But watching her snuggle with her two golden retrievers, it’s clear those sweet dogs can steal the spotlight. “They’re pampered pooches,” says McCarthy of Harper, 6, and 3-year-old Betty. They’re the latest in a long line of pets who have added to her life—and who, she says, mirror both her and Falcone. Harper, the larger one at about 100 pounds, “thinks he’s, like, a Pomeranian,” she says with a laugh, adding that when you sit on the floor, “He comes up and tries to get his big buns on your lap.” Or he’ll nuzzle his face up to hers, as if asking, “Are you OK? What are you doing? Do you like me?” Betty, the smaller one, at around 40 pounds, is super mellow. “She’s more like Ben,” McCarthy says with a smile. McCarthy, 51, is speaking with Parade from her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with Falcone and their two daughters, Vivian, 15, and Georgette 12. She’s wearing a blue sweater and bright lipstick with shiny gold hoops dancing from her ears. She is sitting in one of two sleek chairs covered in pink cheetah print. Behind her is a credenza topped with an old typewriter and framed photographs, and between her feet is Harper, his eyes gazing into hers, head resting on her arm. “They’re absolutely made of marzipan,” says McCarthy, comparing her canines to the sweet confection. “They’re just better humans than we’ll ever be.” That said, there is a lot of human goodness to be celebrated on The Great Giveback With Melissa McCarthy and Jenna Perusich (June 13 on HGTV), in which she and Perusich, her cousin, surprise deserving participants with beautiful home makeovers. (Fun fact: Another cousin is JennyMcCarthy, whose current gig is as one of the judges on The Masked Singer.) Each of the six hour-long episodes honors someone who tirelessly gives of him- or herself, like an ICU pediatric nurse, a military veteran or a young man who worked as an aide in a senior living facility during the beginning of COVID. They’re all people who “just give and give and give,” says McCarthy. “And we wanted to give back.” McCarthy and Perusich previously demonstrated their design chops on a 2020 episode of Celebrity IOU. Makeovers are a natural fit for McCarthy, a flea market and home renovation fan. “I’m a sucker for things where there’s a certain craftsmanship, older things that…if you’re willing to put the work into it, there’s real beauty there,” she says. She wants to save what’s there. McCarthy feels the same way about the painted portraits she finds at swap meets and vintage shops—“To Ben’s horror,” she says with a laugh, explaining how she’s completely filled a wall in their home with portraits of women. “I’m like, ‘That’s a real person! They sat for that! I should save them.’” Perhaps there’s a connection, muses McCarthy, between collecting portraits of anonymous people and inhabiting the many roles she has undertaken as an actress: “Maybe it’s why I like doing characters. Maybe it all folds into what I love to do.”
Melissa McCarthy’s early life
“Missy” McCarthy and her older sister, Margie, were raised on a corn and soybean farm in Plainfield, Illinois, by their mother, Sandra, a secretary for World Book Encyclopedia who later worked in a bank, and their father, Mike, an arbitrator for the Belt Railway Company of Chicago. The family always seemed to have cats and dogs. McCartney’s first pup was a sweet beagle named Mikey, whom she remembers as having very active dreams (hearing herself, she can’t help but joke, “Mikey was like, ‘I want to be a biochemist!’”), and her next was J.J., “an enormous Irish setter that had the temperament of a Buddhist monk.” Living in a rural area without neighbors nearby, McCarthy says, “I needed my imagination. I had to kind of conjure the world I wanted to be in.” Television and movies helped, as she watched with admiration and awe as women—GildaRadner, CarolBurnett, MadelineKahn and JaneCurtin among them—crafted humor, seemingly out of thin air. “I remember being young thinking, They’re doing that. They’re generating that. They are funny!” So were her parents: Her father could tell a story that would have the whole family crying with laughter, while her mother came in “like the assassin,” with well-placed zingers. “The best feeling I have from my childhood is probably around that dinner table and my mom and dad making us laugh,” McCarthy recalls. “I was like, ‘Can that be a job?’’’ McCarthy originally began studying fashion at Southern Illinois University and moved to New York at age 20 with the intention of finishing college at the Fashion Institute of Technology. But her plans changed dramatically when a high school friend, designer BrianAtwood, insisted she try stand-up comedy. “And that changed my entire trajectory,” she says. McCarthy began performing in comedy clubs and acting in New York before moving to Los Angeles and joining the improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings in 1997, where she truly found her calling—and met her future husband. In 2000, McCarthy landed the role of bubbly inn chef Sookie St. James on Gilmore Girls, a part she played for seven seasons; Falcone had appeared on the show as a lawyer. Behind the scenes, they bought a rescue dog together (“a tiny, delicious, furry sausage” named Gladys), married in 2005 and had their two daughters. In 2010, she landed a co-starring role in the prime-time sitcom Mike & Molly, and a year later, her hilarious supporting role in the breakout comedy Bridesmaids earned her an Academy Award nomination. That success opened the door for McCarthy and Falcone to make their own comedy film, Tammy, one of her proudest accomplishments. “I still can’t believe that we get to write and make these worlds come to life!” Her acclaimed roles have ranged from comedies, including The Heat and Spy, to dramas, including St. Vincent, Can You Ever Forgive Me? (which earned her a second Academy Award nomination) and Nine Perfect Strangers. Her goal is always to make the screen, big or small, come alive with “real” women, or real men—in the case of her 2017 Saturday Night Live appearances as then–White House Press Secretary SeanSpicer.
