For a recent Vogue story, Glee’s Jane Lynch talked about finding inspiration for the many parts she’s played over the course of her 30-year acting career and how she delivers her lines so flawlessly.
“Throughout my career, I’ll get cast in a role that exercises a part of myself that has been dormant or has never really ever been awake,” said Lynch, who mostly made her living playing bit parts before hitting it big on Fox’s runaway musical hit. “You have to be ready. You have to allow yourself to be back up against the wall and go, ‘Can I pull this out of me?’ Like when I was in graduate school and they cast me as an ingenue — and I never saw myself as an ingenue. I was still this little tomboy. And you have to dig really deep, and eventually you find it, because everything lives in us.”
Lynch first started gaining attention with her appearance as the overtly-sexual manager of an electronics store in 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This followed decades of various television, film and theater roles, including appearances on TV series like The West Wing, 7th Heaven and Friends and in films such as 1993’s The Fugitive and Fatal Instinct and 2000’s Best in Show.
As sarcastic cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, Lynch has stolen many a scene on Glee since the show debuted in the fall of 2009. Explaining how she never misses a beat, she said, “I go through a line reading a trillion times over and over to find the right rhythm; I kill it. And when I say kill it, I mean hit it to death!”
