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The longest gap in Laurie Metcalf\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9 since making her professional stage debut 50 years ago is\u2014by far\u2014the three years between the pandemic shutting down her Broadway production of Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/em> and her return to Broadway in 2023\u2019s Grey House<\/em>. A charter member of Chicago\u2019s venerable Steppenwolf Theater Company, she\u2019s buttressed those 50-something roles with two Tonys, an Oscar nomination, and four Emmys. Now, Metcalf is tackling one of the greatest American plays, Death of a Salesman<\/em>, which opened the same day Big Mistakes<\/em>, a Dan Levy-led comedy in which she stars, dropped on Netflix.<\/p>\n Arthur Miller\u2019s 1949 masterpiece is an intimate play, but Metcalf and co-star Nathan Lane fill up the massive, 1,600-seat Winter Garden theater with sheer talent and force of will. Still, it\u2019s a beast of a play, and Metcalf tells Vogue<\/em> it represents one of the first times she\u2019s used a microphone onstage. \u201cI\u2019m so old and old-school that I\u2019ve only just started to wear a microphone. It\u2019s the first time that I\u2019ve worn a mic that\u2019s actually doing the real heavy-lifting. If we were having to work without them and just project, nobody would have a voice left by now.\u201d<\/p>\n The deluxe production is a career milestone that Lane and director Joe Mantello had been dreaming up since the \u201990s, folding Metcalf in about a decade ago. Since then, it\u2019s been a game of waiting, maneuvering, and, per Metcalf\u2019s strict rules, not<\/em> watching any performances of the play.<\/p>\n On the eve of her two major premieres, just months after opening in Samuel D. Hunter\u2019s Little Bear Ridge Road<\/em> this same Broadway season, Metcalf candidly told Vogue<\/em> about playing roles written for her by generational fans, the joys of being miscast, and what it takes for her to feel comfortable in front of a camera.<\/p>\n Vogue<\/em>: How do you carry the knowledge, for 10 years, that you\u2019ll be playing a role someday?<\/strong><\/p>\n Laurie Metcalf:<\/strong> I penciled into my calendar, \u201cDo not go see a production of Salesman<\/em>.\u201d That was number one, because that\u2019s going to get stuck in my head and I\u2019ll never forget it. I wanted to come at it as fresh as I could, even though it\u2019s a 75-year-old play. I\u2019ve never seen it\u2014ever. I knew it was one of those bucket-list roles that I would age into\u2014and past [laughs]\u2014so I always stayed away from it. Beyond that, no, I wasn\u2019t pulling it out of a drawer and reading it once a month or anything. I wanted to postpone all of that and wait for the workshop that we did for about four days, when we knew the cast. That\u2019s when I really started digging in, and then luckily I had about a month break to actually learn the lines. I appreciate that what Nathan is bringing to it eight times a week is enormous, but even for me, memorizing took forever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n