PATRICIA HEATON: Unexpected

The daffodils, the tulip seben fading away, the cherry blossoms falling in a profusion of soft, rosy petals that remind me of fluffy, pink snow drifts in my yard. April has nearly worn itself out, But before we bid it goodbye, let's take a moment to appreciate all that it delivered after winter had its way with us. I also want to recognize it for another good reason. April is National Infertility Awareness Month. It is a month filled with signs

Thanks for having me.

I am so glad we're doing this on zoom. Although our listeners can't see it, I get to see you in fangirl for a minute. I don't fangirl very often because I've worked nights for forty five years. Fifty years

Right.

But back when, back in the day, I would record you.

Oh that's lovely.

And that's how I figured out how to use the recording device so I could record you, because.

Yeah, fantastic.

You make me laugh and you're just so I'm fangirling for a moment.

Okay, I'll take it.

You are, and you're even more beautiful, like you're so beautiful. My podcast producer runs things by me and she's like, well, how would you like to talk to this person? How would you like to talk to that person? And she reached out to me and she said, I already know the answer, but I still have to get the official So how would you like to talk to Patercia Heaton? And you you're one of those people that we all

Yes, And they relate to my characters that I've played, and both Everybody Loves Raymond and The Middle are on all the time, and people often tell me they go to bed with one show or the other. A lot of people go to sleep to Raymond and watch The Middle with their whole family and binge it and rewatch it and picked up, you know, sayings from the show.

It kind of becomes a part of your vernacular.

Yeah, and it sort of becomes a tapestry, part of the tapestry of the like the background of your life or the environment. Just the way when you're a teenager and you hear certain songs from the past, it evokes that period of your life. And I think that comedies can do that too. And the thing about Raymond in particular, but The Middle has quite a wide international reach. Also, they both have universal themes about family that anybody in

Broad universal.

Values and situations that anyone who's married with kids has dealt with.

And now we're going to talk about a movie that kind of wraps all those themes up together with Unexpected, which came out two years ago, but now it's available on Prime, so right, for those folks who never leave the house anymore. Until it's available on Prime, it's not really out there.

That's right. And one of the reasons we've decided to.

Promote it again now is that it's National Infertility Awareness months. And though Unexpected, with Anna Camp and Joe Mazzello as our stars, is a quirky comedy about a marriage, but it's dealing with the idea of struggling with infertility, struggling with the question of whether to adopt or not. And our couple, Bob and Amy, are on different pages about adoption and infertility and struggle to get on the same

So I was very impressed.

Because this is just a crew guy that I don't even know that he's even married, but he, you know, was suggesting that we don't get the male perspective and the male struggle on this topic.

So that was.

An eye opener for me to hear that from a male crew member. But it's and of course I love comedy and I think comedy is a great way into a difficult topic, and so it's it's very quirky. Our actors are fantas plastick at a camp and Joe Mazzello, and you know, with comedy of you you can kind of grab people's hearts through laughter. They kind of open up and relax even physically. If you're laughing, your body's getting extra oxygen and your serotonin levels are going up.

Comedy does that with everything, whether it's you know, difficult subjects like infertility. What a tough topic to talk about, to be open about, to deal with. I'm trying to think of any other movie or book that I've read outside of you know, technical stuff or firsthand experience that deals with the topic like it's a part of life. It's what so many couples are facing today.

So many couples, and for so many reasons. I think environmentally, you know, I think we're really now paying very close attention to what's in our food, what kind of drugs we're taking, what we're giving our kids, what's in the atmosphere plastic particular particulate matter and everything, you know, those things.

I saw a study the other day about polyester pants and how that affects.

Oh no, because well, it didn't affect me, because that's all I wore in the seventies. I remember a particular pair of peach colored, high waisted, thirty inch bell polyester pants I got for my sixteenth birthday, which were fabulous, But I was able to still have pop out for kids, kind of late in life.

So I'm going to vouch for polyester.

Yes, I made my mother taught me how to sew and what you basically means. She would come and say rip it out, rip it out, rip it out, and then she would end up finishing the project because but she made me the thirty inch bell you know, high waist polyester.

Fantastic.

You know that was really I had them in white, and I had him in pink.

Okay, And let me say, the seventies are interesting because the men looked terrible, horrid, but the women have never looked better. You look at farafaucet, this gorgeous hair, right these really these clothes like a high waisted polyester, thirty inch bell bottom pant is fabulous. Look it makes everybody look fantastic. Like the women looked wonderful and the men looked terrible.

