Getting Sticky with Judy Greer

When you think of Judy Greer, which role of hers first comes to mind? Turns out, asking this question is a surprisingly effective pop-cultural Rorschach test. Few actors have amassed such a prolific body of work, and even fewer leave such an indelible impression with every role. There is no right answer here; rather, it’s what your answer reveals about you.

Are you a 13 Going on 30 Greer or do you lean more Wedding Planner? Jawbreaker or perhaps Halloween? Hell, maybe you’re an Arrested Development Greer and that would be a stand-up choice. There are infinite Greers to choose from, including her latest role in The Five-Star Weekend, in which she delivers that tight-lipped, smarmy disdain she’s practically patented. Yet whether she’s serving doling out catty jabs, conspiratorial charm, or raw vulnerability, each Greer is as memorable and magnetic as the last. 

Even more impressive: for someone who’s been such a constant presence in our collective consciousness, she’s managed to maintain an enviable degree of privacy. When she isn’t working, Greer’s leading a remarkably normal life with her husband and her now-grown stepchildren, Emily and Lucas. When Greer met her husband roughly 16 years ago, his kids were around 9 and 12. So while she got to skip the diaper stage (a plus), that didn’t mean there wasn’t endless other shit to help out with and, most of all, learn. And as she’s quick to admit, she was exceedingly unprepared for it all. 

Then again, what parent is prepared? Just as no one can teach you how to raise a kid, so too can no one teach you how to help raise a stepkid or, for that matter, how to navigate and find your place within a family dynamic that’s already put down its roots. All you can do is try and fail, then try and fail again, learn a few lessons along the way, and hopefully have a sense of humor about it all. Lucky for us, this is Judy Greer, Hollywood legend and comedy queen.

Here, she reflects on Five-Star Weekend, how “aging gracefully” went off the rails, and stepparenting in all its (often thankless) glory—from the hard-won wisdom to the early missteps that were as mortifying in the moment as they are hilarious in hindsight.  

Words by Rachel Hodin, Images by Erin Pederson

It should go without saying, but: no two stepmom experiences are alike

It’s a strange phenomenon to enter into an eco system. And every situation is so unique. Every family is so unique. Every relationship is so unique. Was it a divorce? Was it a death? Where is the family when you meet them? Where are the kids? How old are the kids? Do you have kids? When you're moving into these situations, every factor is so unique so there's no one, cookie-cutter way to do it. 

When we got married, my husband and his ex-wife had been divorced for many years—seven, something like that. So everything was kind of good and peaceful and settled and happy. That was the experience I walked into and it’s been amazing and really dreamy. Obviously there are movies and books and so many people—many people I know—that don’t have the experience I've had.  

When I met my stepkids, I think they were nine and 13. So they were not little little kids. I got really lucky because there wasn't anything bodily happening that I had to deal with. I didn’t have to change diapers, clean up vomit, or anything like that. Ultimately, I had really good kids though, so it was all much easier for me. Of course there were the regular things, like a snippy attitude here and there as they got older. But my husband's ex-wife is a sheriff and her husband works in law enforcement too, and I think because of that, there wasn't a lot of crazy shit that went on. The kids might say differently, but that’s my observation from the outside.

#1 rule of advice for future stepmoms? Don’t try to win them over

My aunt became a stepmom when she was young. I called her at the beginning of my relationship and was like, “Do I bring presents? What should I do?” And she was like, "Don't try to win them over. Don’t buy them. If anything, just bring some cookies.” Her advice was like, just show up and be yourself. Which is kind of insane to say—“just be yourself”—when you're meeting a child, but it was good advice. I think trying to win them over is never going to work. It's the same with adults; you just have to ask a lot of questions and listen a lot.

“I was coming from a place of full singledom…” 

Before meeting the kids, I didn’t know how to do anything. I was coming from a place of full singledom. There's this funny scene in the movie Stepmom where Julia Roberts is driving one of the kids to a birthday party, and she's like, "What do I do?" And I remember very distinctly getting in the car to drive my stepson Lucas to go play at his friend Kyle's house, and I was like, "Okay, so where does Kyle live?" And Lucas was like, "I don't know." I'm like, "Right, of course you don't know where your friend lives because you're nine." Little things like that; I kind of forgot they were kids. 

Another time, I handed my stepson a lighter and asked him to go light the candles on the table for dinner. This probably makes me sound like a full demon. He was like, "I don't know what this is or what to do with it." I'm like, "Right, that's right. You're a kid and you don't know how to light a lighter.” Things like that. 

I didn't know how to grocery shop for that many people. I’d always been a basket grocery store girl, and now I'm, like, pushing the cart. I didn't know the after-school snack directions. Am I supposed to walk up to the door to get the kid from the playdate? Do I sit in the car? Do they come out? Like, I don't know. I didn't know how to cook anything.

