“I didn't look at myself as 'I'm the white lady’”: Why Lisa Ann Walter says "Abbott" feels like home

ABC's "Abbott Elementary" star Lisa Ann Walter wants the world to know that the sitcom's success is the result of creator and showrunner Quinta Brunson’s genius cocktail of brilliant TV writers and "top tier" comedy all-stars. “They are, top to bottom, the most talented group of people I've ever had the pleasure of working with,” Walter told me on "Salon Talks." “It's like being with the best repertory theater company.” 

"Abbott Elementary," which has won a Peabody, Emmy, Screen Actors Guild and NAACP Image Award, continues to soar in its third season. Walters stars as Melissa Schemmenti, a Philadelphia-born, possibly mob-connected, hard-nosed Sicilian who teaches second grade. She seems to never lose as she hilariously bulldozes her way through conflict. Schemmenti's toughness, reality checks and often harsh “I told you so’s” have made her a fan favorite. And for Walter, playing Melissa feels like coming home. "This may be the first time in my career where it wasn't my show, where I said, 'There is nobody in town that plays this or knows this character better than me,'" Walter said. "I am this character."

Walter has many similarities to Melissa. Her mother was a teacher, she comes from a Sicilian family and she grew up in Maryland and Washington, D.C. That's why she says she was pleasantly shocked when she first received pages from the original "Abbott" script.

It's not lost on Walter that Melissa sticks out on a show about an underfunded Black school with a predominantly Black cast. "The vibe that Quinta tells me that she got from me is probably because that's where I came up," Walter shared. "It wasn't odd for me to be in a room where I'm the only white person. That's the comfort level that I had. This felt like home to me. It's the set where I felt the most at home of any that I've ever been on. I didn't look at myself as, 'I'm the white lady'—although I am."

You can watch our full “Salon Talks” here or read our conversation below to hear Walter open up about her upbringing, nailing Melissa's accent, her friendship with Sheryl Lee Ralph and more.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You're from Silver Spring, Maryland, which is close to D.C.

It is.

I was watching the interview and you mentioned Dundalk to get some crabs, and I was like, "Yo, what is she talking about going to Dundalk?"

[In accent] Come on, Billy. We're going to go bowling. We're going to knock down them pins, Billy. We're going to go get some crabs in Dundalk.

Coming from Silver Spring, you guys used to go to that area when you were growing up?

Well, you always went to where the crabs are good. Silver Springs is the city, it's D.C. I lived in Takoma Park. I lived in D.C. I lived on 3rd and C Street, downtown, northeast, and went to college in D.C. at Catholic University. 

When we were kids we would go, and that's where the Philly accent [on “Abbott Elementary” comes from]. Because that's how it sounded. I didn't realize that I had an accent until I went to college, and then I was like, "I don't have an accent. What do you mean?"

Well, that's how you find out. You get around a bunch of people and they look at you and you say things and they're like, "What are you talking about?" 

Yeah, and then sometimes I would slip in, both my parents are from New York, so sometimes being around my mom's family, I'd say, "CHE-RHY." She would talk to her father and say like, "YEA, DA-DDY we're coming up." I didn't hear her talk like that at home. She was a school teacher in D.C. That's not what she sounded like, and then she went straight New York. It's wild. People will change what they sound like. I figured that's where Melissa's character on “Abbott” comes is a little bit of the New York mixed with the Maryland O's, and then Philly.

How did you work on that Philly accent? Was it just there?

Nah, I mean a little bit. I used to hear people from Philly talk and I'd say, "Are you from Baltimore?" Where my sister went to school, she went to nursing school in Baltimore. I was up there all the time and we'd go there to go to the inner harbor and to get crabs. There was a Phillips.

There was a Phillips. 

That's where you go.

Back in the day. If you like her and you really want to impress her, you take her to Phillips.

Yeah. You better not go to Red Lobster.

No, I never even heard of it. You know what's crazy though? I actually went on a date at Red Lobster. It was crazy because it was like a line at the Red Lobster in the county.

The biscuits. If you're from Maryland, you're not going to Red Lobster because . . .

No, not the seafood. You're lining up for biscuits.

It's like, now they get it in a box. You can make it at home. You don't have to pay Red Lobster money. Quinta likes the crab legs. She talks about some place in Philly where they have crab legs.

You got to bring her to Baltimore. 

That's not crab. Crab is bluefin, Chesapeake Bay. Those dried long Alaskan legs? I don't get it.

