To say that Busy Philipps is, well, busy, would be an understatement. As of yesterday, the social media star became one of the few female late-night talk show hosts to hit the scene since Chelsea Handler with her new E! show, Busy Tonight. As of this week, she also became a New York Times best-selling author thanks to her debut memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little. Add in her existing roles of actress, wife and mother, and you’ve got a schedule that’s hectic enough to make anyone’s head spin.
But, as Philipps herself told me — and a roomful of people at Pfeiffer Hall in Naperville, Illinois, who showed up to take in her book discussion with Nicole Pearl on October 18 — of dealing with the pressure of it all, “I’m strong enough. I’ll f**kng take it.”
The Cougar Town star, 39, speaks with the same candor in person that has endeared her to the, oh, 1.3 million people following her daily happenings on Instagram. Girl tells it like it is, straight up, whether she’s falling down in public or lamenting the loss of a pilot. “I am just not interested in bullsh*t,” she told us.
She isn’t kidding. In just under two hours, the screenwriter (you might have seen her work in a little film called Blades of Glory) has dished about everything from years spent in the public eye on Dawson’s Creek (“I was really messy … [I was] messy in my personal life and messy in public”) to her once “unhappy” marriage. She’s also found time to take a tequila shot with a member of the crowd — after double checking her age, of course.
Honestly, it’s kind of like being out to dinner with your bestie … though Philipps’ real bestie just so happens to be four-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams.
The talk show host, for one, doesn’t really get the world’s fascination with her friendship with the Manchester By the Sea star, calling the public’s shocked reaction to two women becoming close “internalized misogyny.” “It’s a no-brainer for me,” she said. “The idea of, ‘Why can’t I have what she has’ has never occurred to me. Competition gets you nowhere.”
For all her bravado, however, there’s also vulnerability — Philipps admits to being “sensitive” while reading her DMs (which she totally does, by the way, in case you ever want to drop her one).
“The thing [is], we all feel left out and alone all the time,” she quipped, joking of her social media outpourings, “I take it to the people, I guess.”
It’s a far cry from the way the actress, who was raped at 14, dealt with her problems while growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I did lots of drugs. I was going to move and became wildly successful and super famous, [because], it’ll absolve all the other stuff,” she explained to the crowd. “I [wanted] to be seen. People weren’t seeing me. They weren’t knowing me.”
These days, the whole world seems to know her … or at the very least, a sensationalized version of her. The outspoken author got choked up while admitting that having words and anecdotes that “f**cking mean something” to her taken out of context and used as clickbait has been her greatest fear in penning her book.
Those stories that Williams saved her marriage when it was on the rocks post-election in 2016, for instance? Not true. “Mark Silverstein saved it, you f**cking assholes,” she corrected. (They’re doing fine now, PS — As she revealed to the Pfeiffer crowd, “The only two men that I dated that were worth anything were Mark and Colin [Hanks].”)
For the most part, however, she’s an open book. “I don’t need to protect people who’ve been terrible to me,” she shrugs.
There is one thing the mother of Birdie, 10, and Cricket, 5, thinks twice about posting, however: “I try to be very cognizant of being snarky or jerky … I have to resist that urge. I just don’t want to put it into the world.”
Instead, Philipps, who was spurred on to write her book after the election of Donald Trump, wants to be “a part of the next step forward” to a future that involves women supporting women.
“Everyone has each other’s backs now,” she says of the political climate following the #MeToo movement: Both Handler and Reese Witherspoon have reached out to her in support of her show, which is executive-produced by Tina Fey. “That would not have happened five years ago.”
Hear. F**cking. Hear.
Catch Busy Tonight on E! on Sundays at at 10/9c.
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