When the cast of “Kevin Can F**K Himself” assembled to shoot outside Boston, last year, after months of pandemic-related delays, one of the first questions to be resolved was that of the show’s asterisked title. Annie Murphy, who stars as Allison, recalled the uncertainty on a recent Zoom call from her home in Toronto. Her hair was pulled into a loose bun, and she wore a hoodie with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, exposing a forearm tattoo of Jimmy Stewart. “We were all, like, ‘We say it, right?’ ” Murphy, best known for her role as Alexis Rose on “Schitt’s Creek,” said with a grin. “So, I’ve graduated from ‘shit’ to ‘fuck’! Where am I gonna go next?”
Kevin is the schlubby husband of Murphy’s Allison, an archetypally put-upon wife. Whenever he’s onscreen, the show is an oversaturated sitcom, complete with laugh track. When he’s not, it becomes a drama, darker in both style and substance. “In the multi-cam world, everyone’s a little bit more cartoony,” Murphy said. Her character, by design, has only “to be the butt of a joke, or the one who comes in, nags at the guys, and then walks out.” As the camera shifts, Allison tacks from broad one-liners to a more complicated array of emotions. She fulfills her duties and fantasizes about a change—in her circumstances, in her loser spouse—until a neighbor forces her to confront reality. Allison’s life with Kevin, the neighbor tells her, has been “hard to watch.”
Murphy, who is thirty-four, uses her whole body when she tells a story, striking poses and pulling faces. She started performing as a kid in Ottawa (“I’m told I excelled as Hyena No. 2”), and her final high-school role, as Joan of Arc in Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark,” left her determined to act. “My parents—Lord love them, and what is the matter with them?—were nothing but encouraging,” Murphy said. She studied theatre in Montreal, settled in Toronto, and, in her early twenties, began making reluctant pilot-season pilgrimages to L.A. In 2013, after a period of “really questioning if I was doing the right thing with my life,” she was cast in “Schitt’s Creek,” a Canadian comedy series about a rich family bankrupted by an embezzlement scheme. The show achieved mainstream success after it was picked up by Netflix, and Murphy’s Emmy-winning turn as the ex-celebutante Alexis colored the offers she received at the end of its run last year. “A lot of people were very excited for me to do more Alexis, and play the blond socialitey character,” she said. The formal conceit of “Kevin” proved more appealing. “Allison couldn’t be further from Alexis. She’s a very working-class, very unfashionable, very angry human being. I was, like, O.K., I think this is the one-eighty that I was looking for.”
Murphy prepared by watching the types of family sitcoms that Valerie Armstrong, the creator of “Kevin,” had set out to subvert (“The King of Queens,” “Kevin Can Wait”) and working with a dialect coach, trading Alexis’s signature vocal fry for a Boston brogue. “I’m still terrified that we’re going to be run out of Massachusetts,” she said. “It’s such a tricky accent! Because it’s not there, not there, not there—and then it just comes and, like, punches you in the eardrum.”
Despite COVID constraints, there was real camaraderie on set. “I have friends on the crew whose faces I don’t know,” she said, placing a hand across her mouth to pantomime a mask. As an actor, she said, “it’s hard to be told, ‘Go stand over there and don’t interact.’ ”
This spring, Murphy joined the cast of “Russian Doll” and spent a month filming with Natasha Lyonne in Manhattan just as the city was beginning to reopen. “I got to drive an Alfa Romeo down the cobblestone streets of SoHo!” she said. “I got to shoot in this beautiful old brownstone on the Upper West Side! I’d never worked in New York before. I felt like a real working actress.” Bars and restaurants in Toronto were still closed when she returned home, but the warm weather had elicited some signs of life. “I sat in a park and drank wine this weekend,” she said. (She received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine in the U.S.) “I really do feel like we’re going to come out of this thing a little bit nicer, because the people were just in a good mood.” She paused. “Albeit, they might have all been just very shit-faced.” ♦
