As a huge Widow’s Bay fan, I was stoked to see that it got 19 Emmy nominations for its first season, including Best Comedy and several acting nominations. That show was firing on all cylinders this season. One of the actors getting a lot of love from fans is K Callan, who plays Mayor Loftis’ secretary Ruth. Callan (real name: Katherine Elizabeth Callan) is 90 years old and has been acting for most of her life. She’s appeared in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Veep and Knives Out to name a few.
Callan recently sat down for a profile with The LA Times. She talked about filming the series, her long career, and becoming an Internet fan favorite. You can read the full interview here, and here are some of the highlights:
On the love for Ruth: “It’s been such a joy the love that Ruth has gotten from Reddit and various places on the internet,” Callan said last week over the phone, “and the stuff that’s been written. I spent the day [after the finale premiered] crying, really. There were so many nice things coming to me and people sending me things and saying, ‘Did you see this?’”
Acting was her calling: “I always just knew I was going to be an actor. Never told anybody because I thought they would just think I was crazy. And then years later, my brother said, ‘Oh, we always knew you were going to do that.’ In my era, you could be a teacher or a mother, mostly. My mom was kind of sick from the time I was born and died when I was 11, and I just kind of grew up on the movies — and Betty Grable specifically.”
Her big break: Scenes in which Grable had visited an agent inspired Callan to pick up the Yellow Pages, where she found the Molly O’Day Agency.
“I got on the bus and I wore my Easter dress and my little gloves, and I went in and said, ‘Hi, I’m Kay Borman, and I’m a singer,’ because I’d sung onstage at [the University of] North Texas. And I figured, ‘Now she’ll throw me out.’ That’s what happened in the Betty Grable movies,” she recalled. “And she said, ‘Do you have any music?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I figured, ‘Now she’ll throw me out.’ She said, ‘Do you have an accompanist?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I figured, ‘Now she’ll throw me out.’ So she went down the hall and came back with an accordion player and I sang ‘You Made Me Love You’ and ‘I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.’”
Offered $100 a week to sing at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, Callan replied, “I don’t know whether my daddy would let me do that.”
A fickle business: “It ebbs and flows. You fall in and out of age ranges. When I first started doing commercials, I was [cast as] a young mother and young wife. I could do that for many years. But then, you don’t really look like the mother of teenagers yet, but you don’t really look like the mother of little kids [anymore], and you have to sit out until you age into the next group. You have to have a marketable look, and you have to also have persistence. It never occurred to me when I went to New York that it wouldn’t work out. but mainly I’m really good at denial. I think it gets a bad name, denial.”
The life of a freelance actor: “I’ve really been lucky. Any artist’s life is hard, if you’re gonna have a freelance life. It’s a lifestyle choice. People don’t always know that. Like marriage is a lifestyle choice. When I was on ‘Lois and Clark,’ I knew I was employed for, like, three years, and that was fabulous. But I like not knowing, I like that just anything can happen.”
I love that KC is finally getting her flowers. That’s such an old-school story about breaking into the industry by taking a bus to an agency and being completely unprepared to audition. Obviously it worked out well for her, and as she mentioned denial helps as much as naivete. It seems so fitting that she always knew she’d be an actor after losing herself in films following her mother’s death. She found herself in such a juicy role that there are Reddit threads theorizing her fate. I hope we get more from Ruth next season.
Photos credit: Snapper/Avalon, MediaPunch/Backgrid