This other time I had to bring oranges to soccer practice, and my husband's like, just cut up a shit ton of oranges. And, oh my god, I just got bags and bags and bags and bags of oranges, I sliced them all up, and not one child ate any of it. I didn't really realize that of course they’re all going to go for the Goldfish. Little things like that I just didn't know. 

Little league…big learning curve 

It was really scary to meet the kids' friends’ parents for the first time. Very early on in my relationship with my now-husband, there was a little league baseball game I went to, and I remember saying to him something like, “That kid’s terrible.” And then being like, “Oh, we’re not at Dodger Stadium where I can talk like that.” I'm also sort of trying to be funny to the guy I'm dating, and as I’m saying, “How is this kid even on the team?” I’m realizing his parents are sitting behind me, that all the kids’ parents are everywhere and you can't talk like that in the bleachers of a little league game.

But the weekends at the little league field were always so fun. Early on, weekends definitely became a divide-and-conquer. My husband and I had to immediately figure it out and be like, I'm with her taking her to soccer stuff and he's with him taking him to baseball stuff. Sometimes there would be a soccer tournament in Lancaster, California for an entire weekend that I’d have to go to, which was crazy. There was a learning curve for sure, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of the other parents. They told me what time to be at the fields in the morning, what to look for when I came to the fields, and what I needed to bring. I couldn't have asked for a better situation. 

I got to see how much the families in this community where we raised the kids looked out for each other. And I always thought, wow, you see this in the movies, but this is real. Like, you can totally call like the Augustines to pick up Lucas from practice if you're stuck in traffic on the 101. It was like a village where we were and everyone was so helpful, thank God.

On gratitude, or lack thereof 

I tend to take things very personally, and I'm working on that. It’s probably because I tend to be a self-involved actress. Having not spent much time with children before my stepkids, I didn't realize that for kids, their job is to be given to and to be raised and to take from us. 

If I could go back in time, there were a lot of things I took personally that I wish I hadn’t because they had nothing to do with me. Like I’d pack them an amazing lunch and they wouldn’t say thank you and I’d say something to my husband and he’d be like, “Why would they say thank you? You're supposed to pack them lunch.” And I'm like, "Oh, right.” 

All parenting for a certain amount of time is thankless. And because of the age when I met my stepkids, I never got the cuddly baby part with them, the falling asleep on my lap part. When you’re packing the lunch for your kids and they’re older, you’re probably thinking about how they used to be so tiny and would be like “Mama,” whereas I never got that. I’m just packing lunch for an adult-sized human who leaves without telling me to have a good day or something. And I'm like, "Wow, this is just really one-sided.”

When to step in—and when to not

As much as I believe that sometimes an outsider can offer some insight into a family dynamic that's been running in a certain way for so long, looking back, I do wish I had been more of just an observer in the beginning. A therapist once told me that I am responsible for these children when I'm with them but I am not the end-of-the-line decider. That’s their parents’ job, in my opinion. 

My husband and I never fought about it, but there were times where I’d say to him, “You should tell your kid to do X, Y, or Z,” and my husband would be like, “You should tell them.” And I’d say, “That's not really fair to me. I don't want to be put in a position where I have to, at this point, be changing rules and stuff.” And I mean, I don’t think it’s totally fair for the new person in the family to have to be in charge of making big changes; I think it sets us up for some pain and agony, depending on the family dynamic. 

He and his ex-wife were co-parenting, but they were single parents, right? You only have the kids a certain amount of time, so you kind of let things slide that you wouldn't necessarily if you had them full-time. As an outside observer, I was sort of able to notice things. And I did try to sort of push some agendas with my husband early on. I’d say, "Hey, your kids don't have any chores." And he'd be like, "What? They don't?" And I’d be like, "No, maybe they should have a chore or two." And he thanked me for that. But there is something to be said for just hanging back and observing everything for a bit, and coming to the realization yourself of Oh, this is why they do this. This is why that works that way. Maybe their way is a bit more difficult, but it does work better for whatever reasons. 

I mean, it's hard. Even just the house: we lived together, but we didn’t really cohabitate in one single house. I kept my house and he kept his. So it was a long time before I even decorated the house where I lived with him and his kids, a long time before I sort of put my mark on our living environment. Looking back, that helped me to feel a lot more like a part of the family because for a really long time, it felt like I was living in their house. 

“Once I made the decision not to have my own kids, it was really freeing”

I was always on the fence about having kids of my own. With my generation it was always like: you get married, buy a house, and have kids—that’s what you do. It was kind of a script that was already written. As I was getting older, my gynecologist was like, "You need to freeze your eggs if you're not going to try to get pregnant soon." And I was like, "Oh, um, shit, I guess I have to decide.” I was talking to my girlfriend Claudia on the phone one day and I was like, "I really don't know what to do." And she was like, "Girl, you don't want a baby." And I was like, "What are you talking about? How can you say that?" She was like, "Because if you wanted a baby, you'd have a baby. Like, women who want babies get their babies.” I'll never forget her saying that: women who want babies get their babies. And I was like, "Oh, yeah, they do."

