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 new 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 dangerous lack of funding in her spillover hospital—and its unpredictable array of chaotic 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.
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 short 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 deceptive insurance salesman played by Martin Freeman. Tolman is a marvel in the show: assured, quietly righteous, indefatigable. Yet during production, she felt anything but calm.
“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 famous 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 new 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.
Tolman stayed in the broadcast world, finding success as a scene-stealing recurring player on hits like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Good Girls while struggling to secure her own next vehicle. She led another one-and-done, the ABC mystery-thriller Emergence, just before the pandemic broke out. At the same time, she had to grapple with the ghost of Fargo—the enduring feeling of “standing at the station and watching a train leave that you wanted to be on,” Tolman says. “That was hard. It was really sad.” She pitched an American Horror Story–esque format where cast members returned to later Fargo seasons in fresh roles. “But no one said anything.”
So gradually, Tolman started looking back toward the prestige space, eager to feel that Fargo feeling again. “I would tell my team, if there’s a list of actresses my age who are in contention for these roles, I should be on that list—I just don’t see why I shouldn’t be,” she says. “If they don’t like me, they don’t like me, but I should be in these rooms.” Lo and behold, Tolman nabbed and nailed a plum role in Gaslit as Winnie McLendon, the journalist whose bond with conservative activist Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts) helped lead to the Watergate scandal’s public explosion.
“You think of movie stars as having their own sort of gravitational pull because of their aura or because they’re so beautiful or whatever, but I found Julia had her own gravitational pull because she was just a fucking powerhouse,” Tolman says. “She really knows what she wants. I found her admirable and funny—really funny.”
By this point, Tolman thought she might be done with network fare. She wasn’t even sure if the sitcom remained a viable format. “I was like, ‘Are we still making sitcoms? Are they done?’” she says. “Is Abbott Elementary going to be the last bastion of this? What are we doing?” But St. Denis Medical resonated with Tolman thanks to its writing—and its timing. Her father had fallen very ill, and Tolman had returned home to Texas; her mom was visiting the hospital every day, and only had the mental bandwidth for a sitcom when she got home. The St. Denis pilot script was sent to Tolman a few months later. She thought, “There’s really a place for shows like this.”
The first season was picked up during the SAG-AFTRA strike; Tolman was a strike captain. It was renewed for season two as devastating wildfires raged around Los Angeles this past winter. “It’s very weird to be in the position where you’re getting good news when no one is getting good news,” Tolman says. “This whole town is depressed.” But there is pride in St. Denis Medical shooting in Los Angeles, providing jobs and doing its small part to keep the local industry afloat during a dark time. For Tolman, there’s also relief at having a regular job at all.
“Not a lot of people are working. People are freaked out about if they’re going to have to change careers, if they’re going to have to leave town,” Tolman says. “It’s a scary time, so it’s not lost on me how lucky we are to be coming back at a time when things are so tenuous.”
And for someone who’s experienced some high highs and low lows in Hollywood, Tolman has a good handle on how to maintain perspective. “Sometimes, you’re shaking hands with people on a Friday and they’re canceling your show the following Thursday,” she says. “When we were waiting to hear about season two, I was like, ‘This will be my first season-two pickup’—so it was just such a huge, huge relief. Now I get to experience this interim time that I’ve never had before. I’m coming back. I know what my job is.”
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