So, the accent came from a little bit of knowing that the people that I heard when I was in college that I thought were from straight-up Baltimore, were from Philly. Then you start hearing the difference. The O's are a little bit different. It's more in the front of your mouth. And then I watched video, a lot of video. I watched Bradley Cooper. I watched Bradley Cooper teaching people how to do Philly accents and picked it up that way.

Now you guys are in the third season and your cast is finally getting into a rhythm. Is there anything that surprises you even still?

Every day is a surprise because I'm working with what I consider to be the top-tier ensemble cast in half-hour television working today. They are, top to bottom, the most talented group of people I've ever had the pleasure of working with. It's like being with the best repertory theater company and every single week the writers throw something new, “Do this now.” 

We've got Chris [Perfetti] who comes from theater and will do a scene one way the whole way through, and then on the 12th take, he'll do a fall backwards on a chair or jump off something or exit through a different door. We've got three cameras going so our reactions are real. It is not like a writer came up — well, sometimes they do. Sometimes the writers will come up and be like, "Try this or do this line,” and then they forget to tell us and then we all respond to it because we never heard it before. But sometimes it's the actor's choices. 

Tyler James Williams is one of the most proficient comedy actors I've ever seen working, let alone got to work with. He is so small and so nuanced in what he does, but he will switch it up, like actors do. If I'm throwing you something different and every single time you're coming back at me the same way, there's nothing new, there's no surprises, but if I do something different, I'm saying the same thing to you, but I do this, then you're like, you're going to change, right? This is what it's like to work with these people. All of them. 

Quinta, who I'm so glad won the Emmy because I kept telling her, "I had nothing to do with you. I'm not your mother. I'm a mother. I have kids your age, but I'm not your mother." And I'm proud of her like she's my kid because she's unbelievably talented. And I love that she's getting all of these kudos for saving half-hour network television and for being this incredible writer and show creator. And she is. But I wanted to see her get the flowers for the acting because I do scenes with her and she's incredible. She's a gifted actress. I said the other day, "Why is she not doing a rom-com?" And then I remembered that she's really busy.

I'm sure it's coming.

Yeah, because she's cute too. Everybody, there's not a bum in the lot.

It's one thing I love about your show so much is how you guys love each other because show business is competitive.

It is. But here's one of the things that's really cool about our show, I think. Quinta put together a really good mix. It's why we won the SAG Award for best ensemble, which I really respect and honor because that's our peers who know the difference with good work. She also made the characters different enough so that there is not the same archetype going on anywhere. There's some overlap. I was saying to the EPs a month ago, every woman is an alpha in our cast. It's a cast of alpha women. Generally if you see, especially in a diverse cast, you'll have somebody who's meek, and in our show, Barbara's the one who's the lady. She's elegant. She's a queen. You call her Ms. Sheryl when you talk to her. When she's Barbara, she's Ms. Barbara. But she's not meek, at all.

Janelle [James] is the opposite of weak. I watched her yoke a guy in New Orleans when we were down there for Essence Fest because he grabbed her arm, and I was like, "Oh, there's going to be a fight. Oh OK, I guess we're doing this." But she didn't go off. She didn't go ham on anybody. She just was like, "Don't touch me." Grabbed her arm away. But everybody is strong, and yet it works because we're not the same type. So we don't have to be jealous because we're not doing what somebody else is doing. I'm not doing Mr. Johnson, who also just won an award, an Image Award. We're happy for each other.

I think “Abbott Elementary” is one of the most brilliant shows on television. As a writer, I do a lot of school visits, so I'm in public schools all of the time talking about writing, talking about craft, and these different things, and all of the teachers love “Abbott.” What kind of feedback do you get from teachers when you're out on the road and touring?

I do stand-up and I go to cities all over the country and get a lot of teachers that come to see the show, and I have jokes just for them. You have to come to see one of the shows to find them. But what they say is, some of them say it's like PTSD, watching it, because that's so real. But it's like the funny version of it because the show is not like, "And we're going to teach you a lesson and really make you think." One of the early episodes had a little, little storyline that had something to do with the school-to-prison pipeline, but they didn't hang a lantern on it. It was brushed on and it was in the story, but it wasn't slapped in your face. It just was there. 

It's told in a joke, so it makes the point without being pedantic about it or anything like that. I think that teachers appreciate that. It feels like where they live, where it's from. My mother was a public school teacher in D.C., that's how it was. You're struggling every minute to get books that are up-to-date, all that stuff that she's doing, but make it funny.