My husband and I talked a lot about it. We weren’t going to leave it up to the gods; we were actively going to make the decision to do it or not. Ultimately, I was really happy with my stepkids and with my job, and I didn't think I could raise a baby the way I wanted to and still work the way I was working. And I was in love with my husband, and there’s no denying that children really do change the dynamic of a marriage; they can’t not. The goal, I think, is that children bring you closer together, but I don't know, everything was really really great. I'm sure if I’d married a man who didn't have kids, I probably would have had a kid, but I was getting a lot of those needs met with my stepkids and still am, frankly. Once I made the decision not to have my own kids, it was really freeing; after that, I just didn't worry about it anymore.

On Five-Star Weekend

I've been doing this so long, I never have a negative, bitter attitude, but when you're making something, you never really know how it’s going to hit. I've been in so many different kinds of projects where I think, "Oh, this is a slam dunk," and nobody sees it. Or I didn't even think about this as being so iconic and everyone sees it. Or nobody saw it when it came out, and then 10 years later, everyone loves it. You just never know; like my friend Sean Gunn is on Gilmore Girls and he's like, “I'm on a hit TV show that I shot 20 years ago.”

With Five-Star Weekend, the script was so fun. I was excited to work with Jen again. The book was so good. I'd never been to Nantucket. I really wanted to go to Nantucket. It was fun because honestly, they all did so much heavy lifting and I just got to show up every couple weeks and have a really hilarious scene where she's just, like, a full demon. 

I can't help but try to find some truth in a scene or a character that I'm playing. This character Electra is someone who has the highest degree of FOMO and the lowest self-esteem, and she tries to build herself up and portray herself in this other light, which isn't totally accurate. But it's fun sometimes to be the comic relief, to just show up and have a really hilarious day or two at work with all these people and then get to go home. I felt really lucky that I even got to be there at all. It’s fun to have my little explosive scenes as they're in the midst of having these heavy scenes. It reminded me a bit of the beginning of my career, when I was fighting for the smaller guest starring roles and got to just come in and make a splash and then leave. There's a lot to be said for that.

It was fun to see something that mirrored my life more. On television, I see a lot of stories about these women who are this core group of friends, but in my personal life all my friends aren't really friends with each other. I have friends from all different areas; I don't have, like, the core four, the Charlotte, Samantha, Carrie, and Miranda. And I almost think that's not as common as we think it's supposed to be from seeing shows like Sex and The City, Friends, and Girls. That's not how my experience has been as an adult woman.

It's also interesting because it’s so timely, the idea of an influencer and how someone handles their private life publicly. Everything that Hollis in Five-Star Weekend is going through, she's trying to sort of craft for the public, including her grief, and that's something that we're all watching happen for the first time with people that we follow on social media, with influencers and actors and public figures in general. Like, the gate is open now to what happens in everyone's lives. 

And I thought it was a really interesting opportunity to tell stories about women at this time in their life and what they're really going through. What was so cool about the screenplay is it wasn’t afraid to shy away from the harder questions. 

“I’m like, Where is everyone? We were all supposed to be doing the body positivity thing  and now it’s like, Oh wait no no no, we're not, we don't have to do that anymore.” 

This is a really interesting time for women in general, and especially at the age depicted in Five-Star Weekend. It’s funny to me; there are two things happening and I’m not really sure which category I fall into. On the one hand, we’re trying to be more expressive about our age, this time in our lives, and what we’re going through, whether that’s empty nesting or looking realistically at the marriages we’re in. I’m seeing people talk about perimenopause for the first time ever. We’re asking ourselves, What do I really want? Do I like my job? Do I like the choices I’ve made? Because there’s still time to course-correct, right?

At the same time, there’s this other lane, where I feel like I'm watching women my age shrinking their bodies using GLP1s. Like, no judgment, but with the Botox and all the shit we're doing to our faces—myself included—we’re trying really hard to hang on and capture this youth, this look, this idea. And we're not old: we're still viable, we're still sexy, we still look the same. So I'm like, Wait, what are we doing? Which lane am I choosing? Am I choosing the one where I'm owning all this or the one where I’m not? Do these two lanes intersect later? I don't know.

I'm in LA and it's just crazy. I'm like, where is everyone? We were supposed to be doing the body positivity thing and now it’s like, Oh wait no no no, we're not, we don't have to do that anymore.

I'm trying to sort of wade through it by myself and not get too influenced by everything I see around me and what I'm getting fed through the algorithms. I don’t think it’s really affected my work at all. Personally, I don’t feel a lot of exterior pressure; the pressure I feel, I put on myself. Maybe it’d be different if I was more of a leading lady or something—I don’t know—but it has nothing to do with my work, my roles, what I do, thank fucking God. 

Being a Gen-Xer, I come from a generation where skinny and diet was everything—that's how we were raised. So that's just my baseline; it has nothing to do with what's getting thrown at me in the media. I've always fought against that. I've always tried really hard to fight against that and all the aerobics and slim-fast diets and that stuff all our moms did.