“Funny story for you,” I tell Michelle Pfeiffer. She’s sitting across from me in the Deadline office, the picture of elegance. I also suspect that she might be fun. I hadn’t meant to tell her this anecdote, but here we are, so I push on: “I went to high school in England with a boy who had your sweatshirt. His grandfather mailed it to him. He didn’t take it off for months.”

“His granddad was Michael Gough!” I explain quickly. “He was in Batman Returns with you! Er, do you remember giving your sweatshirt to him?”

Suddenly, she leans forward and gives a genuine, hearty laugh. “No! That is hilarious. Oh my god, I love that story! That’s where all my clothes have disappeared to! I’ll be going, ‘What happened to that jacket?’ Now I know. There are people running around in my clothes.”

Since we’re going back a bit now, we get to talking about her big breakout role in the 1982 film Grease 2, in which she stepped into a sort of homage to Olivia Newton-John’s iconic leading role in the original. I tell her I loved the film, starring her as Stephanie Zinone, the Pink Ladies’ all-singing leader. “It’s so funny,” she smiles. “People do. They bring that one up a lot.”

Right now, Pfeiffer is in two major Emmy-contending television projects: Taylor Sheridan’s The Madison and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, adapted from Rufi Thorpe’s bestselling novel and created for TV by her husband David E. Kelley. The two roles are polar opposites; in The Madison, she is Stacy Clyburn, a well-to-do, rather formidable Manhattan matriarch. Poleaxed by the sudden death of her husband Preston (Kurt Russell), she finds herself drawn to the rustic Montana cabin he had so loved. In Margo’s Got Money Troubles, she’s the funny, feisty Shyanne Millet, a former Hooters waitress who struggles to support her teenage-mom daughter Margo (Elle Fanning). Thus, Margo turns to Only Fans for flexible income.

Both shows will have a second season, even though Margo began as a limited series. The Madison is renewed for a third too, and Season 2 was already shot at the same time as Season 1, Pfeiffer says. In the next go-round, she teases, “I think the honeymoon is over, and I think we see—or the family sees, and Stacy even sees—that this is going to be a lot harder than the idealism of Montana. And the beauty of it, and the romance of being there, starts to fall away and we see that it’s potentially untenable.”

At a recent FYC screening of The Madison, Fanning showed up in support, even though she’s in Pfeiffer’s other show. In fact, they have known each other since Fanning was just a toddler on the set of I Am Sam. “Elle was hanging around set,” Pfeiffer recalls. “And she played Dakota in flashback as a younger child. Dakota was six, I think.” And Pfeiffer and the Fanning sisters have remained close. “They’re wickedly smart. They’re grounded. They’re funny. They’re fun. They’re serious about the work. But I think the thing I love most about them is we have pizza and champagne nights and they are the most fun.”

Growing up in Orange County, California, Pfeiffer remembers being about six and seeing black-and-white movies and thinking, I could do that. “But I was so far removed from show business,” she says. “I didn’t know any actors. I didn’t know anybody in the entertainment field at all. And then I took a theater class in high school and I got the bug. But again, I didn’t think I was going to do anything.”

But then a high school theater teacher told her she had talent.

“I remember saying to myself, ‘I’m young enough to where if it doesn’t work out, I can try something else.’ At that point, all I really cared about was, could I make a living doing this? Will I be able to support myself?”

“I’ve, for years, been standing on the sidelines by choice, and just so envious of these actors getting to say these words that he has written. From James Spader to Calista Flockhart to Jake Gyllenhaal.

Pfeiffer was working as a cashier at a grocery store when she was offered her first role, a TV show called Delta House. Created by Harold Ramis, Chris Miller and Douglas Kenney, it would run for one season. Pfeiffer’s character was called ‘The Bombshell’.

“I figured if I could live on what I’m getting paid for this TV show for a year, I could probably quit my other job,” she recalls. “But I literally was weighing it. I was going to not do this show. I’m pragmatic.”

