“Put the past in the past,” the psychic advised. “Start embracing your changes.”
The actress June Diane Raphael nodded sagely. “This sounds like perimenopause,” she said.
This was on a rainy June afternoon and Raphael, an actress, comedian and writer who had come to Manhattan for the premiere of the Amazon series “Elle,” was receiving a double-palm reading from a 10th-generation psychic who goes only by Angela.
Though Raphael doesn’t necessarily believe in the supernatural, she figured a reading would be soothing, like a spa day without the robes and cucumber water.
“There’s so much harsh reality right now,” she said. “I find it nice to be taken away to another plane, whether it’s true or not. I like the experience of it.”
Raphael, 46, has had small roles on big shows (the sitcoms “New Girl” and “Parks and Recreation”), big roles on small shows (the web series “Burning Love”) and a medium role on the Netflix show “Grace and Frankie.” She is also the co-host of “How Did This Get Made?,” a podcast devoted, with love and acidity, to the appreciation of bad movies.
On “Elle,” a prequel to the “Legally Blonde” films now streaming on Amazon, Raphael plays Eva Woods, the often oblivious and always elegant mother of Elle Woods (played here by Lexi Minetree). When Elle’s father performs a rhinoplasty that goes wrong, the family is forced to flee Bel Air for 1990s Seattle.
There, Eva and Elle must adjust to the grunge and the gloom. While throwing a housewarming party (dress code: “upscale terrace”), Eva is shocked to find that her guests have a hankering for down-market drinks. “We’ve had several requests for beer,” she says, distressed.
Eva is entirely self-possessed and Raphael, who arrived for the reading in a feather-trimmed minidress that made her look like an expensive egret, has some of that same confidence. She hadn’t sought the reading out of any sense of uncertainty.
“I’m a Capricorn,” she said. “I’m very much an earth sign. You’re not going to find me with a guru.”
In the reading room, a bitsy, pink-walled space in the lobby of a Madison Avenue hotel, trimmed in geodes and fake wisteria, Angela had Raphael hold an amethyst crystal and concentrate on her wishes. Then the reading began. Angela traced lines on Raphael’s hand.
“This shows me you’re a good person and a kind person,” she said. “But I also see a little stubbornness circling around you.”
“That’s OK,” Raphael assured her.
Angela went on, observing that people come to Raphael for advice, that she smiled even when troubled. There was a tense moment when Angela spoke of a soul mate circling her, trying to connect with her. Did Raphael’s husband, the actor and comedian Paul Scheer, know about this? Raphael decided that this soul mate was Scheer, who had expressed a longing to reconnect after various projects had kept them apart.
Though Raphael hadn’t asked for it, Angela closed with some predictions for the future. She noted that while opportunity had often come and gone for Raphael, soon it would stay.
“You’re an old soul; you’re a hard worker,” the psychic said. “You are meant to rise.”
“That’s great news,” Raphael said. The reading over, she posed for a few selfies with Angela.
That last prediction resonated with Raphael, she said, as she was being chauffeured back to the Plaza Hotel. “Because I’ve had a bunch of moments where I’ve thought, oh things will get easier after this.” They never have, exactly. But Raphael doubted that most actors feel ease or that ease was even actually desirable.
“You’re never not at the front of that train, pushing your own career forward,” she said.
Raphael grew up outside of New York City, on the South Shore of Long Island, the youngest of three girls. To play Eva, Raphael drew on her relationship with her mother, who has since died.
“Me and my sisters were so close to my mom and absolutely adored her with the same kind of reverence that Elle has for Eva,” she said.
A student athlete and the homecoming queen, Raphael later studied dramatic acting at New York University, then turned to comedy after graduation, training at the Upright Citizens Brigade.
For a long time, that career train mostly ran her over. She made great friends, including the actress and comedian Casey Wilson, with whom she wrote the script for “Bride Wars” (2009), and developed her spiky, maximalist comedy style. But she struggled to consistently find work. She auditioned several times to play corpses in various “Law & Order” episodes. She always lost out.
But 12 years ago, when she gave birth to her first child, she felt something shift. She had worried that pregnancy and motherhood would end her career. The opposite happened: Becoming a parent put acting in perspective, which made her a better auditioner.
“It made me more courageous as a performer and more willing to fail,” Raphael said. She landed the part of an entrepreneurial daughter on “Grace and Frankie” when her son was 8 weeks old.
She and Scheer now have two sons, and even if they don’t see her as funny (“They think I’m just a mom,” Raphael said), she identifies proudly as “a real boy mom.” That gave her a particular appreciation for playing Eva, a hyperfeminine girl mom.
“She is riding so hard for her daughter and is so on her daughter’s team,” Raphael said. “That’s the kind of mother love I experienced, and there’s many aspects of my own mom that I feel have been fused into the character.” It was meaningful that the producers of “Elle” had put her up at the Plaza, where she and her mother used to go for tea before a Broadway show.
Looking out the window, she remembered how it had felt as a young actress in the city, “leaving a trail of tears behind me,” she said. But in a very Elle Woods way, a very Eva Woods way, she had kept trying.
“So it’s nice to come back with a project that I’m really proud of and a life and a family that I’m proud of and a career that I’m proud of,” she said. She didn’t need a psychic to tell her that.
The post June Diane Raphael Lends a Hand on ‘Elle’ appeared first on New York Times.
