In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Allison Tolm
In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Allison Tolman celebrates a milestone with Tuesday night’s season finale of St. Denis Medical, her modern NBC sitcom.
In this week’s season finale of St. Denis Medical, Allison Tolman’s supervising nurse Alex sums up her arc with three words: “I show up.” The steady soul of NBC’s hit mockumentary, Alex has been tasked with keeping things afloat amid a threatening lack of funding in her spillover hospital—and its unpredictable array of cluttered personalities. By season’s end, she just wants to take a day off to be present for her husband’s own medical procedure, a vasectomy. As always, she struggles to find that balance. But this time, Alex allows herself a bit of grace. Reflecting on a question posed at the top of the episode, she realizes her “superpower” in life. It’s modest, human, and undeniable: She shows up.
Tolman, a versatile actor who got her start in Chicago’s theater scene, fits Alex like a glove. The star has showcased her gift for deadpan comedy in St. Denis Medical, effortlessly playing to camera as Alex reacts in weary resignation to each of the show’s wild, silly turns. “I took to it like a duck to water,” Tolman tells Vanity Fair. But the star also related to Alex’s deeper psychology: “I like to have a handle on things, and I don’t like it when I don’t know what’s going on.”
Since she was cast in the first season of FX’s Fargo in the early 2010s, this trait has been tested—especially after that show vaulted Tolman into the spotlight. She got an Emmy nomination. She led some broadcast shows that didn’t make it past a single season. She found herself feeling left behind by the prestige Fargo machine, as the Noah Hawley anthology cast different actors for a totally modern story in its second (and subsequent) seasons. By the time the pilot for NBC’s St. Denis Medical came along, she had her doubts. “I’ve not loved the network experience. It didn’t feel like a supersafe place for an actress [like me] who’s felt like a character actress,” Tolman says. “I’m trying to establish myself as someone who can lead a show, and I felt like I kept getting knocked down.”
But St. Denis Medical has been renewed for a second season. It’s a critical and ratings success. And along with Max’s The Pitt, it’s leading a wave of hit series that play like timely throwbacks: entertaining comfort food in the form of good people doing good. “There’s a really decent core in both of those shows, and it is no surprise to me that that’s what we want out of our entertainment right now,” Tolman says. “We still have a need for shows that just feel good, that make you feel okay and kind of held, and are about decent people just trying their best.”
When she was cast in Fargo, Tolman had just a few screen credits to her name: an episode of Prison Break from a decade earlier, a 2009 brief film called A Thousand Cocktails Later, and a recurring arc in the low-budget queer comedy Sordid Lives. She’d spent years on the Chicago stage when she was cast as sheriff’s deputy Molly Solverson, the spiritual successor to Frances McDormand’s iconic Marge Gunderson. Molly butts heads with a hitman played by Billy Bob Thornton and a duplicitous insurance salesman played by Martin Freeman. Tolman is a marvel in the show: assured, quietly righteous, indefatigable. Yet during production, she felt anything but placid.
“I was so out of my element when I was shooting Fargo. I really had to fake it. I just didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. “Making Fargo was like being on Mars. I wasn’t trying to be a television star; I just wanted to have health insurance. I had to just be like, ‘I don’t know what a mark is. I don’t know what that means. What do you mean, “Now we’re lighting?”’ I didn’t know anything.” She also had to work through her famed costars’ specific methods. “With Martin, every take is a wild swing, and it’s incredible to watch—and I was like, I don’t think I work like that,” Tolman says. “It took a long time to be comfortable with figuring out what my process was with filming.”
The craft of screen acting was only the first thing she had to learn. Once Fargo premiered to great fanfare, Tolman started looking up what fans were saying. She read everything—from criticisms of her abilities to insults about her appearance. “I would search our hashtags. I wanted to know. And people do say terrible, terrible things—terrible things,” she says. Tolman learned by force to “thicken up” her skin and what to avoid on the internet. She was not affected, at last, by comments on her actual work in Fargo. “They’d insult my talent, and I’d be like, ‘Well, you’re obviously insane. That’s silly,’” she says. “I have a pretty unshakable faith in my talent, as unpopular a thing as that might be for an actor to say.”
This helped with what came next. “One of the strange things about suddenly becoming successful in this business is that you have to hire an entire team of people,” Tolman says. “Suddenly you’re the CEO of the company of You.” In carefully assembling her team of representatives, Tolman and co. agreed on “the power of no.” Tolman felt that after earning an Emmy nod for leading the biggest modern show of the year, she needed to choose the right follow-up.
“I remember feeling like I could be patient and I should be patient,” Tolman says. “The fact that I broke late and that I still had these skills that I could go back to the job market with, frankly, was really helpful.” She made Krampus, a campy holiday horror movie led by Toni Collette and Adam Scott, before signing onto her first post-Fargo show: Downward Dog. The idiosyncratic half hour starred Tolman as a millennial working at a marketing company while navigating matters of romance and friendship; it was narrated by her dog in moody, existential monologues about solitude and companionship. Critics largely admired the dramedy, which resembled a cult indie hit out of Sundance. That it landed at ABC proved the project’s fatal flaw—it aired as a summer burn-off and was canceled after a season.
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