Brenda Song is sitting in an IHOP when it hits her: She has no idea what she wants. It’s 2011; she’s just ended a long run at Disney Channel, where s
Brenda Song is sitting in an IHOP when it hits her: She has no idea what she wants. It’s 2011; she’s just ended a long run at Disney Channel, where she’d starred in various original movies and spent six years playing Paris Hilton–inspired hotel heiress London Tipton on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and its spin-offs. “There was six months where when I got into a car, I would automatically just drive to set,” she recalls during a recent Zoom with Vanity Fair.
Back at IHOP, Song had rattled off her order on autopilot. Then she paused. “I took a second and went, ‘I don’t know if I want an egg white omelet…. That’s what someone’s brought to me for eight years. I don’t know how I want my eggs!” says Song. “I had the craziest weird breakdown over eggs. Because it was the first time after eight years where I was like, ‘What do I want?’” she continues. “I couldn’t quite grasp things.”
Thirteen years later, Song found herself at another crossroads—questioning her future as a working actor after welcoming two children in quick succession with fellow former child star Macaulay Culkin. “I just felt like such a new person, like a blob of clay, and I’d never felt that way,” she says now. “All of a sudden I’m like, Wait—my body doesn’t feel like my own, and my priorities are so different.”
“The world doesn’t know where to put you if you don’t know where to put yourself,” she continues. “I just was feeling insecure, to be honest, and like I didn’t know where I fit in this industry…. I had literally told my mom and my partner, ‘If the best of my career is behind me, I think I’m okay with that.’” Song recounts all this in fast-paced disbelief, seemingly eager to get to the part where she comes to her senses: “It just goes to show you how quickly life can change overnight.”
Just six weeks and a change of management later, two of the most thrilling projects of Song’s career landed at her doorstep. Earlier this year, she appeared alongside Pamela Anderson in Gia Coppola’s awards season hopeful The Last Showgirl. She’s now starring opposite Kate Hudson in Running Point, a recent series from Mindy Kaling streaming on Netflix. Song had only eight days to dust herself off from the “very spiritual experience” of playing hard-edged showgirl Mary-Anne in the Las Vegas desert before returning to her sitcom stomping grounds in Los Angeles.
In Running Point, Song plays Ali Lee, no-nonsense chief of staff to Hudson’s basketball team president, a character based on series executive producer and Lakers owner Jeanie Buss. It was a dream assignment for the actor, whose dressing room on The Suite Life was home to a life-size Kobe Bryant cutout. Song even wore her Lakers championship ring to her first meeting with series cocreators Kaling, Ike Barinholtz, Elaine Ko, and David Stassen.
“I was honestly nervous when I sat down with them, because I love the Lakers so much,” says Song. “There have been other shows about the Lakers,” she continues—most recently, HBO’s short-lived Winning Time—“and it’s really hard for me as a lifelong fan to watch something where I feel like, ‘Wait, that’s not how that happened.’” But she was assured that Running Point, which centers on the decidedly fictional Los Angeles Waves, is not meant as a straightforward biography. “This is a vehicle to meet this crazy dysfunctional family and workplace family,” Song was told. “And I was like, ‘I’m in.’”
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