Did you lean on experiences with your mom a lot when you were learning Melissa? 

Yeah. Sadly my mom passed before the show premiered, although she got to listen to, at least, the pilot episode before she passed because Quinta got it to me in time, within three minutes, when I said, “I want her to be able to know that her daughter's going to be OK.” I knew — we did not get the official pickup yet — but we knew. We all knew it was so good that ABC would be crazy not to pick it up. Luckily they're very smart.

But watching my mom struggle with bringing stuff from home to the school to help out in the classroom because there was not enough money to get the kids the supplies that they needed and being protective of them. 

You're one of our favorite characters. I don't want this lost on our readers and our viewers. The show is about a Black elementary school in Philly. You are a white woman, but you are not a punchline. You are not corny. You are a leader. You are Philly. You are raw. You are authentic. You are hilarious.

You're giving me chills. Thank you.

Did you meet Melissa on the page or was she already in you?

Not only did I know who she was because my family's Sicilian, but this may be the first time in my career where it wasn't my show where I said, "There is nobody in town that plays or knows this character better than me. I am this character." I had that confidence walking into the very first audition. The feedback was the minute they saw the first 10 seconds, when I'm talking to Janine and she's trying to tell me something, and I just pick up my purse and walk away and I come back into frame, and that's not in the script. I was just like, "I'm busy." And they were like “That's it. It's her.” 

The vibe that Quinta tells me that she got from me is probably because that's where I came up because these were my friends, because it wasn't odd for me to be in a room where I'm the only white person. That the comfort level that I had, I think it was just this felt like home to me. It's the set where I felt the most at home of any that I've ever been on. I didn't look at myself as, "I'm the white lady" —although I am. And Melissa takes great pride in being Italian American.

She runs things.

Right. “No, I got you. I got this.” I do that for Sheryl [Lee Ralph], too, in real life. For day one, she was like, "Oh, I need a car and somebody's running errands for me and I need to get a car." And I'm like, "Oh, I got your guy here, Ralph, Speedy Lane here. Look. All right, I'll call him. You don't want the number? All right. What you got for 5,000 or less? You got a Mercedes over there?" Getting the hookup, being proud of the food you bring in and giving meatballs to people. That's our people and I'm happy with it. I'm so glad that they wrote the character this way. I would've been thrilled to be part of the show even if they had written her corny.

You won “Celebrity Jeopardy!” which means you're the smartest celebrity ever, in the whole entire world.

I'm not as smart as Ike Barinholtz because he won last year and he went on the regular “Jeopardy!”

Take us to that moment. How did you even prepare for that?

You know, D, I didn't, if I'm going to be honest. I have a weird brain that remembers stupid s**t. I don't know why. I don't know where it comes from. Well, it comes from books, mostly. I love to read. My mother, teacher, when I was a kid, she said, "You could take a nap or you could read." What kid is like, "Oh, we'll sleep." So I read, from the time I was three years old. I read everything. I loved reading history, and my mother would never shut up about something on talk radio or from this movie or this time period, and then I'd get a whole teacher lecture about that thing, and if I was interested in it enough, I retained it. 

You got to give us an example. I'll go first. I think Buchanan may have been the last bachelor President.

Okay, so the War of the Roses was between the Plantagenets and the Yorks and it took place over about a 100-year period. Everybody at that time — this was in England — and everybody at that time was either trying to be a king of England, of the British Isles for 100 years. They were like, "The Plantagenets. No, it's the Yorks." And they kept killing each other and getting the wars, but at the same time, they were also trying to kill people in France because they said France was theirs, too. And they wanted France and a land called the Aquitaine, and then they fought over that. Then finally one of the Henrys, the original Henry, married Eleanor of Aquitaine who was married to King Louis in France and she ditched his a** as soon as she saw Henry because he was big and tall and looked like Richard Burton in the movie And then he snatched her back to England and now they stopped fighting.

Is it weird that when you said the War of the Roses is the first thing that came in my mind was like Michael Douglas hanging off a chandelier?

Not at all. What came to my mind, too.

And Danny DeVito picking up the pieces.

See that stuff, memorizing that — who memorizes who played this in a movie? That just stuck with you, so that's how it sticks with me is weird stuff. Then my friends say, "How do you know that?" And I say, "I have no idea."

The prize was a million dollars and you donated it to the Entertainment Community Fund, which was beautiful for actors, writers.

[And] teamsters.

People in our profession.

