Erika Henningsen is used to working with A-listers. Her first big break was the lead role in the Mean Girls musical, written by Tina Fey. She had a recurring role on Girls5eva as the younger version of comedy great Paula Pell. And — premiering on Netflix this week — she’s starring alongside comedy greats Steve Carell, Will Forte and (again) Fey in The Four Seasons. But on the morning of her interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she was fresh from a brush with a very different greatness. Henningsen is playing Sandra Dee in Just In Time, the Broadway biopic of 60s crooner Bobby Darin, and had just been showered by star Jonathan Groff‘s now-legendary onstage saliva.
“I hadn’t gotten spat on that much by Jonathan so far, but last night during our fight scene, he said the line ‘I can’t take it anymore’ and it just got all over me,” she says. “My agents were in the audience for it and couldn’t believe that I didn’t even flinch.”
Seeing Groff’s spit fly is something of a theatrical rite of passage for audience members — he showered the front rows of Hamilton regularly, but the tradition dates back all the way to his debut in Spring Awakening — but Henningsen says it offers inspiration as well. “I love working with him for so many reasons, but one tiny reason is that he’s just fully embraced this about himself,” she adds.
The Four Seasons is its own milestone for Henningsen — it’s her most significant onscreen role to date. In the series, which Fey created alongside longtime collaborators Tracy Wigfield and Lang Fisher, Henningsen plays Ginny, the new girlfriend to Steve Carell’s recently divorced character. Ginny joins a longtime friend group (rounded out by Fey, Forte, Colman Domingo, Kerry Kenney and Marco Calvani) on three different getaways, attempting to bridge the generational divide and to be seen as more than just the younger woman. Below, the actress talks to THR about what she’s learned from working with the best of the best, and what she was able to teach her heroes in return.
What was the audition process like for The Four Seasons?
I’m still trying to get used to the fact that television auditions are on Zoom screens, whereas with Broadway auditions, I always know somebody in the room and that makes me feel more comfortable. My callback for The Four Seasons was a Zoom with Lang Fisher, Tracy Wigfield, Tina Fey and Jeff Richmond. I remember we were about to wrap up, and I just said, “Can I try one more thing that’s totally different than everything we’ve done?” I figured it was worth asking — nobody had to get in their car to go home, they were all already taking the Zoom at home. I don’t know if what I tried made a difference but I at least was able to close the laptop knowing that I tried everything I wanted to.
I had assumed that you were given the role because of your previous experience working with Tina and Jeff on Mean Girls…
We had a long, long process auditioning for Mean Girls, including tapes for Lorne Michaels since he was producing. So The Four Seasons was less than that. I sent in an audition tape, and I have to shout out my acting coach because I recently found out he’s Carrie Coon’s reader, too. His name is Olli Haaskivi, and he’s an incredible actor — he was in Oppenheimer — and so many of us in New York use him for our self-tapes. I sent mine in and then got a callback, which was that Zoom meeting, but I never did a chemistry read. I didn’t meet Steve Carell until my first day on set. But I do think your audition is only as good as your reputation, and blessedly, Tina knew that she could trust me to be easy to work with. I’d proven that I would be chill.
Without a chemistry read, was it harder to get on the same page with Steve?
I came to set one day for a hair and makeup test and met him very briefly. When I’m nervous I tend to overtalk, so I left and was like, I think I just yelled at Steve for 10 minutes straight? My reference for him will always be The Office, that bombastic and un-self-aware human, and Steve could not be farther from that. I knew that, of course, but when you see it up close, you’re just like, wow, you really are an incredible actor. I also got to teach him about Chappell Roan, so that was fun.
How did that come up?
We were shooting in upstate New York and he would sometimes drive to New Hampshire on the weekends. He said he stayed up for the four-hour drive by listening to music, and I asked him what he listens to and he very shyly goes, “A lot of girl pop.” I think his agent also reps Olivia Rodrigo, so he was listening to her. So I said, “Well if you like that, are you familiar with Chappell Roan?” I feel like this is where our characters are the most like real life, because I made him a playlist and he came back from the weekend and was like, “Chappell Roan is great.” He had an alumni event at his college a couple weeks later and one of the questions was who are you listening to right now? He said Chappell, and all the college kids went crazy so he came back and was like, “You made me look really cool.”
What did you know about the character when you took the role? Being the “younger woman” in this sort of story could go in a number of directions, though of course it seems easy to trust Tina to handle it with care.
The description was pretty open, it was like the young charismatic girl that Nick starts dating. I knew that Tina doesn’t do anything in just black and white. This girl wouldn’t just be the sort of flighty, model-esque, Instagram girl. In order to be an antagonist, we don’t hate she needs to have depth and adulthood and exude genuine kindness towards the group. She wants to be liked by them. It’s easy to write a young girl amidst a group of 50-year-olds who is kind of detestable and annoying, and they wanted to steer away from doing that.
