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Posted on Wed, Oct. 28, 2009 10:15 PM
Nicole Sullivan rocks with Lifetime's 'Rita'
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Sometimes life pushes us along a path we didn’t intend to take. That happened to actress Nicole Sullivan twice. The first was when she was a newcomer on “MadTV” and had to mimic Britney Spears.
Though she was good at sketch comedy, mimicry was something she hadn’t tried.
“There was never a part of me that was a mimic, ever,” she said. “I was never that kid. On ‘MadTV’ when they first started doing it, I would sit and watch tapes of the person for hours, like studying for the bar. None of it came naturally to me. In fact, Phil LaMarr, who was on the original ‘MadTV,’ was such a good mimic that I would have him do the voice and then I would imitate his version of the voice.
“It was easier to do that because he would break it down to imitable things,” Sullivan said. “Then over the years, it was a learned skill, and it got better and better. Toward the end, I could watch Meg Ryan and go, ‘OK, I see what I can do here.’ ”
The other time her path took a twist was a year and a half ago, when she was starring in her current Lifetime comedy, “Rita Rocks.”
“I got pregnant before the end of last season and was so sick at work,” Sullivan said. “And one day I had to come in and lie down for 15 minutes. And they brought in the doctor because they thought I was sick. They’d have to shut down if I was really sick. I had to say I had the flu. The doctor said, ‘I should give you a pregnancy test.’ I said, ‘I’m a grown woman. I don’t need to take a pregnancy test.’
“Three weeks later, once I hit the 12-week mark, I called them and said, ‘Well, I didn’t really have the flu, I’m pregnant.’ They couldn’t have been nicer.”
Sullivan’s pregnancy was written into the script and life’s little nudge — 6-week-old Beckett — lies cradled in her arms in her dressing room on the set here.
“Last time I got pregnant and was on another network, they said, ‘Oh, we’ll try to make this work.’ When I told Lifetime, they screamed with happiness for me.”
Sullivan’s older son, Dashel, is in the throes of potty training, she said.
“You can imagine how that is,” she said. “I have to take my 2 1/2 -year-old to the toilet every 20 minutes. It’s the plan we’re doing. It seems like an inordinate amount of peeing. Yesterday he peed 14, 15 times. I never peed that much ever.”
She has someone to watch the baby temporarily while she’s working on the soundstage in “Rita Rocks,” which begins its new season this week. But Sullivan’s mom is taking over that duty.
“The little ones, they gotta be close to you,” she said.
Marriage and motherhood happened faster than expected for the actress, who first startled classmates with her performance in “Present Laughter” when she was a senior at Northwestern University.
“I always wanted to be married and have kids, and I put it off and wanted to make sure I’d grown up and got to do and see everything I wanted to see,” Sullivan said. “And then it all happened whirlwind. My husband, we were engaged after a year, married after another year, pregnant three months after we were married, and then baby number 2 came two years after that. It’s been a crazy five years.”
Sullivan is married to Jason Packham, a former actor and now television producer (“Hawthorne,” “My Boys”).
Posted on Wed, Oct. 28, 2009 10:15 PM
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