Look dorky as I'll get out. Yes, yeah, I saw social media posts the other day that what could have been me and my best friends hanging out, lazing around and leaning against a camaro, you know, and it said it said something like, you think you're cool, you will never be as badass as your grandma.

And.

It's true.

It's true.

It's and the guys with their dorky plaid polyester leisure suits, what was that about.

Yeah, and bad haircuts and.

Yeah, yeah, we still thought they were hot back then.

So yeah, we didn't have a choice else were we going to go. But but just to say that, you know, so the environment is a factor, I think in the struggle.

And then women delaying their.

Child bearing years until into their thirties, which is what happened with me. Didn't have my first son until I was thirty five, so and I had, you know, four very quick succession. They were born in ninety three, ninety five, ninety seven, and ninety nine. So so but and I was just very fortunate, you know. I just come from a very you know, large sort of Irish Catholic tribe. And my mother was one of fifteen kids, and you know, all of those fifteen kids had between five and ten kids themselves.

So how many first cousins, like around.

One hundred first cousins.

Yeah, And my husband jokes that he's British, and he jokes that I had to marry someone out of the country just to make sure I wasn't marrying a relative.

So infertility is certainly not anything you or your family.

I've not struggled with it, Praise God, but I think those are some of the factors. And I think, you know, as far as delaying your child bearing until later, I kind of understand women doing it twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, when we didn't have companies willing to let women work remotely.

I used to work with a group.

Called Feminists for Life, and they for years, years, way before it was cool, way before it was normal, they were always pushing and trying to get companies to allow what they call telework that time, but we're talking about remote work, and nobody was up for it, and then the pandemic happened and it was forced upon everyone and has become, you know, an option often now, although a lot of people are being forced to go back into the offices, and there's a case to be made for

It's just a reality.

And it's not a judgment of anybody who waits or whatever. I look, I didn't, as I said, I didn't have my kids till I was in my thirties. But I think trying to take advantage of the way the world is now where you have more opportunities to work from home, if you can do that and you want to have kids, and I would say investigate that.

Before you hear TikTok TikTok, TikTok TikTok, because then.

You get stressed, and the stress and the pressure can make your body, you know, make it harder for your body to conceive when you have that on top of it.

So your hobby, he's your producing partner, right you guys.

Were you directed this movie and we both produced it? Unexpected?

How fun is that like to get to work with the person you love the best?

Oh? Are you married? I am you've clearly never worked with your husband.

Hell no, yeah, well we're working with a Dave.

We just we have to.

It's great and we're almost always on the same page, but with different styles of working.

So what we have to do is kind of set the rules.

As long as you have rules and you know where the boundaries are when you're working together.

So what's your work is that?

It's fine?

Are you do you? Are you mythoonical? Do you have a schedule?

There?

Are you hierarchy? Well, so on a set, the director is the last word. So he was directing. I was sitting next to him at the monitor, but I, you know, we're both actors and we love working with actors, and I would have my own notes when we would watch, like with Unexpected, when we would watch a scene, and so we had to just and only the director should be going on set to give actors notes after a take, and so I have to make sure he didn't leap out of his director's chair before I say, what do

So and it's fun.

Yeah, oh my gosh. Making a movie is probably one of the hardest things you could do, but it is so wonderful when you're in the midst of it, and when you're in charge. It's a lot of responsibility, but if you have a good crew supporting you, it can.

Be so much fun.

And to have that creative control and to see things come to life and then to see magic happen that you didn't plan. You know, you try to plan, especially when you're doing a low budget, you try to plan within an inch of your life, uh, so that you finish on time every day, you don't run over because it's costly.

And then when you've got that rolling like a machine.

Sometimes things just happened between the actors or there was one there's one scene in the movie where it's sort of a more serious moment and one of the one of the characters walks out the door and as the door shut, it created a little wind in the room where this curtain just softly moved after he shut the door, which you can't you can't plan, and it just was like this beautiful thing where we're all of us have the monitor, were like, oh, the curtain.

You know.

It's like geeking out now about little things on set that make you happy. But it's that kind of magic and magic that happens between the actors. And there's a there's a scene in the movie. There's a rabbit kind of figures prominently in the movie, a live rabbit named Binkie, but also a little origami rabbit that is in a

Is it? Oh? I have to do it again because he went the wrong way or the bunny tipped over.

It's some of a ridiculous way of living, but it's one of my favorite scenes in the movie because it's just so it's shot beautifully by our wonderful DP Alison Andersson, and it's just a very moving moment and it's visually beautiful and touching with this beautiful music underneath it. So those are the kind of things that keep crazies like us going because it's an insane business and nobody in the right mind would ever pursue it.

