INTERVIEW – Patti LuPone – A Comeback in Quarantine: Stage icon talks ‘Hollywood’, her basement videos and why ‘Ladies Who Lunch’ will never be the same

In Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, the wife becomes the boss, the "black screenwriter" is simply a screenwriter, and the gay leading man is just himself. Naturally, it stars Broadway icon Patti LuPone, who, in conversations like the one we had recently, thrives on brazen authenticity.

In the seven-episode Netflix series, LuPone portrays Avis Amberg, the wife of a studio head whose work is relegated to the kitchen. But not for long, thanks to Murphy’s 1940s corrective where power dynamics shift in favor of the underdogs and outsiders in this alternate reality, a fantasy depiction of Tinseltown’s Golden Age reimagined as diverse, inclusive and unabashedly queer.

That LuPone, 71, portrays a grand Hollywood dame and housewife-turned-studio head – in, of course, only the most glam fur-fringed couture – should be no surprise given how she’s been commanding the stage through a variety of extravagant personas for a half century. In 1979, as Eva Perón, she won her first Tony for Evita; her second win came in 2008, for her portrayal of Rose in Gypsy. She's also been nominated for roles in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, War Paint, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Anything Goes.

On Broadway is where she was throwing back martinis in Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical Company, as Joanne, until the pandemic lockdown forced theaters to shut down.

Now quarantined in rural Connecticut with her husband, Matthew Johnston, and son Josh, LuPone has been doling out delicious bits on social media. In one video she posted to Twitter, she channeled Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, making a dramatic entrance from her basement steps (when Glenn Close got the role for the Broadway run of the show in 1994, LuPone said she reacted by trashing a dressing room). Other at-home videos of LuPone involve her giving aptly chaotic, hungover tours of her treasure-filled basement.

When we connect via phone, I tell LuPone that she might actually be happy that, for once, this conversation is occurring between phone lines, not on Zoom. "You’re right," she says, roaring with laughter. "It really is the Brady Bunch."

PL: My problem right now is focus and structure. If I don’t do something in the morning, I’m in bed till 4:30 in the afternoon. So my kid – we’ve come up with a couple more. We just have to get down to it. We have to get up in the morning and go, "OK...