Jane Lynch Can Still Smell the Carbon Paper from Her First Job

In Early Works, we talk to artists young and old about the jobs and life experiences that led them to their current moment. Today, it's veteran actress and comedian Jane Lynch, who will be hosting Earth Live this Sunday, July 9, at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT on National Geographic.

My dad worked at a bank, and my mother was at home until my youngest brother went into first grade—then she flew the coop and went back to work. She always wanted to work. Even when she was doing the maternal thing, she really missed getting up in the morning and going to work. She was a secretary for the school district that we were all in, and she eventually worked for the Illinois Education Association and Arthur Andersen, where she retired from.

I have an older sister and a younger brother. We're two years apart—my mother says she's the perfect example of the rhythm method of birth control. We grew up Catholic, and we were a family that loved to sing and sit around the piano. We loved having Christmas Eve parties where all the family and neighbors would come and sit around the piano and sing.

As the middle child, the way I got attention was by not being a problem—which sort of backfired on me. My sister was controlling and my brother was very quiet, so while my parents were trying to negotiate my sister's controlling mood and my brother's lack of life drive, I was just like, "I'm fine. Everything's good with me." Of course, all I wanted was for somebody to ask me how I was.

My siblings and I always got jobs in the summer. My first job was working at a warehouse. Remember carbon paper? We'd get these purchase orders, and it was my job to pull out the yellow ones, put 'em in a stack, and fill out the carbon paper. I always remember that smell—my hands were black the entire summer. What I loved about the job was the detail work. It was like running errands for me—just going one place to another and putting things away when I get home. I love doing that. I'd be a great assistant.

When I knew I was going to Cornell for grad school in upstate New York, I was thinking it was going to be like New York City, but that didn't happen at all. In upstate New York, they sound like Chicagoans. I don't know if you've ever noticed that, but they have the same damn accent. What I loved about college was that it was in a small town. It was a hippie town. There were a lot of different kinds of ethnicities in terms of food, and a lot of people from like the 70s who were in the hippie movement still lived there—guys with beards and women with long hair and flowing skirts. I learned that East Coast people have a kind of harshness that my little Midwestern polite sensibility found rather assaultive. I felt assaulted a lot.

Second City wasn't on my bucket list—it was one of many auditions that I went to. Improv always scared me, and I didn't think I did particularly well. They only cast two women every year for each touring company, and I was one of them. It opened me up to the world of sketch, and that's where I really fell in love with performing. I'm really grateful that I was kind of plucked out of that group, because I wouldn't have done it for myself.

Nobody who's working in Chicago is saying, "I want to be on Saturday Night Live" or "I want to do something in LA." You're very much in Chicago, and your aspirations are to be the best you can be right there. People aren't looking at it as a launching pad—it was a destination in itself. Also, Chicago is a no-frills city. It's a friendly, inexpensive place compared to both the coasts—a small town in a city.

I was grateful to get every job. I jumped up and down every time I was cast. I did a series of guest spots on television, and at the same time, I was doing sketch comedy at night. It was a very fertile, exciting time for me. I'd do a guest spot, and it would cover my expenses for an entire month. I was doing pretty well. The first time I realized I felt comfortable paying my own rent was when I was doing The Real Live Brady Bunch at the Village Gate in New York. We were paid $900 a week, which was amazing. I stashed a lot of it away. I wasn't partying like everybody else. When I left in Los Angeles to do it, I had $10,000 in the bank, and that was an absurd amount of money for me—and it still is.

My first film appearance was in Taxi Killer. Oh my God. An Italian production company came to town to film, and they were going to dub the end results. They had brought in Czechoslovakian and Russian actors, and they cast some people from Chicago, too. It was a clusterfuck of a movie, and it was never finished. They blew town before paying all of us. The Screen Actors Guild hunted them down, and I think we got 5 cents to the dollar.

I was cast in a Kellogg's Frosted Flakes commercial, and when I showed up for the callback, there was Christopher Guest in the room. I knew who he was from Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman, so I was thrilled for working with him. The commercial was very much like doing a Christopher Guest movie. It was all improvised. A couple of months later, he asked me to be in Best in Show.

After Best in Show, the doors opened up for me. I went to a different level where people began to know my name. I started getting more work and had to audition less, which I was very happy about. I was tired of that grind, which I had done for many years. Then, when Glee came, a level of fame came that I had never experienced before.

My whole life I never felt I had anything to prove, but I certainly don't feel that way now. That's why I do things that I love to do, like hosting Earth Live. It's 51 cameras all over the world in 25 locations in six continents, and for two hours we're going back and forth from all these locations. We chose a night that's the first full moon of the summer, so there's a lot of solar energy in the world which means there's going to be a lot more animal activity going on. There's sure to be some very interesting things going on in the wild. We also have these special cameras that are going to be able to film at the dead of night and make it look like the middle of the day. So in the areas of the world where we are where it's really dark, we'll be able to see.

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