Dedee Pfeiffer

ILLUMINATE:  Hello, Dedee. Thank you so much for being here on ILLUMINATE Magazine. My name is Rachelle Henry, and I’m very honored to have you here with me today.

PFEIFFER:  Thank you, Rachelle, for having me.

ILLUMINATE:  So you have had quite the career, and you have been in so many projects, and I love BIG SKY. I was actually binge watching it before we ever scheduled this interview. I loved it. And we will dive into that in a little bit. But first, how about we take it back to the beginning. I think everyone can guess which family you come from and who your famous sister is. I kind of want to know a little bit also about your childhood. Do you have any funny stories or memories from back then, like prior to becoming the actress you are today?

PFEIFFER:  We were a pretty average, below average kind of all-American family. Four kids, Mom and Dad. Mom never drove and didn’t work. My father, blue-collar worker, and they’re from North Dakota. It was Rick, Michelle, me and then my little sister, Lori. Rick and Michelle were born in the fifties. And Lori and I were born in the sixties. So you have two different generations of kids, and so times were really very different then. We kind of raised each other, considering the dynamics of my parents, and what have you. Lori and I were the stereotypical little sisters, chasing Michelle around, getting into her shit. You know, her makeup and her clothes, her Roger Daltrey t-shirt, which I was obsessed with, and I kept stealing. And oh, my God, she would get so mad. Getting into her makeup, like she’s not going to notice we gouged the blue eyeshadow. We would come out with it. She’s like, “Really?” My brother was smart. He just kind of skated through life, really trying not to be in the family dynamics.

 

Rick and Michelle were really close. Lori and I were close, but now as adults, we’re all really close together. But, really as for family stories, it’s just like the same stuff. One of us would get in trouble and we’d all get smacked. (Laughs) Lori ran around skating all the time. I remember her, she was always just skating, you know, and definitely, Chelle was always getting in trouble. She was the first girl. And then Rick, like I said, was really silent. And I was always rearranging furniture and cleaning because I was the middle daughter. So a very typical middle daughter.  People pleaser, always cleaning and trying to make harmony in the house. (Laughs)

I was born in ‘64. So when I was young, I worked because, like I said, four kids, my mom never drove or worked. So my dad was a blue collar worker, you know? So we did not have a lot of money growing up. So if we wanted something, we had to work for it. That’s the bottom line. That’s how we were raised. You want it, you earn it. No one was going to give it to you. So I was working really young as a kid. Any job I could possibly get, because I wanted stuff at Kmart. So I’m like, well, then I have to go get a job somewhere and make some money so I could go get that thing at Kmart. The Bonne Bell Big Thick Lip thing or Bonne Bell lip moisturizer, other than that. Anyway, so I worked, I don’t know…a really young age. Child labor. Yes, we didn’t have that back then. There was no such thing. But then by the time I was 18, I had worked a lot of jobs. Danced in a Disneyland parade. Picked up, dropped off radiators at gas stations and drove them to the radiator shop. They would fix them and I’d run back, which is a dude’s job. Yes, they did not like me doing a dude’s job, but I got really good. But I got paid really good.

ILLUMINATE:  Girl boss, right there.

PFEIFFER:  Yeah. I was doing stuff that, like, normal girls in Orange County weren’t doing. I also worked at a female oil and mud wrestling joint. Illegally caught gambling. Yeah. I did not ever get into the pit with the old mud wrestlers or the mud wrestling. I was illegally caught counting, so that’s much better. (Laughs) So I did that for a while. Like I said, did a parade. I worked as a bus girl. I slung tables, just really everything you can imagine, I did. So I was 18. I was like, What am I going to do? And college was never really like something my parents ever talked about because they didn’t go to college. So we were always saying “no” in school about college. And I was like, why would I want to keep going to school? Like, I’m done. This is nuts. I didn’t know what I wanted to do so much. At that point, Chelle was doing SCARFACE, and I had been up there a few times to L.A. so I said, Well, I think I want to try this thing called acting. And like everything else, if I don’t like it or if I get bored with it, I’ll just quit and do something else. So she told me to immediately get into an acting workshop, is what happened, you know, she said, Don’t even think about an agent or anything like that. Just get into an acting workshop and see if it’s something you even like. So I went to the best acting workshop, Peggy Feury’s, called The Loft, at the time. She was huge and I started studying and I did not know what I was doing. I was like scared shitless. I stuttered. I couldn’t memorize my lines. I didn’t know about character study, and it was the most haunting, scary thing I’ve ever done. I was like, Oh my God. But I couldn’t quit because I would have felt like a failure had I not mastered in some way or figured it out. So I just kept studying for two years. 