By 1982, Grease 2 had launched her film career, but in 1983, Pfeiffer’s star power took a major leap with the role of Elvira in Scarface. To this day, she cites getting cast as one of her favorite memories: “That was a long audition process, and I really did not think I was going to get that part at all. Anyway, I just showed up, and it went really well. I was going somewhere with my friend, and we found out right before the airport. And I remember sitting in the parking lot at the airport with my friend, with a bottle of champagne, drinking it out of coffee mugs.”

Scarface and what followed—Married to the Mob, Tequila Sunrise, Dangerous Liaisons, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Frankie and Johnny, The Age of Innocence and Love Field—cemented her status as a major movie star with wide-ranging talent and three Oscar nominations. On top of that, she would go on to get an Emmy nomination, seven Golden Globe nominations and a Globe win.

Lately, she’d been actively looking for something great in television. Some shows she’s relished watching are Nurse Jackie, Mare of Easttown and Alex Garland’s limited series Devs—“How I fell in love with Nick Offerman was on that show,” she says of her onscreen ex-husband in Margo. “And then there are my husband’s shows,” she says, smiling. Mega writer-producer Kelley has shepherded such TV smashes as L.A. Law, Ally McBeal, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Big Little Lies and Presumed Innocent. “I’ve, for years, been standing on the sidelines by choice,” she says, “and just so envious of these actors getting to say these words that he has written. From James Spader to Calista Flockhart to Jake Gyllenhaal to… It just goes on and on and on.”

Pfeiffer had noticed the book of Margo’s Got Money Troubles on the kitchen counter in the home she shares with Kelley but hadn’t yet read it when he first mentioned a potential part. “I kept walking by it,” she says of the novel. “It was kind of an intriguing cover. I think I may have said, ‘Oh, what is this? Is this good? Should I read it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it is. Actually, there’s a part in there that everybody thinks you’re perfect for.’” Pfeiffer started reading.

“She’s pretty early on in the book, and I knew immediately that I wanted to play her. There was just no question.”

“I think because I know her. I grew up in Orange County, not that there aren’t Shyannes all over the world, but I think because it was Orange County, and I loved her spirit. I loved that she’s a survivor, a take-no-prisoners kind of gal. I felt like I would have a lot of fun playing her. That’s what I’m looking for too—I’m really looking for experiences that I can thoroughly enjoy. Not that The Madison… I can’t say it was fun,” she adds, meaning its subject of grief, “but it was fun working with that cast, the crew, the director.”

It was this desire to do great television that also prompted her to go to Texas and meet with Sheridan. She had no idea what he had in mind and still didn’t really when she committed to The Madison. “I still can’t believe I agreed, not having seen an outline,” she says. “He talked very little about what is basically this family that has suffered this unspeakable tragedy and moves to Montana. So, I figured it was a kind of ‘fish-out-of-water’ story, and that was it. And I went home.”

At a later date, Sheridan did tell her a little more. “He said, ‘I want to make a show about two people who are deeply in love—and there’s no and then we discover there was an affair. No. It’s a study of grief and it’s a study of true, deep love.’ And that was really beautiful.”

Will Arnett plays Stacy’s therapist in The Madison. He becomes a verbal punching bag for all of her grief and rage, which proves both funny and moving. “I loved working with him,” she says. “We only had him for a few days and those scenes were just pages long. It was so much work. A lot of dialogue. Two people in a room. But he was such an amazing scene partner.”

She also enjoys how Stacy schools her two daughters and granddaughters on their manners, particularly in not being glued to their phones at the dinner table. However, she admits that she herself is rather attached to her phone. “It’s awful,” she says. “I think that technology has just separated us so much, we’re just all so disconnected. I read this checklist of, ‘If you check three of these boxes, you have a phone addiction.’ I checked every single one of them.”

Given that, it’s somewhat ironic that after she leaves, I use Instagram to find the now-middle-aged boy whose granddad once mailed him the fabled sweatshirt. He writes back immediately. “It still smelled of her perfume,” he says.

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