Wedding gift idea for second marriage

Nia Vardalos hit the indie-movie jackpot in 2002 with My Big Fat Greek Wedding, an autobiographical comedy based on her marriage to actor Ian Gomez, who daze, led queer TV audiences as gay coffeehouse manager Javier on Felicity. Looking for a follow-up film, Vardalos wanted to "do something that, again, is close to my gut, close to my heart," so she channeled her love of musical theater into her script for Connie and/Carla, a new comedy about two female entertainers (Vardalos and Toni Collette) who hide out from mobsters by pretending to be drag queens.

Joining Vardalos under the spotlight--and cinched into corsets--was actor and Advocate columnist Alec Mapa, so of course we let him do most of the talking when it came time to speak with the hilarious Vardalos, who arrived at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons Hotel wearing a new top that was a gift from Giorgio Armani ("Can you believe it?" she squealed).

Mapa: You look beautiful. Are you still on the Atkins Diet?

Vardalos: No, actually, I'm just running like crazy. But if there's bread in the room, I will eat it. When we were making this movie we all had to fit in corsets, so we said, "No bread, no starch." It was the skinniest we've ever been in our entire lives. But the minute the shoot was over, I went, "Is that building made out of bread? Good--cram it down my throat!"

Mapa: I was like "Bread pudding sand with!" the day that we finished. "Would you like mayo on that?" "No, a bun on that." [Laughs] I wanted to ask you: Where did the idea for this story come from, and how did you start writing it?

Vardalos: I didn't set out to write a drag movie at all. I know a lot about musical theater because I'm a musical theater geek, so I thought, I'm gonna write a movie where two girls are musical dinner theater performers. That's 'all I had, and I improvised. I just had these girls get in trouble in Chicago, and then they were getting to L.A., and I'm thinking that all these bad things happen to them. But in the light of something bad happening to them, they go to a bar, and then they have a drink, and the two guys they're dancing with kiss--and it's like this chill came over my body, and I went, Oh, my God--and I brought in the drag show.

Mapa: Se where did the musical theater geek stuff come from?

Vardalos: I love that form. I love how the audience has to suspend its disbelief, where you just go, "Yes, and now they're singing and rhyming for no reason." And then we go back to acting. I love it. You can't go into a musical theater performance with any sort of chip on your shoulder or mood and come out in the same mood.

Mapa: I'm sure a lot of the gay readers, when they go to see this movie, the first thing is going to be, "Wow, this is a lot of fun." But the second thing they're going to think is--which is what I thought when I read the script--Oh, my God, she's one of us. 'Cause there's a certain kinship between musical theater geeks.

Duralde: They might as well all be gay.

Mapa: Right, right, right. We had this thing of "You're gayer than me." Do you remember the gay association being there when you first started doing theater? Did you have gay friends immediately?

Vardales: Yes. I remember doing the first musical, Grease--

Mapa: You met your first gay guy during Grease?

Vardalos: Isn't that funny? And I remember just being surrounded and feeling at home. It was quite a joy to be able to show my album collection and have somebody go, "Oh, my God--I have that one too!" Instead of somebody going, "Wait--you don't have Led Zeppelin?" It was really joyous to have my friend Ray say, "Can I borrow Music Man?" "Yeah, sure!" 'Cause I had the Robert Preston recording. OK, I'm a gay man.

Mapa: Yay! Exactly.

Vardalos: [In Connie and Carla I'm] living that. Be careful what you wish for, because when I write "And they dance across the stage," for some reason my brain doesn't compute that it's going to be my fat ass that's up onstage. And all of a sudden I'm in these high heels and fishnet stockings going, "Ow!"

Mapa: But then they added the costumes to it and everything.

Vardalos: That was embarrassing because, considering we couldn't look like girls, they had to sew our costumes--or at least mine--on me. And then nature calls, and there's nothing more humiliating than walking across the set and hearing one AD [assistant director] walkie-talkie to another AD, "Nia's peeing." "Nia's peeing." "Nia's peeing."

There's a message of tolerance in the movie, but you sneak it past the audience between numbers.

Mapa: I think you're helped out enormously in that respect by having Stephen Spinella in the movie. I've been a huge Stephen Spinella fan ever since Angels in America. I wasn't on the set the days that he shot those scenes [with David Duchovny, as Spinella's straight brother], and to see that in the center of the movie--it's such a prominent place--was really terrific.

Vardalos: Yes.

Mapa: That was really a great thing for a mainstream audience to see.

Vardalos: Yeah. Stephen brought dignity to the character, and he played it absolutely perfectly. And [so did] David Duchovny, who is the audience's eye into the movie in the same way that John Corbett was in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. If David played it with a shred of homophobia or distaste, it would have been lost.

That definitely comes through.

Vardalos: I think that Universal thought they had a niche film on their hands. And then they test-marketed it in the most mainstream American audience. When I saw them come in, they looked so strait-laced that I said, "Are we in Utah? What's going on with these people?"

Mapa: Where was this, San Diego?

Vardalos: San Diego, and then Sherman Oaks [a community of Los Angeles]. And then they stopped testing it because it tested so high. I think that the road has been paved for us by--and I need to pay homage to--first Ellen, then Will & Grave, and then Queer Eye. They have made a palatable situation in a world of intolerance. We were shocked with the test screenings. We had guys who looked like they had just stepped right out of the military with their six kids and perfect wives saying, "Sure, I'd recommend this to my friends!" I sat next door and cried.

Mapa: That's really cool.

Vardalos: Isn't it?

Mapa: It's this very moving movie that's about tolerance and being true to yourself. You said on the last day of shooting, you said to one of these teamsters, "Are you having your picture taken with a bunch of drag queens?" And the teamster turns to you and says, "They're just people."

Vardalos: Yeah, Yeah. It was one of those Moments ... First, I'd seen a teamster in between takes, screwing something into a board and mouthing the words to "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair," which is the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life.

After My Big Fat Greek Wedding, were you thinking, I'm coming off this hit movie, and people are going to let me do what I want, so now's the time to do a musical because God knows if I'll ever get to do a musical again?

Vardalos: Actually, it's a little bit more than that. When the movie broke records, every door swung open in my face that had previously been slammed. A lot of the parts that I was offered were My Big Fat Iranian Wedding, My Big Fat Italian Wedding ... almost the same movie over again. And I felt like, If I sell out now and I take the part that's offering me the biggest amount of money and is the least interesting, then why did all this happen to me in the first place? My manager said, "What else do you have?" I went, "I've got this dusty little script in my drawer about musical theater." I was just trying to stay tethered to a point of I know this world. Does that make sense?

Mapa: Yeah. A year ago--it was right after the Academy Awards--we were recording the music, and your eyes were as big as pie plates. Your family was in town, and you had just gone to the Academy Awards, and you'd just been nominated, so it was like everything just happened. The whole thing was like, "Can you believe it?" and you're like, "No, I can't believe this is my life!"