that Metcalf teared up when speaking about a rift with Chicago’s Steppenwolf theater company over her involvement with the controversial producer. “It’s so hard.”
Schulman writes, “When I asked Metcalf about her decision to work with Rudin again, she fumbled for words before taking a piece of notebook paper from her fanny pack. She had reread his [New York] Times interview and jotted down notes. ‘He talked about his therapy, he apologized, he owned what he said, he reflected on it,’ she said, haltingly. ‘He was in the process of rehabilitation. So I just think that, unless we think there is no possibility of real rehabilitation, then we shouldn’t ask people to try and do it.’ She sighed, unsure of herself. ‘I knew you would ask me at some point.’”
Rudin recently returned to producing on Broadway following what proved a temporary hiatus prompted by bullying and workplace abuse allegations in 2021 from former staff members. His first post-break Broadway production was Little Bear Ridge Road last fall, starring Metcalf and directed by Joe Mantello, who also directs Salesman and has worked frequently with both Metcalf and Rudin.
Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock in ‘Little Bear Ridge Road’
Michael Brosilow
Little Bear Ridge Road premiered at Steppenwolf in 2024, and an impressed Rudin offered to transfer the production to New York; the Chicago theater company, where Metcalf began her career decades ago, but Steppenwolf refused to collaborate with Rudin. Metcalf, according to the New Yorker, threatened to quit her longtime theatrical home unless it gave up the rights to the play to allow the Broadway staging, which ultimately was produced by Rudin and Barry Diller.
Asked about the Steppenwolf situation, Metcalf tearfully tells the New Yorker, “I can’t really go into that, because that’s something I haven’t even figured out for myself, my relationship back there.” She is not involved in the Chicago company’s current and 50th season. Crying as she folds up a piece of notebook paper, Metcalf tells the magazine, “I want my own celebration of that, and I want to celebrate it with some of the Old Guard. I want to go back in time, and I want to be brave with the people who taught me to be brave. I don’t want to worry if something is not P.C. – not to trigger people. Just to be daring. Controversial, if it wants to be. Back then, we didn’t have to be so scared that we were going to step on somebody’s toes and get brought down. We won’t call it the fiftieth. We’ll call it something else. It’ll be like getting the band back together for one last tour, you know?”
Metcalf discusses another controversial colleague in the New Yorker piece. On meeting Roseanne Barr, with whom she would costar as sister Jackie on her TV career breakthrough Roseanne, Metcalf says, “I was intimidated by her, because she was self-made.” The two got along well and reunited for the 2018 revival series, which was canceled after nine episodes when Barr, increasingly given to QAnon-style rants, posted a racist tweet about Barack Obama’s former adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Metcalf, who at the time was in New York performing in the Edward Albee play Three Tall Women, learned of the series’ cancellation from a news chyron. On returning for the re-branded The Conners, Metcalf recalls, “There was just a general sadness around the whole place.” She says she has not spoken to Barr since.
“There’s nothing controversial,” she tells the New Yorker. “We just haven’t spoken since we said goodbye at the end of the reboot.”
Asked if she was angry at Barr “for blowing up her own show,” Metcalf “laughed ruefully and replied, ‘I don’t even know how to answer that.’”
