Abbott Elementary’s Lisa Ann Walter Burst Into Tears Over Her Mom’s Casting

[This story contains spoilers from Abbott Elementary‘s Dec. 4 episode, “Winter Break.]

Despite Bette Midler’s social media bid earlier this year to portray Melissa Schemmenti’s (Lisa Ann Walter) mother on Abbott Elementary, the ABC sitcom has found its Italian matriarch in The Godfather and Rocky actress Talia Shire.

“I was thrilled,” Walters tells The Hollywood Reporter of working with Shire on the second of the two half-hour holiday episodes that aired back-to-back on Wednesday night.

In episode eight, “Winter Break,” Melissa hosts her large Sicilian family for Christmas Eve dinner, along with Jacob (Chris Perfetti) and his brother Caleb (Tyler Perez), who comes into town early and makes his Abbott debut in episode seven’s “Winter Show.” A false alarm of an emergency ensues when Jacob informs Melissa that her problematic uncle Archie isn’t just taking a nap upstairs but has gone on to eternal rest as she opts to proceed with dinner, arguing that her family, already hangry and hounding her about being single, will never let her live it down if the gathering isn’t perfect.

Walter had some requests of her own when it came to executing the scene on set. “They let me really arrange the cooking aspect of it because when you’re dealing with a lot of props and emotion, you have to make sure everything feels natural like you’re really making that food,” she explains.

Below, Walter chats with THR about working with Shire and the “bizarre” reaction she had when she heard about the possibility of her casting, plans to celebrate Christmas with her castmates and what she makes of the delayed boost to the show’s season four premiere, which has now reached 9 million viewers.

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When did you find out that Talia Shire would be playing your mom?

Well, there had been so much discussion around it because of the whole thing with Bette Midler. And when it wasn’t going to work out because of scheduling, they said they were talking about a couple of people and Talia was one of them. Literally, tears burst into my eyes. Isn’t that bizarre? Quinta [Brunson] said, “We’re talking to Talia Shire,” and tears burst out of my eyes. I said, “I don’t know why I did that. I feel ridiculous. But she’s royalty,” and Quinta just said, “She is.”

When we were kids, we used to watch The Wizard of Oz on Thanksgiving. For my family [as we got older], it’s The Godfather. When my mother was alive, we would put The Godfather on the way we watch A Christmas Story at Christmas, just 24 hours of it. And I know that for Philly people, obviously, it’s the Rocky connection, but for my household, it was always The Godfather and just the evolution of her acting over the years and how we always saw her as being kind of this little meek young woman and then she becomes powerful, I think it’s such a beautiful acting trajectory that she’s had in her career and she’s lovely to work with.

Had you met her before?

I had not. And as soon as I saw that she was at the studio, she was sort of surrounded by all of our wardrobe people and the hair and makeup people and I didn’t wait for an introduction. I just marched right over and she immediately said, “My girl, my daughter!” And then she starts bugging me. Literally, she did it for the entire time we worked together. “What’s wrong with the firefighter? “And I was like, “Oh my God, it’s literally like having Thanksgiving with family. He’s fine, mom. He’s fine.”

Did she say anything about what made her say yes to guest starring as your mom?

No, and you know what? I should have asked her, and I didn’t. See, I’m not a reporter. If I was doing your job, I would’ve been smart and I would’ve asked her (laughs). Listen, the show is very popular and she has grandchildren. We shared a lot over the days that we worked together. Anytime we weren’t rolling, she and I were sitting somewhere huddled up and talking about our families. And I’m such an idiot. I don’t think in advance about how people are connected or who their people are that are famous.

So I’m sitting there, and she’s asking about the show, “Melissa has 11 brothers and sisters, right?” And so I said, “Do you have siblings?” And of course! [Shire is the sister of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and academic August Coppola.] I’m such an idiot. God bless her. She was very nice about it. She didn’t say “Yes, I have very famous siblings.” She said, “We’re artists in my family,” which I thought was so beautiful. Her family was very supportive because it was not just the siblings. I didn’t realize that she had a history of her parents being in the arts and how extensive that was and I thought that was lovely.

