Mama Nia

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This article was published 20/04/2010 (5839 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NIA Vardalos has the flu and like the polite girl from Winnipeg she is, she doesn’t want to give it to anyone. "Just tell the makeup artist and anyone on the shoot tomorrow they can wear surgical masks. I won’t be offended," she pleads to me via cellphone as I sit in the lobby bar of my L.A. hotel. "And I won’t be able to hug anyone hello or goodbye." This last bit is spoken apologetically, as if it’s a foregone conclusion that the next day’s session will be so enjoyable and success­ful that she’d want to hug a bunch of people she has never met before.

It’s this sort of sweetness and sincere optimism that has been her calling card ever since she burst onto the scene in the 2002 indie film hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which became the largest grossing in­dependent — i.e., non-Hollywood studio — film of all time, making more than $360 million worldwide.

But screenplay-worthy twists of fate follow Vardalos, 47. Take her first big break: an aspiring comedic actress and writer, she took a job at the box office at Toronto’s Second City where she faithfully watched each night’s show. When the female lead fell ill immediately before a performance, Vardalos stepped up to the plate to volunteer her services — after all, she knew the lines. That turn eventually led to a job state­side at Chicago’s Second City where she would win a local acting award and the heart of Ian Gomez, her husband of 17 years who currently co­stars on the TV series Cougar Town.

It was her marriage to the non-Greek Gomez that inspired Wedding,

as a one-woman show that Vardalos performed in L.A. and whose sole newspaper ad was spotted by another actress of Greek heritage, Rita Wilson who, in turn, took her husband, Tom Hanks, to see it. Hanks optioned the screenplay and helped produce the movie that garnered Vardalos an Oscar for her screenplay.

"What I find ironic is so many things that I didn’t think I was going to do have led me to what I feel I’m supposed to do. Like, I never thought I was going to get married. When I was growing up, I had rejected my ethnicity. Ironically, being Greek and my own wedding led to me find­ing my career path," she says over tea.

But as often happens with so-called overnight sensations, a fall from great heights was inevitable. First, there was the television spinoff, My Big Fat Greek Life, which was cancelled after seven episodes. Then there was the lukewarm reception of her second film, Connie and Carla. And then, quietly, she disappeared.

While many actors step out of the spotlight to nurse wounds from poor reviews, what drew Vardalos away from the Hollywood glare was far more intense and personal: her quest for a baby. The struggle to get pregnant is a familiar one for thousands of women, especial­ly those over 35, and when she couldn’t conceive, the feel­ings of loss were so overwhelming that she didn’t perform for more than four years and instead focused on her writing.

For Vardalos, the personal journey to motherhood came to both a happy conclusion and a new beginning in 2008 with the adoption of a three-year-old girl. Based on photos, she is a wide-eyed, pretty, little girl with pigtails who looks remarkably like her adoptive mother. When I mention this, Vardalos nods; she’s heard it before. "What is ridiculously amazing is they found a three-year-old girl who actually looks like us."

Motherhood may be new, but she is a seasoned writer and actor with a full slate of projects, including a pilot she guest-starred on because the character allowed her to step outside her comfort zone as an actor.

Stepping out of her comfort zone is something that Vardalos finally felt ready to do both professionally and in her personal life. To a certain extent, Hollywood has pigeonholed her as the less attractive girl next door, nerdy, overweight, the underdog, but she also recognizes that she had a hand in that as well.

"I was always 220 pounds, big old glasses and over­permed hair and I made sure that none of the guys thought of me as a sexual being by making disparaging jokes about myself," she explains. "And then, when I was at Second City, my producers very quickly taught me to rise above disparaging fat jokes and challenged me to improvise for a week without using the word fat, and I really realized how much I was using it as a crutch, making fun of myself."

She considers herself lucky that growing up she was never really admired for anything other than what was coming out of her mouth, something she credits to her parents and her training in musical theatre. Moving to L.A. in her 30s, how­ever, was a wake-up call.

"I realized that it’s all about your looks. I am not a stan­dard beauty. Some people would say I’m not even attractive," she says matter-of-factly.

During the photo shoot, as she poses and plays in front of the camera in an array of fashion-forward looks, it’s tough to imagine anyone finding Vardalos unattractive. Yes, she’s lost weight in recent years, thanks to a healthy diet and exercise, and she exudes self-confidence in front of the camera, proving there’s a Hollywood bombshell lurking beneath the comedian. Yet when she sees the digital shots on set, she seems surprised at the results. "I’ve never seen myself look like this before," she gushes to photographer Bryan Adams.

When I ask her the next day how she felt about the photos, she ad­mits that seeing herself depicted as a sultry beauty is new, but it’s a direction she wants to keep going in. "This is the year I started to push myself a little further in the letting go and doing more sexy shoots and everything, because I feel that it’s OK," she says.

"Isn’t that interesting that it took me that long?"

— Zoomer