ILLUMINATE:  Well, I think you’re amazing. I think you’re very talented. In fact, one of the big projects that you worked on was a series called CYBILL. You played Cybill Shepherd’s oldest daughter, Rachel Blanders, and it was a sitcom series. Now, Rachel was known for her uptight attitude. She was pretentious. I actually watched an episode I think was the pilot, and it was so interesting to see the family dynamics. You have Cybill, you have her ex-husbands, you have her children, you have her boyfriends, her friends. Just the dynamics between the group were so quirky and interesting, and your character mixes in and has her own place in the story. They each have their own personalities that tie in perfectly with whatever Cybill’s up to. So what were the dynamics like on set and did you have any inspiration, like anyone in mind you were basing Rachel off of?

PFEIFFER:  Well, when I got that show, I was in shock, pretty much like whenever I get any job. But it was my very first series. I guest starred, but I’d never been a series regular, so I was very much a deer in the headlights. And it was crazy that I got the pilot, even more crazy that it went to show. But at that point, my best friend who was still with us, I lost him to AIDS. Kenny used to give me these recordings, because I didn’t have TV then. I only had video of the show called AB FAB. It was hugely popular in Europe and not so much here. From what I understand, CYBILL, the show, was coined around this show. And I had watched it, but when I read for CYBILL, I never got the correlation that my character was very much like the daughter in AB FAB, who’s uptight. The mother’s just whacked, right? Her and her friend are always getting in trouble and the daughter is really uptight, and I never realized that that was my character. So when I read for it, I just kind of used my acting chops, my skills to create an uptight character. And it wasn’t until probably about a year into the show, my friend, Kenny, was like “D, you’re playing the AB FAB daughter!” and went, Oh, shit, I am. (Laughs) So it’s loosely coined after the AB FAB daughter in that show. I was just seriously really young and I was just hanging on by the seat of my pants, trying to act like I knew what I was doing and everything was brand spanking new. I kept holding on to my character. Yeah. I remember being really nervous going up on my lines and thinking, “Oh, they hate me. They’re going to fire me.” Yeah. I’m like, I should have just chillaxed. You can’t tell somebody to chillax when they’re uptight. It’s like the worst thing you could do, right? Right. Maybe just to be nervous and use it. How about that? Because then you’re not fighting against what’s really authentically going on. But I was really young, too, so it’s kind of nice getting older, by the way.

ILLUMINATE:  Well, along with CYBILL, and every other thing you’ve been on, you’ve worked on so many series. You’ve worked on FRIENDS, SEINFELD, SUPERNATURAL, MURDER, SHE WROTE. You were big in the cult classic VAMP, all so many amazing projects. What has been the biggest lesson you’ve learned from working on any of these shows, and do you have a particular set experience that has really stuck with you? 

PFEIFFER:  Wow. By the way, it took me to get sober. I’m almost four years sober. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Almost four years ago, I took a year off and just worked on my sobriety and my addiction and all the trauma that goes with that, or at least for me, that went hand in hand. And in the process of really working on all my stuff, what I realized is that there’s this internal conversation/dialog that we have with ourselves that is horrendous. And the way we talk to ourselves, it’s not any way I would ever talk to another human being. So I think for me, not just going along for 30 plus years blindly not knowing how to address my addiction or my trauma and everything else in my life, I was able to put a lot of that into my work, which is fantastic. I mean, that’s kind of what you want, right? Is to take every life experience that you’ve seen and inject that into your work. In a way, that’s therapeutic in its own way. And yet, when you’re not working, you’re left with all that stuff, right? So I think this is the first. BIG SKY is the first project I’ve done sober and with my sober legs. And one thing I’ve learned is to watch that internal narrative to challenge it, right? So wait, what evidence do I have to support that thought that just happened?

ILLUMINATE:  Right?

PFEIFFER:  If there’s no evidence, then shut the F up, Dedee. Just get out of your own way and be in the moment and reground yourself. Also, I think being transparent and honest and laying boundaries down with love because I never knew how to do that, especially as an actor. I knew how to do it or not do it at all. And when I would finally get pushed into a corner, I’d lay a hatchet down a boundary. You know, other people didn’t even realize that that was a boundary. One thing we have to learn as artists, and as women, and as people, and men and they’s, that first of all, discover what your boundaries are to begin with. And then try a beautiful way to communicate that with the other person and lay the boundary down with love.

ILLUMINATE:  Exactly. Especially in this career path where things are subjective and where  people make assumptions looking at photos of us. You work hard, you’re talented, you’re beautiful. At the end of the day, ultimately you have to love you.

