What To Know
- The set was filmed in Abbott territory.
- Costar Sheryl Lee Ralph makes a perfect hype woman.
- Her son shows up for a hilarious bit.
Don’t tell the PTA, but an Abbott Elementary teacher is trading straight A’s for F-bombs!
“It’s raw,” admits Lisa Ann Walter, whose bawdy alter-ego Melissa Schemmenti would so be front row for her sassy comedy special, It Was an Accident. Fittingly shot at Philadelphia’s Helium Comedy Club (and intro’d by costar Sheryl Lee Ralph), the seasoned stand-up works the crowd like a champ with her takes on everything from political scandals and adult women with baby voices to Gen X-ers and, of course, her iconic turn in the 1998 Lindsay Lohan classic, The Parent Trap.
“Nothing makes me happier besides my kids than getting on a stage and making people laugh,” she says. And it shows.
Now that you are an official local favorite, how was filming in front of a Philly crowd?
Lisa Ann Walter: Just think about how they are as sports fans. [Laughs] They are incredibly warm and loving if they like you. I’ve always had that. The thing I love about Philly and that I’ve come to embrace as my sort of adopted hometown is that they have super-pride of their city. They’re very much into being Philly. And so everything about it is like, “No one likes us, we don’t care,” and they’re fine with rioting even if they win. They’re fine with being messy. I was the Grand Marshal of the Italian Heritage Day Parade, then I rode in the Thanksgiving parade, and that was one of the best years of my life because just getting to experience the people just out in the street. Not people that came to my act, even, just people out on the street. I was getting hugs from people just coming up. I remember one lady on the route, I actually wound up saying, “Can I take a video of you? ” She cursed a blue streak while complimenting me.
Hulu / Disney
When was the last time you did a standup tour?
Oh, I tour every time I’m not in production for Abbott. There are even some hiatus weeks that I’ll go to Chicago or I’ll go to another city.
I figured you would want to use that downtime to relax because there’s so much work going on with Abbott.
No. No. Look, two things. Number one, I’m incredibly blessed that I have this opportunity at this stage of my life. Incredibly blessed. Some people never get it. The fact that I’m doing it now, I mean, it would’ve kind of sucked if I had done it young and then now nothing. At this stage of my life, I’m busier than I’ve ever been.
And secondly, nothing makes me happier besides my kids than getting on a stage and making people laugh and cry. That’s what makes me happy. I want to make them feel something. And laugh is the best because you’re changing their whole chemistry for that time that you share with them. Standup is community.
Hulu / Disney
When did you start developing this set? Because a lot of it is very timely, and everything is changing so fast in the world right now.
It takes a minute, and really, it was on me because we did it in July, and it took months and months for me to get to the edit, make notes, and [decide] what I wanted to cut out. Then we adjusted again, and we had to cut a bunch, a whole giant chunk out, maybe 15 minutes just for time. So it took longer than I would’ve liked. Obviously, if we did it last week, there would be new stuff that’s in there because there are sections that are about what’s happening currently in the country.
It’s so cool how Sheryl Lee Ralph is there to introduce you to the crowd. And then you have a surprise moment at the end with your son… may I say, that man is fine.
[Laughs.] I will let him know! He lives in Brooklyn now. He’s queer and is with a partner now, though. He is a very loyal partner, so he doesn’t step out or anything. I think he was in his maybe second year of being single when we started touring, and he laid waste. I was like, “Dude, you got to calm it down!”
Disney / Gilles Mingasson
Back in 1995, you wrote and created My Wildest Dreams for Fox at a time when we weren’t seeing a lot of women have that kind of agency. Now you’re working on a show 30 years later with another woman who has written and created a show. It’s gotta be wildly different, what Quinta Brunson faces compared to what you had to deal with?
Oh, 100%. I was just talking to someone about this. The fact that it ever made it on the air was kind of a miracle. We had three presidents of Fox, two presidents plus an interim of Columbia TriStar/Sony. I had three executive producers of my show, including the person they hired to write it quick when we were doing the pilot. She didn’t understand television writing, she’d written a couple of features and it’s like, there’s notes all the way through so she left. The other two she brought on were trying to get creator credit, and the people that were the interim in charge between the two presidents were like, “No, Lisa’s the one who’s rewriting this.”
And I came in with my friends and with the non-writing executive producers, we all got in an office over a weekend and rewrote the pilot and shot it on a Tuesday. But Fox had given up on that show [until] they walked in, were like, “Oh!” My very first scene was with Steven Root, who played a teacher…I go in, we did it in one take and they were like, “Lightning in a bottle. Call Rupert Murdoch!” But there were notes even when we did the first one. They thought [my character] should have a sexy manny, and then the manny should be causing all sorts of problems because my show followed Married with Children. I wanted my show to be realistic, so I was like, “America doesn’t have mannies. America gets on the bus and takes their kids to daycare. I’ve been all over America, makin’ ’em laugh for seven years. Y’all need to jump off when you fly over.’” [Laughs.]
What do you think has changed between 1995 and now?
What I’ve found in watching what Quinta has accomplished as opposed to how it was, not to be rude, is that there are a lot more women making decisions. And so when you’re trying to pitch something as being a true experience, [they’re] much more likely to get it.
So I think there’s more women. What Quinta has put together and what she was able to build, she’s incredible at seeing the long view and the big picture. And the notes that we’ve got from the studio and the network have all been—now I’m going to ruin my reputation the other way, but Quinta agrees with this—they’ve been really solid. They supported not just this woman, this young Black woman, but they have supported her view of what this show should be, and then you see the result.
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The Parent Trap is beloved by so many people. And what is the one thing nobody has asked you about it?
Ooh. People have just started to ask about becoming best friends with Elaine Hendrix during that movie because of Dancing with the Stars. Now they know that she’s my best friend and has been since then. So people have asked about that. And I’ve talked about it, that the reason we became such good friends is because we had time to bond due to how long it took to shoot. CGI being so new at the time, having to do one whole side with Lindsay Lohan as one character and then the other side, it was double the shooting time. It was six months, that is time to bond a friendship!
I will tell you something that is true, and I’ve never said to anybody in any interview: Best food I’ve ever had on a movie. [Laughs] The first Friday we had dinner on set, Simon Kunz, who played Martin, was like, “There’s surf and turf… There’s filet mignon!” I was like, “Yep, Disney.”
Lisa Ann Walter: It Was an Accident, May 15, Hulu.