PASADENA, Calif. _ The first time actress Natalie Morales appeared onstage was memorable, to say the least. She was 14 years old and was learning Southern dialects in her class. "I went onstage as Britney Spears in her Catholic school girl outfit," recalls Morales.
"I happened to have that because I'd just come from Catholic school. I don't know why, I believed she had more of a twang than she actually does, but I was like "Hi y'all, my name is Britney Spears.' And my skirt broke, fell off, and suddenly I was standing in my underwear in a room full of seniors and two other classes, so it was about 200 people," she says.
"It was literally a nightmare. My first time onstage! Everyone is laughing, laughing, laughing. I'm standing there. My sister had just given me for Christmas my very first thong, and that's what I was wearing. I was standing nearly bare-naked on stage and that moment lasted forever until my friend brought up a jacket and walked me offstage.
"I said, 'OK, that's the worst thing that could happen, so it happened and I survived, and as long as I can laugh with it, what else could there possibly be?'"
While that proved a mortifying experience, it stood her in good stead because not much rattles Morales. She trekked to Hollywood from her native Florida at 20 and today finds herself the star of NBC's new comedy "Abby's," premiering Thursday.
She says she fought hard to earn the role of the savvy bartender who illegally sets up a bar in her backyard. "I think I generally am a daring and bold person because I've found that I discover so much about myself and about the world when I take chances and when I do something new or something that might frighten me, I learn a lot," she says.
Moving to Los Angeles from Miami was difficult for her family, she says. "As far as my mom knew, L.A. was made of mountains of cocaine. It was a terrifying environment. I did not find that at all when I got here. But it was really scary for my whole family; no one had ever done this," says Morales.
"I was very sheltered. Miami itself is a bubble. And I lived in a house with my mom and my grandparents and Cuban family life features sheltered women. You're kept safe in this little thing," she forms a box with her hands. "And the outside world is scary, and everyone's out to hurt you."
But Morales, who's costarred in projects like "Girls," "Parks and Recreation" and "Santa Clarita Diet," says she was surprised when she discovered a Hollywood she wasn't expecting.
"The big surprise when I got out here was how the women supported each other, how many of us will sit and watch your kid when you go in to audition, how many of us will cheer each other on, how many of us will go, 'Listen, that guy in there is not nice,' or 'This person is this.' People like to say it's the opposite, but I've found so much support out here, especially from the women and my peers surrounding me in this business."
When she first arrived she and her best friend, actress Cyrina Fiallo, slept in their van waiting for their apartment to be readied. And they began trolling for roles.
"Working in bars, I met some people in the comedy scene and did some sketch comedy and started doing a lot more of that," she says.
"We had a sketch troupe called Sitcoms Blow _ and here I am doing a sitcom. I did that all over town for a little while. Then I ... auditioned for a show called 'The Middleman' and that sort of propelled me into a place where people were taking me seriously, which was nice."
Still, before she landed that role, she considered quitting. "I said to myself, 'The best job in Hollywood is to be an older actress, 65 years and older, being an actress in Hollywood, that's the best. Betty White has it made.' Of course Betty White had a whole career before that. I thought, 'What if I just put this on hold and resume when I'm 65? Then I'll be the funny, dirty grandma and it'll be wonderful and none of the pressure of how I look or what I am. Then I booked 'The Middleman.'"
Once she scaled that hurdle, Morales, 34, made a vow. "I think I made the choice early on to try and never take a role that was just the 'hot' girl because you can age out of the 'hot' girl. Not really, because a woman who's beautiful will always be beautiful, but in the perception of Hollywood's eye, if you're the 'hot' girl, you can age out of that. If I'm the 'funny' girl, you can't age out of that."
ACTRESS REVEALS GRANDFATHER'S LIAISONS
The next three-hour series coming to PBS "Masterpiece" on Sunday is a startling true story. It's the tale of actress Ruth Wilson's grandmother, who was married to a man who turned out to be leading an entirely separate life that the family knew nothing about.
Titled "Mrs. Wilson," Ruth Wilson ("The Affair") explains, "My grandmother wrote a memoir in two parts, and she gave the first part to us to read probably about 15 years ago. And that was about her growing up, meeting Alec (her husband), falling in love with him, and then finding out about his betrayal."
Wilson's grandmother discovered Alec had another wife and family. "She didn't give us the second part of her memoir until after she died, and that was all about her finding God, which is the second part of the film," says Wilson.
"But weirdly, a year after she died, we then had correspondence from two other people saying, 'I think we've got the same dad.' So we worked out that she's one of four wives, not one of two. And we have an inkling that she might have known the full story, but only chose to write about one of them in her memoir," says Wilson.
"So the piece then became an amalgamation of the memoir and things we have since found out about Alec and about his life and about my grandmother's life."
Alec's various offspring eventually got together and celebrated family reunions, complete with nametags, says Wilson. "And there was sort of 55 of us in a room talking about this mysterious grandfather or father. And every time we told the story, just more things were coming out, but it was just an extraordinary story. It was something that felt it had to be told."
FILM TO TRACE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN COUNTRY STARS
Megan Hilty and Jessie Mueller will portray two of the most famous singers in country music when the feature film "Patsy & Loretta" is released later this year. The story of the friendship between Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline is being written by Angelina Burnett and produced by veteran musical producer Neil Meron.
Callie Khouri, best known for writing "Thelma & Louise" and "Nashville," will direct the story about the kinship, which began when Cline was already a soaring star and Lynn was a coal miner's daughter, struggling to gain a foothold in Nashville.
Hilty herself learned about music in an odd way. "My mother read an article when she was pregnant with me about how tone-deaf mothers should never sing to their children because then they'd be tone-deaf too, which is not true," she says.
"But she was terrified. So when I was little, I would beg her to sing to me and she wouldn't. And the more she wouldn't, the more obsessed I became. So she would set me down and play me recordings of 'The Music Man' or the Manhattan Transfer or Whitney Houston _ anything. And I was insatiable. I couldn't get enough. So she's the one that exposed me to all these different types of music and theater."
SERIES FEATURES AB-FAB COLLECTIONS
Imagine a first edition "Harry Potter" book with handwritten notes by J.K. Rowling or a toy handmade by "Wizard of Oz" creator L. Frank Baum. Or how about a phone used on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"? All of these are nestled in private collections. And TV audiences will get the chance to explore them and more on the new "Collector's Call," premiering April 7 on MeTV. Hosted by Lisa Whelchel ("The Facts of Life"), the show will visit all kinds of collectors and their one-of-a-kind treasures, which will be appraised by experts. The owners will then have the choice of trading one of their pieces for a coveted item that would benefit their collection. It'll be the collector's call. For more information, viewers can visit collectorscalltv.com.
