A Woman of Many Voices: Maile Flanagan

Flanagan has voiced a diverse bunch of characters, including a 90-year-old witch, a teenage Pakistani boy, a toddler, an old Russian woman, and an alien. The day after the Emmys she found herself honking through an audition for the role of Goosey Loosey in Disney's Chicken Little series.

Like every role, this one required research and preparation. “I had to honk and talk like a goose. I was listening to goose calls on the Internet and recording them as MP3s so I could play them in my car,” she says. The hard work paid off and Flanagan landed the part.

Flanagan goes by her middle name, Maile, a Hawaiian word for the green laurel commonly used in leis. She was born in Honolulu but her family moved to Thailand when she was four-and-a-half and Germany when she was ten. “I went to school with people from all around the world,” she says. “That probably helps me with doing accents.”

Flanagan says her father “worked as a spy for the military.” She lived abroad until she attended Boston College. She graduated in 1987, and after a brief stint in D.C., she settled in Minneapolis, where she performed stand-up comedy and theater. In 1996 she moved to her current hometown, Los Angeles.

Flanagan has three agents who represent her separately for voiceovers, commercials, and theatrical roles. She has appeared on screen in many films, including 61* (2001), Phone Booth (2002), and The Station Agent (2003).

When she lived in Minneapolis Flanagan mounted a one-woman stage production of The Sound of Music. She scurried around performing every character's part in a 50-minute version of film, which is nearly three hours long.

Flanagan says she had no idea that the 1965 movie had a gay following until “droves of lesbians” started coming to her shows. “Sometimes I'm a little late to things,” she says. “I'm like, wait, you mean it's a lesbian thing to be in love with Julie Andrews?” Flanagan says she doesn't anticipate resurrecting the role because it requires more energy than she feels she now has at 40.

Flanagan has parts in two upcoming films: Evan Almighty (sequel to Bruce Almighty) and The Number 23 (with Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen). But she is particularly excited about Lovespring, a new Lifetime series about a dating service. Flanagan plays a client who's “a total loser who can't get any dates. She's uber horny but uber Christian.” The cast also includes Jane Lynch, Sam Pancake, Jennifer Elise Cox and Jack Plotnick.

“I love playing repressed homophobic characters,” Flanagan says. “I love mocking their ignorance.” For two weeks she is playing “a homophobic born-again Christian stage manager who's the most annoying person on the planet” in Oklahomo! It's a role she's reprising from last year. The stage production had been selling out consistently until a cease-and-desist order from Rodgers and Hammerstein forced it into hiatus until the script was revised.

When asked whether she has ever played a lesbian character, Flanagan laughs and says, “There's a lesbian element to everything I play.” Look for her in upcoming episodes of Grey's Anatomy, where she plays a CAT scan tech. “I don't think anyone knows her sexuality,” Flanagan says, “but in my mind she's gay.”