The 2016 Emmy Award winner for Best Supporting Actor is Louie Anderson, who won by channeling his mother for a complex role in FX’s challenging, refreshing, and funny comedy Baskets. Anderson plays matriarch Christine Baskets. And as he said from the Emmys stage: “I have not always been a very good man, but I play one hell of a woman.”
Anderson says his difficult upbringing basically spat him into comedy, where he was lucky to find something he both loved and was good at. But that difficult upbringing also gave him everything he needed to nab his third Emmy Award, and his first for portraying a woman. From his own mother Anderson “stole every nuance, shameful look, cruel look, loving look, passive aggressive line,” he confessed. Great artists steal, as everyone knows. Faulkner said a writer should be able to rob his own grandmother if it helps produce art. Why? Because he believed one “‘Ode on a Grecian Urn‘ was worth any number of old ladies.” (Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature.) In robbing his own mother, Anderson follows an illustrious artistic path of homage/thievery. Baskets begins its second season in February.
Breakfast of Champions pic.twitter.com/maJio5YonY
— Louie Anderson (@LouieAnderson) September 19, 2016
