“I'm doing a job that synthesizes all the things I love, which is comedy and musical theater and staying home in New York,” Ana Gasteyer said, and then smiled as if the sentence had finally landed where it belonged: on a first Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Schmigadoon!, a part she played as Mildred at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre.
The nomination is the kind of milestone that measures a long arc in a single line: Gasteyer, 59, has been working across stage and screen for 25 years, and she called the moment “just a cool little moment of saying, ‘Oh yeah, guess what, I was on the right path.’” The public reckoning arrives this Sunday when the Tony ceremony takes place at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
Her account of why the nomination feels earned skips the usual résumé lists and focuses on craft. “I love the discipline. I love the rigor. I've been doing this for 25 years, [so] it's just a cool little moment of saying, ‘Oh yeah, guess what, I was on the right path,’” she said, contrasting the press-and-plug rhythm of film and television with theater’s daily rehearsal and nightly performance: “Usually when you're doing film and television, you do the project and then you plug the project and there's sort of press mode and regular mode,” she said. “But when you're in theater, you're sort of talking about what you're doing all day and then you go and do it every night. So it is sort of like having two days in a day.”
That synthesis—singing chops mixed with comic instinct—was not inevitable. Gasteyer traces the beginning to a music audition: “I sang my way in,” she said of Northwestern University, where she was “a proper voice major.” The pivot that reoriented everything came quickly: “I got rejected everywhere else — it was the hardest school I applied to, and I got in — but I dropped out of music within a year because I met the comedy people, and it changed my life.”
The change of course led west after graduation. She joined The Groundlings in Los Angeles and was then cast on Saturday Night Live, where she remained for six years, building a public profile with impressions of Martha Stewart and Celine Dion. She left SNL when she was pregnant with her daughter, Frances, and has since moved between TV, film and stage—appearing in Mean Girls as the mother of Lindsay Lohan's Cady and returning to Broadway for work like Schmigadoon!.
Gasteyer still names collaborators the way a player names teammates. She joined Will Ferrell onstage in 2025 to resurrect Bobbi of Bobbi and Marty for SNL’s 50th anniversary celebration, and she called Paula Pell “one of my favorite comedians on earth.” Those relationships, she suggested, are part of why this nomination feels like recognition from a community as much as from an awards body.
The immediate next step is concrete: Gasteyer will attend the Tony Awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday. Whatever the statuette’s eventual destination, she has already framed the nomination as its own proof — a public acknowledgment that the path she altered decades ago, when she left a strict music track for comedy, has produced work she values and, now, a Broadway nod.
