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After treading the boards in live theater and the concert stage for 45 years, Christine Ebersole was ready for a change of address. So, when Chuck Lorre asked to her to co-star in his new CBS comedy “Bob Hearts Abishola,” she left the Great White Way behind. “I’m living on network TV Easy Street,” the …
After treading the boards in live theater and the concert stage for 45 years, Christine Ebersole was ready for a change of address.
So, when Chuck Lorre asked to her to co-star in his new CBS comedy “Bob Hearts Abishola,” she left the Great White Way behind.
“I’m living on network TV Easy Street,” the irrepressible two-time Tony winner tells The Post from her home in Maplewood, NJ.
Ebersole plays Dottie Wheeler, mother of three adult children, including Bob (Billy Gardell). She’s president of the Max Dot compression sock company and is such a formidable creature, Bob refers to his late father when describing her, saying, “You know why my father died so young? He wanted to.”
“I always ask on the set, ‘Who had a mother like this?,” says Ebersole, 67.
Dottie spent a good chunk of the show’s first season incapacitated as the result of a stroke. Being bedridden did not impair her talent for manipulation, though. In one episode she played her three adult children off one another, promising each one that she would leave the company to them in her will if they met her stringent requirements. For youngest son Douglas (Matt Jones), he would have to stop getting high all the time. His twin sister Christina (Maribeth Monroe) would have to stop sleeping around. With Bob, she gave him a gut-punch. “She wants me to lose 60 pounds,” he says.
Dottie’s stroke happened early on in the season, and served as a way to bring the show’s two families together when Bob’s girlfriend, Abishola (Folake Olowofoyeku), became her nurse. While many actors would have met with stroke victims and medical professionals to research that infirmity, Ebersole had first-hand experience: her husband, Bill Moloney, suffered an acoustic neuroma 29 years ago, two years after they were married.
“It’s a tumor in the inner ear pressing against the brain,” she says. “He had a seven-hour surgery and his whole left side became kind-of paralyzed. He was a drummer and that really ended his career. He had to learn how to walk all over again. He couldn’t blink his eye. He couldn’t smile. He still has a lot of facial pain because of nerve damage
“It was all on his left side,” she says. “So I chose the left side [for Dottie]. I could relate to that. What I imagined was what Bill went through.”
Despite these hardships, the actress remains effervescent and upbeat. She briefly interrupts the phone interview to take a tray of lemon-ginger muffins out of the oven and rhapsodizes about her new gig — a piece of cake compared to Broadway, where her acclaimed performances include playing both Big Edie and Little Edie in the 2006 musical version of “Grey Gardens.” (Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore played those roles in an HBO movie in 2009.)
“If I do a split screen on a Wednesday on ‘Bob Hearts Abishola,’ I’m at work at 10:30 a.m. and finished at 11 a.m.,” she says. “Compare that to a Broadway Wednesday matinee. If you want to send me a postcard, just mail it to Easy Street and it will find me. This feels like my reward.”
Dottie may have a reward too, as Lorre has an upcoming episode where the character, who refers to herself as a “marionette with a broken string,” goes on a date with a fellow stroke victim, played by John Ratzenberger (Cliff from “Cheers”) . “Dottie doesn’t think anybody would be interested in her because she’s in this compromised position,” Ebersole says. “So she meets this guy in rehab and he makes her laugh.”
It was her first time working with Ratzenberger, whom she calls a delightful man. With all of her accomplishments, Ebersole is generous with her co-stars and sometimes in awe of them. She admits that when she was co-starring on Broadway as cosmetics mogul Elizabeth Arden in the musical “War Paint,” she would stand off-stage and watch Patti LuPone, who played her competitor, Helena Rubenstein.
“She is such a force. I said, ‘Who are you?’ The only reason we shut down was because she could not walk anymore,” she says. “She had to have her hip replaced. It still wasn’t stopping her. She was very inspiring to me.”
