Romy Rosemont might be best known for her role as Carole Hudson-Hummel on FOX’s 2009 breakout hit Glee, but she recently teamed up with fellow actors Jason Antoon, Mary Birdsong, Greg Comer and Tricia O’Kelley in a hilarious new online venture titled Bitter Party of Five, which the actors started after the pilot for their new show Downwardly Mobile wasn’t picked up. To date, they have posted ten episodes on their YouTube channel, and plan to post several more.
Romy spoke with TheCelebrityCafe.com’s Lauren DuBois about the passion behind Bitter, as well as what it’s been like playing a mother on one television’s biggest new cult phenoms in recent years.
TheCelebrityCafe: You’ve had a 20+ year career in Hollywood, and you’ve had roles on several shows, including Nip/Tuck, Grey’s Anatomy, CSI, Law and Order: SVU, King of the Hill, and of course, Glee, so it’s a very varied set of genres…which would you say you prefer shooting, more of those serious, dramatic shows and scenes, or more of those lighter, comedic ones?
Romy Rosemont: To be very honest, I love both…as corny as this sounds, I love making people feel something. So if what you’re feeling is joy and giggly, and happy, I’ve done my job, and if what you’re feeling when you’re looking at the screen is…I don’t want to say sadness, but if you’re feeling empathy, or relating, I should say, to whatever my character’s going through, I’ve also done my job, because I just try to do the most honest performance I can do, as if you know me.
TCC: Glee has given you one of your bigger roles in recent years, playing Carole Hudson-Hummel, but that wasn’t the role you were initially asked to audition for.
RR: No, I auditioned for Jane Lynch’s part, but I was reading it and I knew it wasn’t right for me. I thought, it’s got to be someone like Jane Lynch, or someone who looks like they used to be a cheerleader. And then I got a call saying would you consider coming in for the role of Finn’s mom, but it doesn’t have any lines in the pilot…and I was like ‘um, okay, that’s weird…but okay.’ And the casting director said Ryan promises she’ll recur, and that’s all I needed to hear. I’m just thankful though that I got it, and I have been able to meet all of these people and to have been able to go on this journey with them. It’s been great.
TCC: How much of your own personality do you inject into the character of Carole?
RR: I think they’re very complimentary to one another. I think that the situations we find each other in, are very different from the situations in my life, but I definitely wanted to make Carole someone who…you saw the struggles that she had been through, and that she loved her son, and that there was just the two of them. And then they created all of these different situations, like Burt came, and so on and so forth, so I just really tried to make her the everyday woman that adult women watching the show could relate to. One of the episodes I actually got the most response to, and it was a short scene, was the one where Finn thinks he’s gotten Quinn pregnant, and I walk in and he’s singing to the sonogram that’s on his computer, and he tells me, and I hug him. They got a close-up, and all that was going through my head was the thought of ‘What a mother would feel if her 16-year-old son got a girl pregnant, as she’s sitting there with him, being a single mother, knowing how difficult it is and all of that.’ I got people who said that was such a beautiful scene, and they completely understood, because they knew what I was feeling…and when you get that response you know you’re doing your job well. But I wasn’t going after that, and that’s what was so glorious about working with Cory Monteith, is that I definitely felt maternal towards him, and felt a connection in that way.
TCC: The biggest news to rock the worlds of both all of the people who work on the show, and of course the fans, was Cory Monteith’s recent death. Are there any favorite moments from the set you would want to share?
RR: You know what, every time, because I was just so long between scenes and being on set…I mean last year, I hadn’t seen him in over a year, because I didn’t work, and I only did one episode…but no matter what, anytime I saw him, whether I was walking to makeup or wherever, he always greeted me as ‘Hi, mom,’ and that was just always sweet and lovely, and it immediately made me feel that even if I had been gone, and I hadn’t seen him in months, that we were right back to where we were, and that he felt the connection that I did, and he really was just…all the things you hear about him and how lovely he was, it’s the honest to goodness truth. He was just a really unique and special guy.
TCC: How much of an impact do you think Finn’s upcoming death in episode 5.3 is going to have on your character and her role on the show?
RR: You know, I really don’t know. I mean obviously I can’t speak for the episode, I mean I am going to be part of it, but I don’t…you never really know in what direction the writers are going to take this, they’re honoring the character in the most responsible way that they know how, and they’ve been very successful. And Finn was, he was so much the heart, or at least one of the beating hearts of Glee, so I think you’ll see that. But as far as how it will be for me in future episodes, I don’t know, I think that if I have future episodes this season, you know, it will always color Carole that she lost her son, because I don’t think any parent comes back from that completely.
TCC: So Bitter came from you and your co-stars not wanting to say goodbye to each other after the pilot for Downwardly Mobile didn’t get picked up. Is there any more detail about why you guys decided to just come together to form the show?
