16-05-2025
‘It keeps me on my toes': ‘St. Denis Medical' star Allison Tolman on walking a fine line between zany and ‘incredibly heartfelt'
'I've always wanted to do a mockumentary,' admits Allison Tolman about what immediately drew her to St. Denis Medical. The self-professed Christopher Guest fan had heard word about the project and told her team to get their hands on the script. Once they did, the premiere episode by Eric Ledgin and Justin Spitzer did not disappoint: 'I was already pretty excited about it just based on the format, but then, read the first script and was like, 'Oh, this is really lovely. The jokes are funny, the characters are interesting, they really know how to make this format sing,'' she recounts. (Watch our full interview above).
Tolman plays supervising nurse Alex in the new workplace comedy series, which is set in a regional hospital in Oregon. Though the character struggles with setting work-life boundaries, especially considering that she has two young children at home, Alex serves as the calm-ish center to the goofier characters around her. 'It can be lonely to be the straight man in a comedy like this because you're not the one who gets the big moments or the big jokes or the big set pieces,' the actress says. But the role does have its unique attributes, too. 'I really feel a kinship with the audience and I really feel like the responsibility and the honor of being their touchstone. … The joy of Alex for me is that she's really aware of how all of this is coming off and she's really aware of the fact that she's being observed at all times,' she adds.
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Tolman is a television veteran whose credits include Fargo, for which she earned an Emmy nomination, Why Women Kill, and Gaslit with Sean Penn and Julia Roberts. "I've been doing this long enough now and I've had enough ups and downs that I don't really trust anything,' says Tolman, adding that she felt passionate about St. Denis Michael, but that 'specialness doesn't always reflect in how things are received and how they're promoted.' She says she felt like 'the skeptic' when other folks on the series were optimistic about the huge prospects of the comedy right out of the gate. Still, her own perception started to change when she saw how supportive NBC was of the show. 'The parents are betting on us,' she describes.
SEE Inside the success of 'St. Denis Medical': 'If you're a comedy and you're not trying to make people laugh, I don't think you're doing it right'
St. Denis Medical features an ensemble of comedy pros, including David Alan Grier and Wendi McLendon-Covey. Tolman says 'every day is a delight, we really do like each other a lot, we really do have fun.' Despite the incredible improvisation chops amongst the cast, the actress shares, 'We don't break that much, we don't improvise as much as you might expect, but we have a great time between the lines.' The series also deftly balances the zaniness of the storylines with a healthy dose of heart. 'We'll be doing a crazy scene where there's a cat loose and then 30 minutes later, you're doing this incredibly heartfelt talking head that's wrapping up the entire episode,' describes the performer, adding, 'It keeps me on my toes. It reminds me that I can do both things, that I can do comedy and I can do drama.'
One of Tolman's standout episodes of St. Denis Medical is the 10th, 'People Just Say Stuff Online,' in which Alex gets severely rankled about a patient review on Yelp that describes nurse Alex as 'snippy.' Desperate to find a different Alex who works in the hospital who the review could be describing, Tolman's Alex finds and flips out at another, quite lovely Alex in the geriatric ward. The actress says she enjoyed getting to play that scene in particular: 'I was really happy that I did have an episode where I got to be the one who was not okay. I was not holding it together well. … She was the unreasonable one and she was the one who was over the top. It was great, it was fun to play, and I thought it looked great when I finally saw it.'
Tolman has a few favorite moments from the first season. First, she references '50 cc's of Kindness,' in which 'Matt [Mekki Leeper] and Alex are trying to convince the prisoners that they have a lot in common,' because it 'is so funny and was so much fun to shoot' and was also the first time she felt like she and the show had found its groove. Then she mentions 'Listen to Your Ladybugs' about breast cancer screenings, as well as the season finale, 'This Place Is Our Everything.' Of the latter, she says, 'I'm really proud of the way that the monologue at the end of Season 1 turned out. … That was another day where I got to be, like, vasectomy jokes, stunts, and then dial it in and do this great monologue that Eric had written and do some deep, real scene work.'
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