[And] hair and makeup [people].

You were also on the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee. It sounds like you care deeply about your fellow actors and you show it.

Yeah, I do. I care about the profession. I think that, obviously, there's great money to be made in giant Marvel movies and I enjoy watching those, too. I'm not like a hater because it's pulp entertainment. I love it. But there's also little stories that need to be told. There's people that need to be supported. Maybe some of the people are getting inspired, right now, by “Abbott” that want to tell whatever their story is. Luckily, because it's streaming and high budget video on demand, we've got a regular video on demand, there's opportunity to tell more stories. I want to support that. 

A lot of people think if you're in the entertainment industry, you're rich. "Oh, I saw you on TV, so you must be [rich]." Your cousins come out of the woodwork, hit you up for money. It's like, no, I played a day role on a streamer, so I made $5,000, half of which went to my reps fees and taxes, so I made $2,500 and that was the one job that I got in that six months.

That's why I gave the money to that charity was because we were in a labor action, the people that are not making a negotiated wage, they're working for scale and they don't get to say, "Oh, I'm sorry that we're not doing most of our shows this year." Oh well, they still got to pay their bills, and the union stuff is just because everybody should be worried about whoever's making the least amount of money in our profession, that's the one that we have to fight for.

As a stand-up, you go everywhere with comedy. Does your set land differently when on the East Coast versus West Coast? How do you tweak certain shows based on city and region?

I do a whole bunch of material, not all of it, a lot of it's about dating in L.A. and kids and family. A lot of, a whole big bunch, about “90 Day Fiance,” a lot about stupid unscripted shows that I watch. But I talk about politics. I talk about what's going on in the world. There's a big hunk in my act that I do right now about reproductive rights. It's really funny, but it is pro-choice, so there were places I was worried about. Actually the bit starts with, “I was afraid to work in Texas . . ." and then it goes on from there. Again, you have to come to the show. 

There are places that I'm like, "I don't know if I need the smoke. I don't know, at this point in my life, I need to go to a place where I can roll the dice and probably 50% of the audience is going to be mad because I'm saying stuff that they don't want to hear." Now, those are probably the places that I need to say it the most, that need to hear it the most. But I'm trying to stay working on my TV show. 

I do have Austin scheduled and I played there before. It's Texas. But I did work there for their Moontower Festival. I'm going back there to work a comedy club and I played Nashville and had all five sell-out, standing room only, killer standing ovation shows. So you never know. You think it's going to be rough or whatever, and it turns out great. I will say Philly were probably my best shows.

Did your set change with the success of “Abbott”? Do you have to scale back on certain things because now you have this big television machine behind you?

No, I say what I have to say. The only reason I ever wanted to do comedy, when I started, was to say the things that I had to say, that I had to get out of my face or I was going to die. I think that's still what I'm doing. But stuff that's just fun for the people. I do a couple of fun little songs at the end now. I think what's different is that there's more people who feel like they know me. They feel like I'm family. Because I think people feel that way about “Abbott” to begin with. It's part of the success of the show.

I feel like I know you and I don't know you at all.

I'm like that. I'm not different. 

You're not different at all.

The success of the show is because people feel like they know the characters, and we have that, we're blessed with that. We have a whole Twitter-verse or X-verse or whatever we're calling it now, of people that are like, "No, you're our family." They claim us.

What some people don't know is that you have four kids that are grown people. It's rare in Hollywood to have a large family.

It is.

When you look back as being a working mom in the business, what are you most proud of?

Well, that I had all four of them and my stomach's still reasonably flat. No. I said, "Yes, I'm a mother of four" like I'm a Duggar. They're all accidents. They know. Happy accidents. It's not an easy place to raise kids.

Sheryl and I bonded and became great friends the first week when we shot the pilot because we were single moms raising our kids in LA, which is really expensive. We were talking about where we would shop for their clothes come school time and who had the best discount racks at the back of the store. It was not easy to raise kids there because there are a lot of kids also that have excess and then whenever there are kids that have too much excess and too much freedom and not any kind of control in the household, somebody's going to act the fool. If that kid's around your kid, your kid's going to go to jail because I can't afford that kind of lawyer. So it's not easy.

Luckily, all four of mine are doing great. They're great kids. I got one of them here in the city getting her PhD. I feel like I've done my job. The other three, no PhDs, but also really great kids and successful and working. One who still lives at home and the other one who just moved back because he broke up with a girlfriend. But you know what? I'm happy to have him there.