PFEIFFER: Took off for ten years to go to school and got some degrees, the one to help people and what have you. And ten years later, I came back…to BIG SKY. Oh. (Laughs) That whole ten years, I was just in college and I never looked in the mirror other than to brush my hair and brush my teeth and run out and then you’re at college all day. Raising two boys on my own, going to school, and having a learning disability and just make sure they get to karate and then write the paper. So ten years went by and I started aging. I didn’t notice it until BIG SKY and I was, oh, when did all that happen? So I was like, oh, hell no. So I started to call my actor friends. Now I have social worker friends and then called more actor friends and they’re like, Oh, honey, this is what we’re doing. We’re doing a little bit of this. We’re doing a little bit of that. You know, or some are doing a LOT of that and a LOT. No, no, no, a little bit’s good. What’s this filter thing? Where’s the filter? (Laughs) You know? And I just bang it out with red lips and call it a day, you know? (Laughs)

ILLUMINATE:  Red lipstick is always great.

PFEIFFER:  Always. I mean, really, at the end of the day, just do red lips and no one really knows. (Laughs)

ILLUMINATE:  

Right? Exactly. What my next question for you actually was going to be about school because I know that you took the time to go to school. You got your bachelor’s degree in psychology and then you got your master’s degree in social work from UCLA. And you have a concentration in mental illness, substance use and homelessness, and you’ve talked a little bit about it. Could you touch a little bit more on your inspiration for pursuing that degree and did you miss the industry at all when you were gone working on that? Or did you just think it was a really refreshing break and coming back to it now it’s just been an appropriate time?

PFEIFFER:  Yeah. Totally the second one. When I started school, I was exhausted from being told no. I was exhausted getting jobs that barely paid me enough to even pay the girl to watch my boys. I was like, wait a minute, I’m just breaking even here just to make my insurance benefits for my boys. Like I said I was doing it on my own. And at that point, the industry really was changing and really kind of like I wasn’t old enough to play the mothers, but I wasn’t young enough to play the young girls anymore. I just didn’t fit in and it was getting really tough. And I started seeing a lot of social welfare things going on in the world that were really bothersome, but I always did a lot of volunteer work. I thought this might be the time to just take a break for a minute. I didn’t mean to take ten years off, but I didn’t know. So I said, I think I want to go to college. So in school, I was going for a psych degree and then took a left-hand turn when I started looking at the different things I could do, and I decided to go for a social worker’s degree because it was more diverse. I got to learn macro, mezzo, and micro policy, community and individual. I learned all about different modalities. I learned about biopsychosocial perspective. It’s just a really diverse degree. And within that, my first year internship was with those experiencing homelessness, and I was in the field doing outreach. So a woman in her 50’s, climbing the side of a freeway. So they’re like, this woman’s nuts and they, of course, threw me out in the field because I was not afraid. So I fit really well in that internship. From there, I started to really understand it from the bowels out and it’s changed my life forever. So I’m a huge advocate for addressing it from a multidisciplinary perspective. Not a linear problem. Can’t be treated that way. And then the entire time, my life, fighting my own addiction, right? I took a year off, right before my last year at UCLA for my master’s social work, to get sober. So I had my own journey of addiction. So that’s where my, not just learned it from school, but my own learning experience where addiction came in. And mental health, just because I didn’t even realize how much trauma that I had been walking around with until it was addressed in rehab. And how addictions over here and traumas over here. And they really do need to be treated differently and from different perspectives. I’m glad I don’t use that lens. You know, I’m grateful today. I don’t do that. I don’t use that lens of anger or hate or whatever it is that you’re seeing with curiosity because of that.

ILLUMINATE:  I love that about you. I love your positivity. And I love how open you are about things and the fact that you have gone through so much. You’ve persevered and you genuinely want to help people and you’re using your own experiences to help others. You are also inspiring people to go out there and get educated. And I really admire that. You are never too old to get educated. You are never too old to go back to school to learn new things, because if you’re not learning you’re not growing and you’re never too old to grow. So I think it’s very admirable.

 PFEIFFER:  Bring you to the light quicker than anything. Don’t close yourself off to what life really has. Maybe trading hobbies, you know? I don’t know. Try it at work, try something else. If that doesn’t work, try something else. I mean, I’ve been trying acting for 40 years and studying and I can’t figure it out. (Laughs)

