COMEDY CENTRAL
“The moment she walked onstage we’d
all chuckle in anticipation,” says Octavia
Spencer of watching McCarthy’s early
performances in the improv troupe The
Groundlings. “She was so beloved.” Marina
Rinaldi coat, Universal Standard pants,
vintage T-shirt and Jimmy Choo heels.^71

for 2011’s Bridesmaids). She routinely ranks on Forbes’s list of the

world’s highest-paid actresses, coming in at No. 9 last year, with an

estimated income of $12 million. Her movies, while not always crit-

ical darlings, are often commercial hits at the box office. Identity

Thief, The Heat, Spy and Ghostbusters brought in $174 million,

$229.9 million, $235.7 million and $229.1 million, respectively.

Along with her husband and frequent collaborator, Ben Falcone,

she runs a production company called On the Day. (The name,

suggested by her Mike & Molly co-star, Billy Gardell, describes

McCarthy’s frequent promise to go all out on the day of filming. “On

the day, I’ll do it right,” she often says. “On the day, it’ll be there.”)

She and Falcone have made three movies together: Tammy (2014),

The Boss (2016) and Life of the Party (2018), with two more—Super

Intelligence and Thunder Force—still to be released.

McCarthy, who majored in clothing and textiles at Southern

Illinois University, also somehow finds time to design clothing.

She launched her first label, Melissa McCarthy Seven7, which

offered sizes 4 to 28, in 2015, because she loves fashion but couldn’t

find anything to wear. “I’ve been every shape and size that’s out

there, and I just found it harder and harder to find stuff,” she says.

“I thought, I’m modern and young and want to wear what every-

body else is wearing. Why is this such a strange request?” (Melissa

McCarthy Seven7 is no longer in production, but McCarthy is

working on a new label. “I just wanted to make it a little smaller

and more accessible,” she says. “I wanted to work on keeping prices

down and for it to be for everyone.”)

She and Falcone have two daughters, Vivian, 12, and Georgette,

9. And so, as a busy working mother, she gets up at 4 a.m. (“I’m like a
   weird old man,” she says), prepares breakfast, takes out the family’s
   two dogs, gets her girls ready for the day and then she or her husband
   drives them to school. “It’s the normal: homework and somebody for-
   gets their violin,” she says, characterizing their life. Tonight, in fact,
   she will head to a violin recital—her youngest daughter’s first.
   Taking all this in, you can’t help but wonder about the McCarthy
   who is such a riotous, unruly and original on-screen presence that
   even when her movies flop—and risk-taker that she is, they some-
   times do—she still steals the film. From what inner wellspring
   does she draw all the loopy, lawless energy? Flaubert’s famous line
   comes to mind: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may
   be violent and original in your work.”

A

ROUND 4:30 P.M., when we arrive at the bar, the

driver asks if there is a back entrance, which would

be the usual celebrity preference. “You have to go in

the front,” McCarthy says, unconcerned. Inside, she

is greeted by several bartenders who know her (“Hi,

cutie,” one says). McCarthy, who is obviously a reg-

ular, orders a Lush IPA on tap. The décor, with its leather couches,

wood paneling and collection of beer steins hung from the ceiling,

evokes a basement in a Midwestern home.

The setting feels apt. McCarthy grew up in the Midwest, on a

corn and soybean farm in Plainfield, Illinois, a small town roughly

38 miles southwest of Chicago. “She’s very Midwestern,” says

her husband, who is also from Illinois. As anyone familiar with

that part of the country knows, he means she’s optimistic, well-

mannered, punctual, grateful, hardworking, modest. McCarthy’s

mother worked for World Book Encyclopedia and later at First

Midwest Bank. Her father was an arbitrator for the Belt Railway

Company of Chicago and is a great raconteur who can, McCarthy

says, “tell a 15-minute story that will wipe out a room.” As a

young girl, she was exposed to comedy by way of her parents’

television-watching. She’d hover behind the TV-room doors to

catch a glimpse of The Carol Burnett Show or Gilda Radner, Jane

Curtin and Laraine Newman on Saturday Night Live. She was

transfixed by these women, who were not supporting players but

were, in her words, “generating the funny” themselves.