RR: Basically we had spent so much time together between the time we filmed it and the time we would normally find out if we were going to get picked up, and we were all just so positive that we were going to get picked up, we were creating this scenario of what the next seven years of our lives would be. And when we didn’t, we were….this was so much more than a job for us, because we all just fell in love with one another, so we just said, wait a second—it might not be picked up, but it doesn’t mean we have to stop working together. So everybody came over to my house a couple of times and we just started to write stuff. And then one of our producers/director, Adam, had come up with an idea that we’d all be sitting at a table, and that there’d be a celebrity there, and just the notion, that we’re always the ones that were just passed over, and so we kind of liked the premise of that. We all just kind of came upon the idea of the “’Bitter, party of Five,’ as if we were a family and our last name is Bitter (laughs), almost like if you’re at a restaurant you know, like, ‘Bitter, Party of Five!’ But what we concentrated on the most was the fact that we all loved working together, we had such amazing chemistry, and we wanted to put out something that we thought was funny, that when people watched it they would just laugh at how ridiculous we are.
TCC: You’re not only acting on Bitter, but you’re also producing and writing the episodes.
RR: We’re doing everything…we have this brilliant editor, but we’re on such a shoestring budget, that we have to do a lot of the preliminary stuff…so we’re completely hands-on in every aspect...which makes it challenging. We would love to start paying a crew. People are doing the work out of the kindness of their hearts, and because they believe in the project, which is really nice. You want to work on stuff that you like…I mean obviously, we all have to make a living, but it really does matter who you’re working with and what you’re working for at the end of the day.
TCC: Some of the guests you’ve already had on the show have included your Glee co-stars Chris Colfer and Dot-Marie Jones, and of course your actual husband, Stephen Root. How was it working with them in that setting?
RR: It was great, such a blast. It was always more uncomfortable for them though than it was for us. My poor husband, he’s always kind of the guinea pig in that situation, because he was one of the first episodes. And then doing Chris was such a blast, and Dot is just such a good friend, I adore her. It really was fun, but I kind of had to…I mean I am Romy, but I am a different bit of a persona, and I get to play a little bit thicker in the head. I think Jenna (Ushkowitz), said she wants to be on the show though, but I haven’t tapped the whole cast. But as we continue to do this, hopefully more of the cast will come on.
TCC: Maybe including Mike O’Malley (who plays Rosemont’s husband Burt)?
RR: That would be fun; he’s just always so busy. He’s actually been asking me, but we don’t have a regular shoot schedule, and that’s part of the problem, so we never know when we’re going to do them.
TCC: Any chance you may get Glee creator Ryan Murphy on board for an episode?
RR: That would be amazing, but I’d be afraid to even consider asking him. I don’t even know if he’s ever seen it. But there were other people who said they wanted to be on it, like Sarah Paulson from American Horror Story, which is always cool, when someone approaches you and is like, ‘How come I’ve never been on your show?’ And you’re like ‘WHAT? You WANT to be? Okay! You’re nice!’ And plus, a person like that, who’s so unbelievably talented it just blows my mind…it’s amazing to even think that she’d want to be on our show.
TCC: So when you approach guests on your own, how do you decide who to approach?
RR: it’s anybody we’re friends with. We have not pursued people we don’t know…yet. We kind of choose and go down our list of people we do know and ask who would have fun with this?
TCC: You’re developing your characters as you go along, but how much of yourself would you say is in Bitter Romy?
RR: I definitely have feelings of what I envy, or that I would love to be in a position where I have more access to a greater amount of material or more roles, or better material…that’s what every actor aspires too, so that’s real. The fact and I love my husband to death, the fact that he gets offer after offer after offer, it’ll wear on you. Of course the primary emotion is absolute joy and happiness for his success, but the actor inside of me is like, ‘Well I’m good…why don’t they call me?’ But that’s human nature. So does the fact that Chris has all this success make me feel bad about myself? No. It’s more of that, as Romy, and I think whenever you meet people that are successful, and who you admire, that they challenge you--it’s just how you perceive it. Bitter Romy perceives it as she’s definitely the kind of person who’s like ‘I have no idea why you’re more successful than I am. Clearly I’ve inspired you in some way.’ We ended up cutting it out, but I actually asked Martha Plimpton [when she was on the show], ‘So, what have you learned from watching my work?’ And she just kind of gave me this look like ‘Well…I…uh…I’m sure I haven’t really seen any of your work…’ And Bitter Romy is like ‘WHAAAT???’ and Romy Rosemont is like, ‘Oh I’m sure you haven’t seen anything I’ve done’, so it’s more like that. There’s a blind arrogance in Bitter Romy that does not exist in regular Romy.
TCC: Anything else you want to add about Bitter at all?
RR: No, just that we want people to watch, enjoy, share, subscribe, tweet it, Facebook it…just get the Bitter word out, because I really do believe that watching Bitter Party of Five, will make you feel better about yourself in some way. It’ll either make you laugh, which makes you feel better, or you’ll just be glad watching these five delicious idiots making fools of themselves, and that’ll make you feel better about yourself.