BUSY PHILIPPS
by ERIKA JANES | photographs by weston wells
credits
Creative Direction
+ Design
Sheila Patel
Photographs
Weston Wells
Styling
Samantha Sutton
usy Philipps is getting comfortable. It’s late May, and the Freaks and Geeks, Cougar Town, and Girls5Eva actress has just finished a
photoshoot. In the dressing room, she kicks off her white sneakers and tucks herself, cross-legged, into a chair for this interview. As we talk, she gets up to change out of the Marie Oliver caftan she was photographed in. Casually, just out of my view, she changes back into her own pale flared jeans and a delicate printed blouse before folding herself back into the chair again to continue answering questions. Philipps has a birthday coming up — she’ll be 44 on June 25th — and so we’re talking about aging. Busy Philipps is getting comfortable with that, too.
“I mean, look, in a purely physical way, I’ve only gotten better looking,” she jokes. “Someone just commented that on my Instagram: ‘What the heck, how do you get better looking as you get older?’ I’m like, dude, my outside is catching up with my inside, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Coming out of the pandemic, she admits she feels “sort of robbed” of time. “It’s like, thinking how old I’m turning, that can’t be right,” she says. “It almost feels like I am still turning 41.” Still, Philipps isn’t sweating a few years. “Especially as women age, I think we become more confident,” she says. “This is a generalization, but just anecdotally with my friends and myself, [we’re] more confident, and less interested in people who aren't interested in us... And then being able to tap into your own deep knowing of who you are and what you stand for and what you want to do in this world — that translates to a lot of freedom.”
Comfort, confidence, freedom — these words describe a happy emotional place that hasn’t necessarily been easy for Philipps to get to. Two weeks after the Flow photoshoot, we’re talking over Zoom. The Canadian wildfire smoke has blanketed the New York City sky in an awful yellow haze, and Philipps is having Los Angeles flashbacks as she moves around her airy, Manhattan apartment, closing windows and lamenting that it’s too gross outside to take her Goldendoodle, Gina, out for a walk.
What, specifically, do deep knowing and freedom mean to Philipps right now? It’s complicated. “If you could teach a class on how to be the person you become in your 40s, but in your 20s, everyone would take it,” she says. “It's almost impossible to articulate how to do that when you're still growing and learning and figuring things out — [but] it's through the process of figuring things out and growing and experiencing and learning that you're able to come to the place where I feel like I'm at now, which is: I feel very confident and comfortable in who I am, and what I believe in, and what I know to be true.”
By her own admission, Philipps can be a lot. She owns it, proudly, in her 2018 memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little, while also relaying the time a guy friend said to her, “You know, I think people would consider you really beautiful, if only you didn’t talk so much. Your personality is just a lot…I think people get distracted by that.” (She makes sure to note that this is a former friend, and rightfully so.)
Busy Philipps Is Getting Comfortable
Caring about that is another thing that the years have softened. There’s the confidence of not worrying about the people who aren’t interested in her, with the tiniest smidge of middle school angst mixed in. Still, it’s an important lesson to learn, that you don’t have to be everyone’s favorite flavor.
“I do think I still occasionally struggle with that, especially moving to a new city and making new friends and now being like a single person, which is so weird,” she says (Philipps moved from LA to NYC in September 2020; she and ex-husband Marc Silverstein quietly separated in 2021.). “That old feeling of, ‘I am a lot’ does creep in but then the other piece is knowing that, ‘Okay, so you are. That's fine. You're not for everybody.’”
The things Philipps knows about herself now, she says, were maybe things she always knew about herself — the difference is that now she’s able to integrate them, and thus “have that deep inner knowing that allows the freedom to move through the world in a different way.”
For most of her life, Philipps has moved through the world with anxiety, although she didn’t always recognize it as such. In her memoir, she wrote, “I’ve had anxiety for as long as I can remember.” As a child, she would lie awake in bed “and imagine the worst possible scenarios,” convinced something terrible would happen to her family, her friends, or herself. More recently, she revealed a time where she “would become convinced right before sleep that my heart had actually stopped beating and I was seconds away from death.”
For a time, Philipps considered her anxiety a by-product of her “volatile” family dynamic, and coped as best she could with things that didn’t actually help, like alcohol, and things that did, like therapy. (And as an adult, medical CBD and THC, which she wrote were the only things that ever helped with her sleep anxiety.) But when we first spoke, she revealed that it was actually ADHD that was, in fact, the larger root cause of her anxiety and low-grade depression.
