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After her hilarious turn as Victoria on the sitcom “Mike & Molly” with Melissa McCarthy, Katy Mixon has for four seasons strong lit up the screen as Katie Otto on ABC’s “American Housewife.” Even on a long-running comedy, Mixon knows exactly how to keep her performance fresh and exciting—and here, she shares her best tips with us! Sitting for a recent Backstage Live interview, the actor talked “Housewife,” her early trials and triumphs, and how her education prepared her for every curve ball thrown her way.
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Mixon continues to love playing Katie.
“I think whenever you begin a character, you always hope and believe that you’ll be given the gift of being able to dig into it and do all kinds of different things. So, honestly, just to be able to keep filming and doing it is wonderful, and that’s what I’m adoring so much. I’ll tell you, I’m with an incredible group. I feel very fortunate to be with such incredible, wonderful people who are really, really talented. I’m surrounded by greatness.”
Her training at Carnegie Mellon University prepared her for work both in theater and on TV.
“For me, all of the technicalities are different, but what I’m grounded in and my background is the same. You approach it the same way where you prepare, and as an actor, you go into a scene: ‘What’s my objective? What’s my want? What’s my tactic? Why am I talking? What do I need out of this person?’ That’s all the same. It’s just you happen to be there for 14 hours filming so many different ways from so many different angles. All of what I had experienced up until then has prepared me for what I’m doing now…. I was kind of a wild animal, to be honest with you. They didn’t really know what to do with me! I didn’t just want to go to a singing, tap, and dance school. Those are wonderful, too, but I knew I wanted to be trained in Molière, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams. I wanted to be very versatile in my background. I found it really the most wonderful program.”
Keep the camera rolling as long as possible to capture the perfect take.
“If the camera is still rolling, they need so many options, they don’t know how they’re gonna edit it. Instead of ‘And cut,’ I say, ‘Keep it rolling! Keep the camera rolling!’ I’ll just take each line and do it all different kinds of ways. I’ll play with it. The moment they say ‘Action,’ I’m a bulldog, I’ll attack it. That might be the theater in me, where I’m like, ‘We’re going out onstage and you’ve got to handle it for the first time in front of 2,000 people.’ That’s still in my head. I don’t want to have people wait, and I just want to go ahead and handle it and get it right, hopefully, the first or second time.”
When starting a career in acting, don’t compare yourself to others.
“You cannot look to the left or the right. You cannot judge yourself depending on other people. You have to literally know that nobody else is like you, and do you, boo! Do you! That’s all you can do. And, always strive to keep learning. I’ve been doing this situation with ‘American Housewife’ for four years; you constantly have to keep [asking], ‘What can I learn?’ ”
This story originally appeared in the Nov. 7 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.
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