“Hello, baby,” the actress Allison Tolman said to a handsome male. “Look at your mustache.” He crawled into her lap.
This was an afternoon in late September and Tolman, a star of the NBC mockumentary “St. Denis Medical,” which premieres on Nov. 12, was at Meow Parlour, a cat cafe on the Lower East Side. Tolman grew up with cats — alongside dogs, lizards and guinea pigs — and has lived with them for the whole of her adult life. “When you have a home, obviously you put a cat in it,” she said.
Her Instagram bio reads “Childless Cat Lady” (also “proud member of the Perfect Breast Community” and “Rich Man”) and on her left ring finger she wears two thin gold bands, one engraved with the name of her first cat, Annie, the other with her current cat, Bud.
“I just think I’ll always have cats,” she said. “Cats have their own lives, their own things going on.”
Tolman, 42, also keeps busy, selectively. She broke out at 32, with the lead role in the first season of the FX drama “Fargo,” and has spent a decade convincing producers that she is a leading lady, not the co-worker, the best friend, the mom. Choosy, she passes on any role that doesn’t seem substantial enough for her or mentions a character’s weight. (That she is considered a plus-size actress even as she is a straight-size woman “doesn’t make me feel insane at all,” she said dryly.)
A tabby cat nudged her hand. She cuddled it. “I know my worth,” she said.
Tolman can’t remember a time when she wasn’t performing. She loved making people laugh; she loved the alchemy of shifting between character and self. (Later, in therapy, she’d recognize acting as a way to receive positive attention from her family, but she didn’t know that as a child.) She grew up in Sugar Land, Texas, just outside Houston, and went to college at Baylor University, a Baptist school in Waco. She majored in theater and was promptly typed as a character actress; she was generally cast as older women, grandmothers. There wasn’t much to do if you weren’t an ingénue, she said.
After graduation she moved to Dallas where some classmates were starting a theater company, Second Thought Theater. She stayed there for most of her 20s, working day jobs to pay for her theater habit, supplementing her income with the occasional commercial and the even more occasional TV appearance (a nurse on “Prison Break,” a mom on “Barney & Friends”).
Steven Walters, a founder of Second Thought, recalled Tolman’s gifts for both comedy and deep emotion. “She had a great facility for drawing audiences into not just the humor of what she was doing, but also the humanity of it,” he said. Audience members, he recalled, would feel that they knew her, even though they had never met her.
That authenticity appealed to Noah Hawley, the creator of the TV version of “Fargo.” Plenty of well-known Hollywood actresses auditioned for the role of Molly Solverson, an upright, no-nonsense police deputy, but the casting department also sought out Midwestern unknowns. Tolman, who had moved to Chicago by then in search of a bigger theater market, put herself on tape. She didn’t expect much from it. She had a decent day job by then. She had health insurance.
When Hawley watched Tolman’s tape, he saw someone who could embody the decency the role demanded while also being strong enough to counter the story’s darkness. “She was not Hollywood in any way,” he said. “She just felt like your neighbor; she just felt real.” Tolman was flown to Los Angeles for a screen test, and the network was convinced.
That fall, in Calgary, she found herself acting opposite veterans like Billy Bob Thornton, Keith Carradine and Martin Freeman. She didn’t know her way around a set, didn’t know the lingo. What was a mark? An eye line? She paid attention and figured it out. And while she is not confident about some aspects of her life — “Don’t look at my romantic history,” she said — she has never doubted her acting abilities.
“I was like, yeah, this I can do,” she said.
“Fargo” was a success, winning the Emmy for best mini-series and securing Tolman a supporting actress nomination. The public-facing part of the job was sometimes fun and sometimes frustrating, as when she felt compelled to respond to criticisms of her appearance. “I’m not fat, I’ve just been wearing this GIANT EFFING COAT FOR 8 WEEKS ON YOUR TELEVISION,” she posted on Twitter at one point.
Back then, she found the criticisms baffling. She had never thought of her body as a problem.
“But the deeper I got into Hollywood, I was like, oh, I am Hollywood fat,” she said. “And it’s incredible how it has actually become a part of who I am in my regular life. I never thought of myself as plus-sized. I never thought of my body that way before I moved to Hollywood, but now it’s truly a part of who I am. It’s part of my inner monologue.”
Even after a triumph like “Fargo,” many actresses would have taken whatever came their way, eager to hold on to their rung on the Hollywood ladder. Tolman declined most offers, waiting for roles that felt worthwhile. She’d had day jobs her whole life, she reasoned, and she could take another if she had to. She wouldn’t compromise.
“I’m more confident in my professional life than I am in any other area,” she said. “I was like, I’m a Golden Globe nominee; I have carried a show. I feel like you should give me a better role.”
Better roles did come. She had a brief arc on the excitable workplace comedy “The Mindy Project” and a longer one as an antagonist on the crime dramedy “Good Girls.” She landed two more leads, in the canine comedy “Downward Dog” and the sci-fi drama “Emergence,” though ABC canceled each show quickly. She also had a lead on the Paramount+ anthology series “Why Women Kill.”
Her ABC experiences soured her on network shows, and she hadn’t been looking for a sitcom. But in 2022 her father became ill. She put her cat in the car and drove to Texas to help her mother with his care. During those fraught months, she would often end the long days watching a half-hour sitcom with her mother, who couldn’t tolerate anything sad or serious. The sitcoms were a balm. So when a comedy about health care workers like those who had helped to heal her father came along, Tolman was ready.
“It just seemed like kismet,” she said. “There’s a place for shows like this, shows that are just yummy and palatable and soft.”
On “St. Denis,” Tolman plays Alex, the supervising nurse at an under-resourced hospital in Portland, Ore. “I love it,” Alex says of her work. “It’s not always glamorous and our patients don’t always appreciate us and the pay’s not great considering the amount of work and the risks we take. …” She can’t seem to complete the sentence.
Alex is a born multitasker with terrible work-life balance and a tendency to micromanage. Like Molly in “Fargo,” she is designed to be the moral center of the show and an audience surrogate, cuing viewer response with direct-to-camera looks.
Justin Spitzer and Eric Ledgin (“Superstore,” “American Auto”) read hundreds of actresses for Alex, but none of them found the right combination of toughness and vulnerability. A casting director suggested a video call with Tolman, who immediately understood the jokes, the tone, the balance of sunniness and stress. And the creators loved how normal Tolman seemed.
“She’s not normal,” Ledgin clarified. “She’s actually superhuman at inhabiting a character. So it’s an act, but she’s incredible at it.”
Once the shoot began, Mekki Leeper, who plays a newbie nurse, noticed this same quality. “On set, you get a sense that you’re working with such a tremendous actor,” he said. “But when you watch the final cut, she just reads as this wonderful, real person.”
After the forced leisure of the actors strike, Tolman found the return to set a joy. “It was the happiest set that I’ve ever been on, because everyone was just so thankful to be together and thankful to be working,” she said.
Tolman has further goals. She writes. She’d like to produce and direct. Broadway is one of her longtime dreams. But she doesn’t mind accomplishing them in her own time and stopping to pet the occasional cat along the way. “Oh, hi friend,” she said to a passing tuxedo. (She later texted a photo of a newly acquired pink cap that read “CAT MOM.”)
And unlike the ingénues, the ones who broke out early, she doesn’t worry about her longevity.
“I know that I will work forever,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about aging out of my appeal.”
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