So Philipps is among the growing number of women diagnosed with ADHD as an adult — sort of. Over our Zoom call, she clarifies: “By the way, my mom went back into my medical records, and it was like, fourth grade,” she says with a laugh. “I was diagnosed in fourth grade, but I wasn’t…” she switches gears here. “The medication back then was so different than it is now; with ADHD medicine back then it was like you had one choice. And they tried that medicine and I really hated it.”
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Article
Erika Janes
On the eve of her 44th birthday, the actress and activist continues to come into her own.
is finding herself
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It's through the process of figuring things out and growing and experiencing and learning that you're able to come to the place where I feel like I'm at now, which is: I feel very confident and comfortable in who I am, and what I believe in, and what I know to be true.
BUSY PHILIPPS
COVER STAR
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Owning Herself
Paying Attention
ADHD fell off her radar, although the problems it presents didn’t. It wasn’t until one of Philipps’ kids was diagnosed — she and Silverstein are parents to Birdie, 14, and Cricket, 9 — that a light bulb went off. “They were going through all of the symptoms, and Marc and I were looking at each other and I was like, ‘I have all of those things that you just listed. All of those things apply to me.’”
Philipps had never raised the possibility of ADHD before, never remembered her diagnosis, thinking that if a therapist or doctor felt she could have it, they would have brought it up. Of course, as we now know, the condition presents differently in girls and women, which medical professionals don’t always take into account.
Being put on medication five years ago was a game-changer for her mental health. “That was the most revelatory part of the ADHD medication,” she says. “My sort of low grade depression, the underlying feelings of low self worth and anxiety, just kind of went away.”
Now, the ability to accomplish tasks and prioritize things in a way that she struggled with for so long — “to look at the 4 million things that we all have on our plates at any given time and know which one needs to take priority and which one can be put on the backburner” — feels like self-care to Philipps. In the past, she explains, “I would ascribe the same amount of importance to everything, and then feel really terrible about not being able to do it all.”
Philipps isn’t trying to do it all, but she does do a lot. She’s busy professionally, with her successful podcast, Busy Philipps is Doing Her Best, and a plum role playing Regina George’s mom in the forthcoming Mean Girls movie musical. There’s parenting, of course, and navigating life in New York City as a single woman. And then there’s her activism. Philipps was a founding member of the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Creative Council; more recently, she’s been outspoken in her support of the Writers Guild of America strike — even giving a speech at a rally — and was just named an ACLU Artist Ambassador.
“I think it’s important,” she says of this work. “We live in a time that is increasingly political; being a person right now, especially a person with a vagina, is a political act. I wish it weren't. But our bodies have been politicized. My friends and family in the LGBTQIA community have been politicized, their lives and bodies and choices have been politicized. And I think that I have always been a person who's been motivated by trying to do the right thing.”
Her place in this world, however temporary, is what ultimately drives her. “People get motivated by all different types of things,” she continues. “I’m motivated by the idea that we're just here for a second. And I don't understand why money and greed is the motivating factor for so many people. I don't know everything in the world, of course, but one thing I do fucking know is you cannot take it with you. And I look at these billionaires, and these conglomerates and these huge corporations, and I'm consistently disappointed by their choices.”
A Natural Activist
It turns out that Philipps comes by her outspokenness naturally. “It’s in my actual blood,” she says, explaining that her great grandfather was a socialist activist priest at the turn of the century. Philipps never knew him, nor even knew about him until about a year and a half ago — this great grandfather, who lived to be 98, was arrested in the Hull House riots, wrote books about fair compensation for workers and “was always fighting,” she says — but he lived in New York City for a time in the early 1900s, and she discovered that she ended up, very randomly, in the same neighborhood.
Coincidences like that, as well as almost spooky-level spiritual occurrences, happen to Philipps a lot, and she’s here for them. “I’m a very open-to-the-magic-of-the-universe person,” she says. Proof (or just another coincidence?) is that the podcast episode that’s dropping the day we talk features a tarot and oracle creator. “She’s like a witch,” Philipps explains. “She’s a spiritual, tarot card reader lady that I like.”
Philipps believes in manifestation — that you can put your wishes out into the universe and make them a reality. Not in a winning-the-lottery kind of way, she clarifies, but if it’s something that’s “in line with the universal higher good.” On the podcast episode, she explains how she’s moving into a new apartment that she verbalized out loud that she wanted. She knows it all seems very The Secret. “I sound so woo woo, I know, but listen, I'm from LA. I'm like, very into it,” she says. “But also, I just think that at my best, I trust that even when things are terrible, or not great personally in my own life, that I will be protected, taken care of, and at some point I will understand why I had to go through it, why it was important. I just believe that.” She pauses. “Sometimes it takes a real long time.”
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