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Leanne Morgan wants her fans to know that she hasn’t gone Hollywood. Sure, she just released her second Netflix stand-up special, “Unspeakable Things,” and she recently wrapped production on the second season of her Chuck
Lorre-produced sitcom, “Leanne” — which, no big deal, shoots on Warner Bros.’ “lucky stage” that once housed “Friends” and “The Comeback.”
But she is still the same person she has always been — unapologetically herself. Always going on and lamenting about her family. Unafraid to call out her blemishes, which are really just her best qualities. When she’s out in Hollywood, she is still the consummate neighbor, like she was raised to be. She rents a house across the
street from an LAPD captain, to whom she brought a roasted chicken after he had surgery.
“He cried,” she tells Variety. “I don’t think people in California make meals for each other.”
She definitely hasn’t gone Hollywood, which she makes clear before casually name-dropping the sage advisor who has been coaching her through her meteoric rise — specifically, how to silence the overly critical part of her creative mind.
“I don’t mean to drop names, but precious Jerry Seinfeld has been kind of mentoring me through this whole sitcom thing,” she says. “We’ve talked about ‘Unspeakable Things,’ and I told him I wish I had more time because I think I could have made it better. And he says, ‘Leanne, I always feel that way. I want you to know, you never feel like it’s finished. You always look back on every special and think, I could have done this or I could have done that.’”
She took that advice to heart, even if she’s still dissecting the hour special, which shot to the top of the Netflix charts in November. In the spirit of Seinfeld’s advice, we try to focus on what she loved about it.
“I think it’s aesthetically beautiful, and our team pulled that off and I feel very proud of them,” she says. “I think you can tell from the first special to the second, I’ve got a better hair color and I had a stylist! I wanted it to be more elevated and look more like somebody with a television show and somebody who had done a movie and all that.”
While juggling both, a typical weekend in her life was chaotic. She would finish filming on Friday, do two stand-up shows on Saturday, start learning lines on Sunday and then be ready to lead a table read on Monday morning. Oscillating back and forth between the two had an impact on her stand-up. “I think that it helped me with expression,” she says. “I’m still learning how to be an actor, but in that second special, I was able to be more expressive.”
But doing it all was hard. Some days, she jokes, she almost caved to the pressure.
“In that first season, when I had to learn a script every week, you’re talking about hysterical,” she says. ”Every morning, I would tell my 28-year-old baby daughter, who is my makeup artist, ‘Pack your stuff up, we’re leaving! I can’t do it.’”
But she could do it — and everyone knew she could. Touring more than 100 cities while also making her own TV series proved a lot to Morgan — most importantly, what her doctors have been telling her for years.
“It made me realize that I’m stronger than I ever thought I was,” she says. “I’ve always heard that I’ve got a strong constitution from chiropractors and physicians. I think that comes from my farming people. But then I thought, you know what? I must be strong mentally to be able to do this, and I am proud of myself.”
Season 2 of “Leanne” debuts on Netflix August 27.
