Holland Taylor Reflects on Her Scene-Stealing Turns in ‘The Chair’, ‘Hollywood’, and ‘To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You’

Following memorable turns in Ryan Murphy’s period drama Hollywood and the teen rom-com To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, Holland Taylor is a scene-stealer in the upcoming comedy The Chair, a six-episode series set in the complicated world of academia that debuts Friday, Aug. 20. Created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, the show stars Sandra Oh as Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman to be named chair of the English department at the prestigious Pembroke University and one of the few people of color on staff at the university.

Taylor portrays Dr. Joan Hambling, a distinguished professor and friend of Ji-Yoon who has been in the department for decades but now finds herself struggling to earn the respect she deserves from her peers in the department as well as her students. We recently caught up with Taylor to chat about The Chair and Joan’s struggles to be seen and heard. Plus, she reflects on having her own version of Hollywood’s Ellen Kincaid and what it was like to play a fan-favorite character in To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You.

What was it about The Chair and the role of Joan that drew you in?

First of all, Joan is an older character and those parts are rare. Fortunately for me, I seem to get them; I’ve worked steadily playing older, older, and older characters. She’s also well written, she’s a real person. The elder situation in America is such that there is sort of a cliche “old lady” people write — you’d have to shoot me to make me take a role like that. To see a real person who was a valid, lively, interesting person of integrity, who was depicted very accurately—and who is in her late 70s — that is really interesting to me. It makes me feel very alive as an actress to play somebody who is fully drawn.

The show is very funny but it tackles serious topics, including sexism and ageism. Have you ever had to fight in your own career the way Joan has to fight the academic establishment here?

The fight is much less direct. You don’t know if you’re not getting a part because of some sexist or ageist issue. You don’t really know the machinery that governs your career. Occasionally you’ll have an agent say, “We couldn’t get you in on this. They just didn’t want an older person to play it.” Sometimes you get something direct like that. But unless you’re a very big star where the machinery of your working and getting work is much more apparent to you, there is nothing that you can do. You don’t have an invitation to the fight. So, I was just lucky in this instance I was offered this role. Amanda Peet is, of course, a great actress, but she’s written a couple of plays that I saw in New York, and she’s a really good writer. I didn’t have to even see a script. I knew that Amanda would not create a character that wasn’t worth playing. So it was a no-brainer.

What was your favorite part about bringing this story to life?

Joan is, according to Amanda, a woman who at her point in life has become somewhat unedited. That means she delivers as a teacher, she conducts herself as an authority to school, she has a social arrangement and agreement with all of the other professors, and relationships with her students. She mostly behaves as she always does, but she has moments where she’s hit a wall, where she might say or do anything. She breaks the norms of how she’s supposed to speak, even in the middle of class. So she’s a little bit of a loose cannon in that regard. I really enjoyed that liminal state of not quite being in control. I did it when I was acting as a performer too. I said, “I don’t know how I might play this. I might do something quite unexpected at this moment.” I wanted to feel that kind of almost off-balance, trembling state that you can see a person get into when they’re really just pushed too far, and Joan is pushed too far.

Did you pull from anyone in your own life to play Joan?

I don’t know that I did. I have my own understanding of getting older that was very lively in me that I could bring to Joan’s struggle with regards to people not even paying attention to her, not even acknowledging when she spoke, not listening to her point of view, not hearing what her problems are and just sort of making assumptions before they even talked about something with her. This is a very typical thing that happens to anyone who’s older. And Joan is a professor at the college! At one point she was probably a star professor. She’s published in a field that demands unbelievable scholarship. To be a medievalist is the most demanding scholar of all. You have to speak about five languages fluently, for starters. So she’s an esteemed scholar, and to go from being an esteemed scholar to just this old lady who’s bumped out of her office and put in some kind of dreadful basement office without even a nod to why it’s happening, it’s a bomb going off in her life. So these things were very real to me. I have a real understanding of them. I’ve seen them do that to others around me and in my own generation. So it was actually very, very fulfilling to play those scenes.

Of course, The Chair isn’t your first outing on Netflix. On Hollywood, you played Ellen Kincaid, a mentor to aspiring actors. Did you have someone like Ellen in your life?

I did in a way: Stella Adler, who was my teacher. I came to her as a student when I was already not mature as an actress, but I’d been working for 15 years already in New York. I worked quite a bit in theater in those days. I heard about her and early in my life I went to see if I could be a student of hers, and her registrar so intimidated me that I backed off. Years later a great actress said to me, “I cannot believe you’re not a Stella Adler student, you and she would be perfect for each other.” So I went to Stella finally, and because I had worked quite a bit, everything she said made extraordinary, perfect sense, whereas the youngsters in her classes didn’t have anything to judge what they were hearing. They didn’t recognize situations that she would describe because they’d never happened. I, on the other hand, was electrified by her teaching because I was mature enough to understand it in a deep way.

We got to know each other personally, and I would say we were friends although she was so much my elder. But it was actually she who told me to take Bosom Buddies, which was my first job in LA. She said, “Nowadays, you can’t really work in New York theater unless you are known nationally.” This is a great intellectual teacher telling me this. So I took the job. She had an enormous influence on me.

What was the experience of playing the fan-favorite character Stormy in the To All the Boys sequel like? Did you hear from any fans?

I do on Twitter. Twitter liked that character very much, and I did too. I saw her… not as sort of an Auntie Mame, but as a kind of wizard, where she would try to infuse her young charge with enthusiasm for things in life and then try to instill in her a self-regard. The makeup scene is my absolute favorite, where I try to just cast this spell on her of belief in her own beauty, in her own charm. Then in another scene when she comes up and visits me in my sitting room I try again to instill in her a belief that she has absolute choice of everything she does in life and that no one may influence her or guide her to do something that doesn’t feel right for her. It was kind of a blunt scene where she is pretty specific about when to be intimate with someone and how you have to feel at first. So that was kind of great to do that. Everybody wishes they could have someone they could count on in that way, so I really reveled in playing that role.

All three of these characters are wise women who, in their own ways, don’t take crap from others. Do you specifically seek out those traits when choosing projects or is it just a happy coincidence?

It’s a happy coincidence that they offered those things, but of course it’s so attractive. I’ve played other kinds of characters too, but maybe there’s something about me. Often, I’m given roles where I’m a very strong character, and I suppose that’s true of Ellen, but you wouldn’t think of a strong woman characterization for Stormy particularly. She’s much more of an exciting character.

If I play a role well, people think that I’m like that and they cast me again in that kind of role. I’ve been lucky in getting roles where the similarities persuade people that I’ve got that at my fingertips. Let them think that; I keep getting these wonderful roles. People think I’m a very powerful person and I don’t think I am at all. I think I’m holding on by my fingertips like most of us are. But the illusion one can create is quite something else. Playing someone like Ellen Kincaid, for instance, she’s a person with just enormous goodwill. I love taking that as a main character trait, because it gives a person a kind of generosity in their manner that feels good to play. And it’s actually something that you can play. It’s a doable thing to play that quality. It’s not just smiling sweetness, it’s an action. To have goodwill is to act that way. It shows in how you carry your body, in everything you do. It’s wonderful to play those characters. Joan, in her current state, is not a character of great goodwill. She’s a very frustrated person who feels she’s at the end of the rope. I have not played that kind of character very much at all, and it’s very interesting to play. Anybody my age will have insight into that. It’s a privilege to play something that you understand well.

The Chair releases Friday, Aug. 20 on Netflix.

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Talia M.

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