ILLUMINATE:  But you’re amazing at it. Well, let’s talk about one of my favorite roles of yours. Denise Brisbane on BIG SKY. She’s the office manager for the P.I. firm, Hoyt and Dewell, on the hit series BIG SKY. Your brother-in-law, David E. Kelly, actually created and executive produced the show. And you were telling me about how he, just out of the blue, messaged you. Could you talk a little bit more about how he pitched the story to you? And did you actually get to read the original C.J. Box book, THE HIGHWAY? And also the Cassie Dewell series that BIG SKY is based on? I happened to have this. (Show the BIG SKY seat back cover). I just got back from New Mexico. I read the book after I got it. He’s a great writer. My God, is he great! Oh, I didn’t see it coming when he called. I was off doing school for ten years, so I didn’t see it coming. He didn’t even realize he threw me a lifeline. And then he, out of nowhere, texted, and said “Hey, you still act? I’ve got this role named Denise on BIG SKY. It’s kind of perfect for you.” And I text back “Yesssssss!” And of course, I was interning for the Department of Mental Health almost the last year of my master’s degree. And I called my sister, Chelle, and I said, “I think David just offered me…” and she said, “Honey, he did.” (Laughs) So I read it and I was like, oh, I am so perfect for this role. Yeah, I could play this role. And hadn’t, like I said, been acting in ten years, but what was so great is, while it wasn’t a huge role, it was one of the principal characters. All shows produce seven-year contract, but it wasn’t like one of the leads, like Jenny or Cassie. And she’s kind of like a therapist, which is fantastic, because I am a social worker and so I’ll be able to bring a lot of my life experience to Denise. We made her sober.

ILLUMINATE:  Right. I noticed that.

PFEIFFER:  Yeah, like a lot of Dedee is in this and this is the first time in a character that I’m able to paint her with a lot of Dedeeisms. I’m so again, I’m trying to she’s trying to grow old gracefully, so it was really a blessing. And he didn’t even know. He just threw me this lifeline. And what I love now is being on BIG SKY Thursday nights, ABC 10PM and you can binge on Hulu. That will keep me employed. I’m waiting for the third season as we speak. It’s given me an opportunity to come back and a lot of people who had followed my career before are now following me again and new people who are rediscovering me. Or didn’t know my work before have discovered me. And with that I feel like I’m going to have an opportunity to pull my degree, my learned experience together with that, and create ,hopefully, a show one day that helps people on a larger scale. That’s my goal one day. Right now, I gotta play Denise. Make sure that she just keeps Dewell and Hoyt in check. Those girls are crazy.

ILLUMINATE:  I love Denise. I love Denise. She is such a great character. I mean, she’s almost like this surrogate mom in the group, but she’s also gossipy, but not in the way that would harm anyone. Just like she knows, like what’s going on with everyone. She knows all the dirt. 

PFEIFFER:  Dirt is her currency.

ILLUMINATE:  I love her. She’s so funny. And of course, you’re interacting with that group that works at Dewell and Hoyt all the time. What is the day to day experience working with the cast? And do you have particular scenes you had the most fun filming?I noticed that Denise was out in the field more. Starting to get more involved with the cases. 

PFEIFFER:  I don’t know what the writers are going to do for the third season.

ILLUMINATE:  We need more Denise on BIG SKY, so I’m crossing my fingers for season three. Big Sky, ABC, or you can binge it on Hulu, like I did. Very worth a binge. Do you have any other projects coming up and how can people follow you on social media?

PFEIFFER:  @dedeepfeifferofficial

I am working on, like I said, that talk show podcast thing, merging together social welfare issues. Topics of which I think affect a lot of people. And my friends who are really amazing people who don’t ever have the platform to show how they can help. And I want to create a platform for them and then a vehicle for people to see, say, a social welfare topic from a policy community and individual level. I think education is super important, because I think everybody can help be part of the solution in different ways. I didn’t know I could do A, B, or C and be part of the solution, so my show will be a lot of that and again, keep people kind of learning, right? And that’s how my education was and now my life’s journey.

ILLUMINATE:  I love your idea for your show. I can’t wait to watch it when it’s out. Thank you so much for being here with me today. You are such an inspiration. You are a superwoman. You are beautiful and amazing. And it was just an honor to have you here on ILLUMINATE.

PFEIFFER:  Thank you for having me, sweetie. You are amazing too, girl. You go get ‘em.
ILLUMINATE:  Thank you. Power women!

 

FOLLOW Dedee Pfeiffer on Instagram @dedeepfeifferofficial

Television fans will know Dedee Pfeiffer from her series regular roles on FOR YOUR LOVE with Holly Robinson Peete, Tamala Jones and James Lesure and from the award winning comedy series CYBILL opposite Cybill Shepherd and Christine Baranski.  This series won a SAG Award for Outstanding Ensemble Series.  Other notable small screen guest roles include but are not limited to ELLEN, SEINFELD, CSI, CSI:NEW YORK, WANTED, FRIENDS and ER.

Pfeiffer also had impressive roles in the films RED SURF opposite George Clooney, FALLING DOWN with Michael Douglas, TUNE IN TOMORROW with Keanu Reeves and INTO THE NIGHT with Jeff Goldblum.  Early in her career she starred in the indie cult film VAMP with the legendary music icon, Grace Jones.  In addition, she has dozens of other studio and independent films to her credits including producing the indie award winning film LOREDO.  The short film, THE TUB in which she starred and produced won multiple awards including a festival Best Actress Award. Dedee Pfeiffer is a single mother of two bright and talented young men.