Ann Dowd tells Jimmy Kimmel that channeling Mrs. Garrett was the one role that scared her

One of the oddest offshoots of celebrity we’ve got is the vanity project. That’s where a famous person pours their considerable industry clout into an endeavor that, while dear to them, carries with it an undeniable air of, “What? Why?” Such have been Jimmy Kimmel’s forays into throwback TV fandom, where, since 2019, the late-night host has partnered with television icon Normal Lear to recast episodes of such Lear-created series as Good Times, All In The Family, and The Jeffersons with A-listers from Woody Harrelson, to Jamie Foxx, to Viola Davis, just to pluck out a few.

Most recently, Kimmel and Lear partnered once more to bring to life two episodes of the 1980s sitcoms Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts Of Life. And, as aging fans of 80s TV (and current insomniac watchers of TV Land) know, there’s one pivotal casting choice linking both those Kimmel-formative series together, and that’s Mrs. Garrett. In one of the crossovers that marked Lear’s series of the time, the late Charlotte Rae originally played protective surrogate mom to both a gaggle of boarding school girls and a pair of orphans scooped off the streets by a well-meaning but occasionally clueless older white millionaire. And if nobody watching either The Leftovers or The Handmaid’s Tale immediately imagined Ann Dowd as the ideal TV busybody and fiercely loving protector, well, that’s because, as Kimmel stated, correctly, on Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, Dowd is “one of the finest actors of all.”

And the reliably loveliest, as Dowd came out to rapturous studio applause and repeatedly claimed that Kimmel’s invitation to put on a red beehive wig and mentor everyone from Jennifer Aniston and Kathryn Hahn to Kevin Hart and Damon Wayans represented her greatest acting challenge yet. “I’m out of my league, for sure,” Dowd recalled sincerely upon being greeted with the task, telling Kimmel that confronting those 40- or 50-year-old TV scripts had the noted thespian contemplating a flop-sweaty early exit.

But Ann Dowd is a pro, dammit, and claims she eventually had to give herself the sort of inspirational pep talk Edna Garrett might have delivered in her day. “You know, honey, you’re a grownup,” Dowd remembered delivering that Garrett-esque tough love in the mirror, “So what we do when we’re grownups is we do the work that’s in front of us.” Luckily for the accomplished Dowd, everybody involved in Kimmel’s ongoing exercise in throwback TV was also into the gig, with Dowd singling out Diff’rent Strokes re-enactor Snoop Dogg for praise. “Isn’t he the loveliest, that Snoop Dogg,” enthused Dowd, who added the rapper and actor to her list of favorite co-stars.

As for the original work almost certain Oscar nominee Dowd has been up to, the actor thanked Kimmel for his kind (if emotionally shellshocked) words in praise of her performance in Mass. Dancing around the central plot element of that four-person/one-room dramatic film (from first-time writer-director and Cabin In The Woods star Fran Kranz) Dowd was, once more, feelingly Mrs. Garrett-like in expressing the universal and character-building nature of her grieving character’s pain. “We’re all kind of scared, you know, these days,” Dowd told Kimmel of the film, “It’s a way through, meaning to healing perhaps or forgiveness, the burdens that we carry, that we want to put down but we don’t know how.” Calling her time alongside her Mass ensemble-mates Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs, and Reed Birney, “the most profound experience of acting in my life,” Dowd once again unconsciously channeled Mrs. Garrett in ensuring us that all the pain is ultimately worthwhile. Just a fact of life, you might say.