Did you feel a generational divide on set? Do they even feel like they’re older than you?
It’s funny, this group, they’re all supernovas. They’re the best at what they do. And I totally felt like part of the crew. Except when they would make references to songs and TV shows that I was not alive to watch. I think Tina wrote in my wrap gift card that it takes a special kind of millennial to put up with so many 1970s sitcom songs. There was a day on set in Puerto Rico when we were waiting for a setup and Colman [Domingo] started this game where you would sing the first word of a song and we would try to finish it — everything went over my head. But it went both ways. I had to explain to Will Forte what floating is. We were at a dinner party and they asked me what young people do now instead of going to clubs. I was like, they do this thing where you put on headphones and run around Brooklyn and dance. They were all like, that’s psychotic and blasphemous, you could not pay me enough money to do that.
How did working on the show, or watching the finished episodes, make you think differently about being at their stage of life?
What I loved about the show, and what I think people are going to respond to, is that it shows people in their 50s with really big, vibrant lives. I think for my parents’ generation, you sort of form a unit with whatever neighborhood you live in or the school system of your children. But this shows people with rich social lives, they still have their best friends from college who know them inside and out. So much of what I’ve watched before is related to parenthood, and this show is bound up in friendship. I don’t have kids yet, but I have such admiration for how they’re all smart, sharp, driven people who also happen to be parents. It’s just one part of who they are.
In the show, Ginny forces all the “older” folks to go to an off-the-grid eco-resort — what type of vacationer are you?
OK, that is justifiably insane of her. Planning a trip for six people she only kind of knows, and not running it by them? That’s a cuckoo thing to do even if she means well. I like to plan my vacations out, but then I need like one reading-by-the-pool day for every five days of running around. We shot the resort episodes in Puerto Rico and we did have a great time. We had paddle boarding lessons because we had a big paddle boarding scene — we all knew how, but a lesson sounded fun for all of us. Filming those episodes felt like camp, being able to walk to one another’s rooms and hang out after shooting to eat bad pizza together.
You’ve talked about liking the instant feedback that performing on Broadway offers — how do you figure out what works, or is funny, for your television work?
The audience in a Broadway show can be intoxicating, and it’s like a litmus test. If a joke doesn’t land one night, you tell it differently the next night. It’s terrifying, on set, to have no idea if something is working. I remember being on Girls5eva and watching Paula Pell — she played a dentist on that show, and I just clocked that I also play a dentist in The Four Seasons — and she was being so hysterical but everyone was wearing masks so she couldn’t even see if people were smiling. It’s such a confidence in yourself to know that it’s funny, and that is so impressive to me.
As you progress in your career, do you want to keep doing Broadway or are you looking to pivot more into Hollywood?
The only downside to Broadway — besides the pay scale, but that honestly doesn’t matter so much to me — is the time commitment. If you’re having a great year in Hollywood, you could do a movie and shoot a series and a guest star arc all in one year. That’s just what it takes to develop a Broadway show. The great thing about Just In Time is that we didn’t have an out-of-town tryout, we just cold opened on Broadway. I never want to leave Broadway because it has given me so much, but I also want to do more onscreen. There’s a new trend of limited runs, which of course makes it harder for people to put together a living if they’re fully immersed in the world of theater, but it does allow room for people to try a bunch of different things. I would love to do a six-month revival — I’ve never done any of the classics — in between shooting a series or independent film. That’s the ideal.
From the outside, it seems like there’s a huge influx of celebrity talent to the stage world lately. Does it feel that way to you, and does it take up space or opportunities for theater actors?
I think it causes foot traffic. We have to be realistic about the fact that the economy of the theater doesn’t make sense, and it’s very boom or bust. The fact that any show happens at all is a miracle, so if we can create a bit more certainty by bringing in somebody like Denzel Washington, that’s great. That bodes well for all of us, because people are going to come to New York to see that show and I do believe that trickles down to the entire community. There’s also a really beautiful gratitude from the “quote-unquote” screen actors towards the process of Broadway. Most people don’t start on TV, they start in local theater, so they come back to the stage to be respectful of the traditions and to feel lit on fire by it. It’s not just something you’re trying to cross off your bucket list.
I interviewed your Just In Time co-star Gracie Lawrence, who is on stage for the first time since her childhood Broadway debut, and the thing she said she was really nervous about is figuring out when to eat dinner. Do you have any expertise on the matter?
I do. Mean Girls was so hard because I didn’t leave the stage. It was a two-and-a-half-hour show and I was in every single scene. You can live it up for breakfast but then you have to go super bland. I eat a lot of peanut butter, bananas, bone broth, sweet potatoes, chicken, rice…I eat like a dog who has Giardia when I’m doing a Broadway show. And you can use that quote. (Laughs.)