It would have to.

It just has to be something that's in you that you just feel you have stories to tell and they must come out.

So in addition to telling those stories in your acting career when you were on camera and in your producing career, you've written a book for moms, you've written a book for us.

That can act.

How to get a job like mine.

Oh, motherhood in Hollywood? How to get a job like mine?

I wrote that many many years ago when I was on Everybody Loves Raymond. And it's sort of an odd autobiography and that it's it's divided into three sections, growing up in Cleveland, struggling in New York, and making it in Hollywood. So the chapters are not necessarily on a start to finish timeline. It's sort of a little bit stream of consciousness essays on certain events that happened in those three different periods of my life, about things I

And now you've got four boys, and have they all launched? Are they still in the nest on the edge of the nesta? Have they flown the nest?

They've all flown the nest in a sense. And there's ages twenty six to thirty one, and they all have jobs, but they're still, you know, finding their way. Three of them have what I consider serious girlfriend. I think that those are going to be their life partners. So we're excited about that. And we're just trying to stay alive long enough to see grandchildren because that could be a minute.

So I'll lend you a few, oh, so that we can.

Give them back after a few hours. Yeah, it'd be great.

Between my husband and I, we have twenty twenty three and one great grand So.

Oh my goodness. You sound like yeah my mom's family growing up.

Yeah, but I didn't do it the old fashioned way like your mom, right right right. I let other women, God bless them, all the birth moms to the heavy lifting. Yeah, and all but two I got after they were you know out of diapers, right.

Yeah, so that's helpful. Yeah, they were.

Sleep through the night mostly mostly mostly.

Yeah.

It's been so lovely catching up with Patricia Heaton today and learning about the film and everything else. I want to stop for a moment and thank my podcast sponsor for making this conversation possible. Trying to come up with a thoughtful Mother's Day gift, I have a suggestion absolutely anything from Laura Geller Beauty, whether it's their skin perfecting spackle primer, their silky baked foundations, their juicy lip balms, or any of their other fabulous offerings. Every product makes

We have a couple projects that we're going to be taking out and pitching. I'd like to do another comedy, possibly multi camera, with an audience, because it's such an immediate gratification and I love being with comedy people. It's really fun. And I think when you spend your life trying to make people laugh, it gives you kind of a lightness.

Now, of course there's a gat up comedians. We're a little bit different.

They're slightly darker, but for the most part comedic actors, and sometimes they're both like Ray Ramano. It's just fun. It's just fun to make people laugh. It's fun to be around people who make you laugh. And I think if everybody could go to work and your whole focus of the day was trying to be funny and perfecting it and honing it, and then at the end of the week an audience came in and applauded your efforts at your job, the world would be a much.

Much better place place.

It's a blessing, a blessing. A blessing to be able to make my living doing comedy. It's such a blessing.

I don't enjoy being around people who aren't funny, like if you can't laugh, especially at tragic situations or.

Difficult Comedy is based on pain.

Really, when you analyze it, it's about pain and pain as can be hilarious and it's the best. A great way to deal with pain is to try to find the humor in it, which kind of lends you a sense of hope and that this, you know, whatever you're going through, is not going to last forever. And that the other message would be there's a lot of people in the world who are going through what you're going through, and we all get it and we share it.

Amen. Amen.

When my when my father was passing away, all of us five kids had the blessing of being with him for the last three days of his life in the in the hospice care and you know, every day, at some point in the day, the nurses would come in and say, I think this is time, it's time. Now he's going, he's going, and we'd all gather around him and put our hands on him and thank him and talk to him, and then he'd hang in there, and he'd hang in there, and then another day and another day.

I have.

Come on Dad.

And head.

He was probably cracking himself up, like gotcha again, right, So yeah, you know humor, humor, well, you humor us, you make us laugh. Ah. Patricia, thank you, thank you so much, Thank you, honey.

Appreciate you.

Yeah, God bless. Patricia recently finished filming a supporting role alongside Zoey das Chanel and Charlie Cox on the Amazon MGM studio's upcoming film MERV, and also start alongside Brian Cox in the indie feature Mending the Line and in Sony's faith based comedy Mom's Night Out. She can currently be seen in the feature film Unbreakable Boy, Oh my gosh, that movie made me cry so hard with Zachary Levi, and next in the ritual with al Pacino, Oh my gosh,

Mhmm.