Finding the funny
“I always find it funny when someone’s like, ‘Oh, you play these crazy characters,’” she says. But behind the zaniness is a lot of real-world research. McCarthy makes notebooks of unique traits and details she says she always pulls from real people. “My favorite thing on earth,” she says, “is to just sit on a bench and watch people. We are the sum of our quirks and ticks and idiosyncrasies and bad choices; that’s what makes us fall in love with our friends or our partners.” Which is why, she adds, “I can only really play somebody, even if they’re massively flawed, if I kind of love them.” This holds true for her latest character, in the Netflix series God’s Favorite Idiot (June 15). It’s a 10-episode, half-hour comedy about a midlevel employee (Falcone) who is chosen to become a messenger of God to muster his co-workers, outwit Satan (LeslieBibb) and save mankind. “That whole show is what’s going on in Ben’s brain just on a given Tuesday,” says McCarthy, who co-stars as Amily Luck, an office mate with an eclectic style, an electric scooter and a heart of gold. She’s the ultimate nonconformist who is unapologetically who she is. It’s McCarthy’s favorite kind of character to play, a product of her and Falcone’s constantly whirring imaginations. She revels in the ongoing process of creating these eccentrics. “When we’re taking out the garbage, cooking or in the car or whatever, it’s kind of always, ‘What did you do today? Blah, blah, blah…Do you think Amily has a drug habit? What kind of drugs does she do? Recreational?’” She laughs. “It just feels creative and so fun. Ben and I love what we do so much. There’s not a day, I can assure you, that we aren’t like, ‘Is this really what we do for a living?!’” McCarthy starts every day early, around 5 a.m. “I love it when it’s quiet, and when the girls finally do come down, I like to make a fuss over breakfast.” She’ll put on music—maybe some SteelyDan or EllaFitzgerald—and Falcone might hop on the piano or his guitar. “There’s a lot of music in the house,” says McCarthy, and, no surprise, a lot of laughing. “He’s just weird and really funny,” she says of her husband, “and I have a crazy and uncontrollable gut laugh at least once a day.” She swears all the humor is adding to their lives, quite literally, and every laugh guarantees she’ll live a little longer. “I’m always like, ‘Hoo! That was a four-monther!’ or ‘I got two more weeks on that one!’” Daughters Vivian and Georgie have appeared in some of McCarthy and Falcone’s films. (Vivian has played a young version of McCarthy’s characters in Thunder Force and The Boss.) But she has no idea if either of them wants to pursue acting. “They’re completely their own creatures, in a magical way,” she says of her girls, who love painting, drawing and sculpting. “I don’t care what they do as long as it leads with kindness. I just want them to be proud of themselves and to feel good about whatever choices they make.” It’s where McCarthy is at in her own life too. Next up, she has a humorous role in the film Thor: Love and Thunder (she plays Thor’s older sister, Hela, in a stage play within the movie), in theaters July 8, and she’ll star as Ursula in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, due out next year. Beyond that? “I’m curious myself,” she says with a smile. She’s thought about bringing back the fashion line she launched in 2015, Melissa McCarthy Seven7, and other business prospects are on the burner. But first things first. “Now I know that I only want to put certain kinds of things into the world…to shine a light [on the fact] that good matters and kindness is important.” It’s another way she’s found herself in sync with her dogs. McCarthy looks down at Harper and Betty, blissfully sprawled at her feet. “You just have to look out for people,” she says. Dogs have always reminded her of that. “They’re also looking out for you, which is a good feeling, because you get as much back as you give.”
Melissa McCarthy’s Musts
On the nightstand: “My headphones; a very weird, triangular ‘As Seen on TV’ pillow that holds my iPad; and a heart-shaped pillow that Georgie gave me four or five years ago from the 99-ents store, which I now have stuffed into one of those Blissy silk pillowcases that’s ‘Better for your hair!’ I sleep with it every night.” Reading: “Gallant by V.E. Schwab.” Always in her on-site trailer: “Some kind of fun throw. Usually a pair of Crocs. [Laughs] A Glenlivet [Scotch]. And then pictures of my family—I should have maybe started with that.” First boyfriend: “JoeFunk, who was just an absolute sweetheart. He was so damn funny and such a sweet guy. He brought a cane and a cape and a top hat to prom, and I was like, ‘Wonderful!’” The Beatles or the Stones: “Beatles, for the variation. Just watching the constant changing of someone—that, I think, is everything. I love that they had no boundaries. They weren’t like, ‘We have to stick to this because this is what works.’ They were like, ‘No, we are completely different now.’ I love that.” Secret talent: “Folding a fitted sheet.” Comedy idol: “I remember watching Carol Burnett get a Lifetime Achievement Award [at the 2019 Golden Globes]; my whole body was shaking. I couldn’t believe I was in the same room as her. I thought, ‘In a million years, this seems impossible.’ We were all up and clapping for her, but I was like, You really have to keep it together!” She has too many… “Portraits. Ben and the girls are always like, ‘Stop bringing haunted portraits in,’ and I’m like [whispers], ‘I can’t. There’s a woman on a horse—how does her family not have this?! I’ll bring ya home.’” Mantra of the moment: “Ben made me this magical trench coat, and there’s one of my favorite quotes across the back: ‘Never grow a wishbone where your backbone should be.’ Don’t be like, ‘Oh, I wish something could happen.’ Have the strength and conviction to make it happen. And there’s another one on there with Ina Garten’s face, and it just says, ‘What Would Ina Do?’ [When Vivian was little] we didn’t watch kids shows so much, but we would watch Ina, ’cause she’s so comforting. One of Vivian’s first words was ‘Ina,’ and then ‘ganache.’ And we were like, ‘That’s right!’” How to relax. “Anything with the kids, like dinner, and then usually we pick a ridiculous movie or show to watch. That and Etsy—it’s a real wormhole! If I had to pick a thing, other than my family, let me just go down the weirdest wormhole in Etsy, and everything’s gonna be fine.” Next, Review: Melissa McCarthy Gives a Career-Best Performance in Razor-Sharp Masterpiece Can You Ever Forgive Me?
