Some actors are so good they can consistently draw attention without even trying. But Carol Burnett might be the only living legend who can literally steal scenes in her sleep. The 91-year-old actor just received her 23rd Primetime Emmy nomination for her supporting work in the satirical comedy “Palm Royale” — for playing a character who spends a good part of the season in a coma.
Created by Abe Sylvia and set in 1969, “Palm Royale” casts Burnett as Norma Dellacorte, a beloved and feared grand dame of Florida society who has been bedridden since a pulmonary episode. Her caretaker becomes Maxine Simmons-Dellacorte (played by fellow Emmy nominee Kristen Wiig), the wife of Norma’s nephew, but can only communicate her disdain through a series or groans and gibberish. Yet Burnett makes her limited capacities a master class in acting.
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While that might sound difficult, Burnett dismisses such ideas. “It wasn’t a challenge at all,” she tells PvNew’s Awards Circuit podcast. “You get up at five in the morning, you go to the studio, you get made up, you put on your costume, then you go right back to bed. All I had to do was close my eyes and try not to laugh at what Kristen was doing around me.”
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As “Palm Royale” progresses, things became a bit more difficult as Norma is trying to communicate but there are no actual lines written – the script simply says “Norma speaks.” Notes Burnett, “You can’t write gibberish in a script.” So Sylvia asked her to improvise, saying she should know what Norma was trying to say and just speak whatever syllables or lines she could get across in gibberish.
Of course, improvisation is nothing new for Burnett, who earned her first Emmy nomination – and win – in 1962 for her work in the variety program “The Garry Moore Show.” Burnett is also experienced at trying to keep a straight face opposite a hilarious co-star – though she infamously failed to do so during her 11-season run on “The Carol Burnett Show.” While clips of her and the cast breaking during Tim Conway’s antics have been around for years, Burnett says it was actually a rare occurrence. “People think we broke up all the time and that’s not true,” she says. “It’s just that it’s so delicious to remember.”
She points to the infamous sketch where Conway plays a dentist and Harvey Korman is his trapped patient. “That’s over 50 years old and still one of the funniest things you’ll ever see in sketch comedy,” she reveals. “Poor Harvey was helpless in that chair. And Tim swears Harvey wet his pants.” (For the record, she says Korman denied it.)
Asked about her most memorable Conway moment and she points to the recurring sketch “As the Stomach Turns,” a soap opera parody. In one episode, Conway’s character falls down the stairs. What she didn’t know was that Conway was going to make a meal of it. “He was a gymnast in school, so he had great control over his body,” she recalls. “He fell down those stairs in slow motion. People think we slowed the film down. It took him minutes to fall down the stairs. Then he got to the bottom and there’ s a rug on the set – he rolled himself up in the rug and kept rolling on the floor.”
During that Golden Era of television, Burnett was on air with such shows as “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “MASH” and she observes how well the comedy has aged. “They are funny and character driven, they’re not scatological or blue,” she says. “I’m not a prude, but sometimes I think some of the stuff today … it’s been kind of easy to get a laugh by being a little blue. I don’t mind if its within the character but if they do it just to say a bad word, I think it’s boring and it’s not funny. Funny is ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show.’ Funny is Mary, Bob Newhart, ‘All in the Family’ – and they hold up today.”
Of course, Burnett has also proven herself skilled at dramatic acting – mostly recently she appeared in a powerful arc in the final season of “Better Call Saul” as Marion, a prickly woman who ends up warming to Saul before turning him in. Burnett was a huge fan of the series and when creator Vince Gilligan called her and said he had an idea for a role, she told him she’d do anything. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s going to be interesting, because you’re going to be the one that brings his downfall,’” Burnett recalls.
Their final confrontation is a tense stand-off where it appears Saul might actually harm Marion, until she heartbreakingly says, “I trusted you.” Burnett reveals that wasn’t the initial line Gilligan came up with. “Vince said the line he really wanted at first for Marion to say is, ‘You broke my heart,’” she says. “But he said, ‘We can’t do that because that’s a line in “The Godfather.”’ So that’s when we came up with: ‘I trusted you.’”
Also in this episode of the Awards Circuit Podcast, the Roundtable goes through the drama series acting categories and discusses the Olympics.
PvNew’s “Awards Circuit” podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay, Emily Longeretta, Jenelle Riley and Michael Schneider, who also produces, is your one-stop source for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each episode, “Awards Circuit” features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives, discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines, and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts.