I was talking about my father, who was a beautiful singer. He was training at Carnegie Hall when he was young. But he was also at the Bronx High School of Science because he was first generation and he wasn’t Mario Lanza. My father’s family was from France, and they were like, “You are going to be a physicist.” So that’s what he did. So we shared about our family. She is just warm and darling, but she has a real steel to her. I thought it was a great casting choice. As were every member of the Schemmenti family. I told Quinta afterward, “Man, you really know what you’re doing” — turns out, she knows what she’s doing (laughs). I said, “Everybody was good. Everybody fit in and was funny. It’s a really good mix.”

The dinner scene was such a chaotically fun watch that made me hopeful to see more of each of Melissa’s family members in other episodes. What was it like for you filming?

I agree with you! I hope we see them, too. The young man who plays Jacob’s brother is just a delight, so inventive and creative. At one point he said, because he’s a little flirty, “Hey, why can’t Melissa have a young boyfriend?” And I said, “First of all, Lisa, in real life, did that and no. No.” I said, “You’ll be back. You don’t have to offer yourself up as tribute.” But it was awesome.

First of all, my real family’s pictures are all over the wall of that set. So I was walking people around, especially Talia saying, “Here’s my mom. These are the grandparents from Sicily. These are the ones from Calabria. This is the kitchen in Brooklyn.” It felt like having a Christmas dinner at my house, because I’m honestly cooking. They had a wonderful food stylist and she was very committed to making sure I felt good about what I was serving, which I really appreciate as someone who loves to feed people. They had some kind of sauce and I said, “Why do I have white sauce on my table?” And they were like, “You’ve got to differentiate.” So I was like, “Alright, okay…” But everything was really good; I tried everything. They said, “What do you want to serve?” And I asked for the cannolis from a specific place, and they got them from there. They were absolutely stunning. People were fighting over them at the end of the day.

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You’ve mentioned having Chris Perfetti over for the holidays in the past. Do you have plans for this Christmas?

I do have Christmas plans. Everybody’s coming here. I think that Stan [William Stanford Davis] and his wife may be here for Christmas dinner, and I asked Chris to come. He said if he was in town he would come with his boyfriend, but I think they’re also going down to the boyfriend’s family who lives in Orange County. I had to make sure everybody had plans for Thanksgiving because I was in Philly doing their Thanksgiving parade, but everybody was taken care of. Quinta was there at the same time, and so was Sheryl [Lee Ralph], but unfortunately, we didn’t get together. We were all booked up.

There’s so much anticipation about the upcoming It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia crossover. What can you say about working with that cast and when you found out it was happening?

I think I speak for all of us when I say we were deeply excited. We’re all fans of the show and I’ve loved it for years. I’ve been watching it from the original inception, so I thought that it was an inspired concept. Kudos again, to Quinta and to Rob [McElhenney] for making it happen. Working with them, they’re all such incredibly talented actors and improv artists and they’re just nice. They’re nice. So besides having it be kind of an artistic win for everybody — I think they were happy with it too; I can’t speak for them, but they seem to be — it was also just a really fun thing to do because they’re playful and they enjoy what they do. It’s a lot of years they’re doing it, but they’re not burned out. It’s not a chore. They are inventive and it was great. I think people are going to enjoy it.

People continue to marvel at the high ratings Abbott has four seasons in, what do you make of the latest numbers?

All of the stats around the numbers that we do are interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One, they’re like, “Oh, that 35-plus days number is enormous. It’s like quadruple the night-of ratings,” and that’s awesome. I think that many people have a lot of shows that they back up on. I know people come up to me and say, “I don’t want to watch any of it until the whole season’s done.” They’ve been trained to binge. With our show, we have a lot of people that watch every week, but, unfortunately, because we’re on the late side for families with little kids, they’re not going to watch it on the night of because kids are in bed a half hour before we come on.

So a lot of times people wait for the weekend, or they’ll wait until there’s a couple of shows in a row, or in November, we only have two episodes so they’re going to wait until the end of the year. So I think that the accumulation of numbers over the month is not surprising. Who knows what the numbers would do on overnights if we were on a little bit earlier. I read a story about that just today, about the potential that we might have for bigger night-of numbers if we were in an earlier time slot. But as long as people are watching it and enjoying it, I mean, heck yeah, let’s do more episodes per season. I like going to work, I work with really talented people and, again, much like the Always Sunny folks, they’re nice people. I enjoy it.

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Abbott Elementary returns with season four Wednesday, Jan. 8, moving to an 8:30 p.m. time slot and streaming the next day on Hulu.