Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s roles now are far from her tough-kid days on HBO’s hit series, The Sopranos. For those still stuck on the show and her character Meadow Soprano, here’s an update.
Sigler has gone from TV daughter to TV mother. Also, she’s not Italian – she’s Cuban, Greek, and Romanian. These days she’s not interested in playing the troubled, young woman any more. “I was exhausted reading those scripts. That’s what everyone is doing,” she said in our interview.
Dare I say it? Jamie-Lynn Sigler is normal. Now, I recognize the word itself is impossible to define, but truly it’s the best fit. During our interview, I never felt like she was hiding something or that there was more to a story than she told me. She’s not a “down-to-earth” celebrity – the term is way overused to say that a celeb is pleasant and not as openly ill-mannered as the media makes them out to be.
She’s at home on her new show and okay with playing a mom. “I was always the kid. This is a new chapter,” she said. “I’m learning so much. Thirty-one seemed so mature when I was young. When you get there, you see that it’s really not that way.”
She’s thirty-one, has moved on from past projects, and has done indie flicks in between her HBO stint and her new show – including an award-winning I Do in which she plays a lesbian proposed to by her gay best friend. She still loves HBO, but it was time for something new. “Their shows are awesome. Look, if I didn’t feel like I was so oversaturated on HBO, I would work for them forever,” she said. She’s now playing a mom of four on network TV under the direction of funnyman Jimmy Fallon, and she loves it.
Fallon’s show, Guys with Kids, is finding its footing on NBC this year. The show is a nod to sitcoms of the past with its live audience and laugh track. It, not surprisingly, focuses on the lives of three fathers. Sigler’s character is married to one of them. While the show’s concept garnered high hopes, even the network’s tagline “Can new dads stay cool dudes?” lacks originality. The show received some pretty harsh criticism – even the poster of dads in Baby Björns looks like a knock-off of The Hangover. Even our cover girl admits to not knowing much about viewership after coming from cable. “This whole sort of network game and system is brand new to me,” she said. However, critics agree, the actors on the show are way better than the material, especially Sigler.
Sigler defended the lack of serious parental behavior and depth and said, “Look we’re a comedy. We’re not trying to be any serious show.” She explained that it was Fallon’s idea from the beginning to go back in time with the multi-camera filming style – as a reference, this was the same style as Friends was filmed. She recognized the lack of this kind of show right now, aside from Guys with Kids. “A lot of shows are pretty racy. This is really a family sitcom.” Family-oriented, it certainly is. There are twelve children that round out the cast, one baby particularly fond of putting his hand in Jamie-Lynn’s mouth when she’s about to say a line. “They’re the best improvers,” she said of the kids.
Comedy is a hard gig for any actor, and the fact that the cast is eliciting some laughs from their audience (no, not the laugh track) is still notable. “What makes people laugh, that’s very individual,” Sigler remarked. “The live audience makes it all fresh,” she said when I asked about rehearsing the same jokes all week long.
“Everyone else pretty much on the show has done this before except me,” she said of the genre. She clearly doesn’t lack a sense of humor. She was randomly set-up with a cashier role in Saturday Night Live’s digital short titled Jizz in My Pants with Andy Samberg. She said, “I ask everyone to tell me if I’m not being funny or how I can be funnier.” Insecurities aside, Jamie-Lynn does credit her theater background for helping her comedic performance in front of a crowd.
Theater is the one thing that Sigler wants back in her career, although the nine to five lifestyle of her current role is an actor’s dream. “I’m very at home on the stage,” she said and expressed hope to start carving out the time to get back to her musical roles. Sigler had an album released in 2001, and her singing is the one talent she’s not shy to admit. “I hate to even say this, but I don’t even really have to try when it comes to musical theater.” Her dream project would be to star in a musical movie to “marry the two”. She wants to figure out how to take the time to return to New York and get back on the stage. It’s her niche and her calling, she feels.
Though things appear smooth for Sigler – these things being a steady job with reasonable hours and a strong year-long relationship with minor-league baseball player Cutter Dykstra – her life was not always without struggle. She married early and then divorced from her former manager. She battled an eating disorder in the public eye at the start of The Sopranos. She even authored a book about her fight with anorexia. She admits to being less candid about the whole ordeal these days and when it’s brought up in the interview, her first response is, “Oh my God, that was so long ago.” She did the book because it was a great medium to get her whole story across. She was only eighteen when she wrote the book, and she’s grateful for it. However, those days are behind her. She said, “Like what am I going to talk about now? How I went to Earth Bar and had a cream juice?”
One thing that Jamie-Lynn seemed pleased to talk about was her relationship with Cutter. We reached the subject of love and she said, “Honestly, the best way to love is to show support in the weak times and the dark times. A relationship should pull you up when you’re down.” Her advice on love was, “Be vulnerable. Be open. It makes a platform for someone to be vulnerable or open with you.” She admits that both she and Cutter have had their own ups and downs, but he’s always there for her when she wants to throw in the towel.
Jamie-Lynn isn’t throwing in the towel on acting any time soon even though she’s had a twenty-three year career already. “With any art, you’re never full,” she said. “You can always evolve. No one ever feels like they fully grasp it.”
She’s coming into her own and shows no signs of looking back to her younger characters or her more public life as a teenager. “This is really, I feel like, my next chapter now, and I’m excited about it I don’t know what’s to come. But I’m enjoying comedy, and I’m enjoying learning.” She uses the phrase “new chapter” more than once in our interview, and it seems that she doesn’t want to pin herself down to any one category of performer or character.
She reflected on her acting career and her decisions to write a memoir. “In the beginning it’s not scary, but it’s new, and you want to share everything. You want to please everybody,” she said. “It’s not that I still don’t care about that but I think that I can take a deep breath and go a little bit slower. I think in the beginning, you don’t know which way to turn at the moment.”
