YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN THIS PROLIFIC ACTOR/COMEDIAN/WRITER ON THE SCREEN, BUT YOU MIGHT NOT RECOGNIZE HER ON THE STREET

BY LAURA D.C. KOLNOSKI • PHOTOS © AMESSÉ PHOTOGRAPHY

The life of character actress Siobhan Fallon Hogan is one of collaboration with A listers, world travel, and close encounters of the fascinating kind. When she was a youngster in upstate New York, watching Merv Griffin’s afternoon talk show (1962– 1986), the performance seed was planted, and it quickly sprouted.

“My father, a lawyer, was extremely funny,” she recalled. “I was in shows starting in third grade, but I was always the last wheel and did not get great reviews. My family wanted me to be a lawyer.” But there were other forces at work, helping to lead the creative redhead in a different direction. Her early life was peppered with celebrities.

“My aunt, Beth Fallon, was a reporter and columnist for the New York Post and the Daily News,” Hogan continued. “Her father, my great uncle Benny, spent time in a rehabilitation center.

Jackie Gleason was also there, and they became best friends. So my Aunt Beth met many celebrities from childhood on.” Hogan graduated from Le Moyne College in Syracuse and got her master’s degree in fine arts from Catholic University. She then headed to New York City, taking a job as a receptionist at a law firm.

“I tried to be a waitress, but I was terrible at it,” Hogan laughed (which she does often). “A friend told me about an audition for the improve comedy club Who’s On First, and I ended up performing there on Saturday nights.” The director advised her to write a one woman show, which she did, calling it Bat Girl. She put it on in a lobby and had her friends stand in front of TKTS, the discount ticket outlet, handing out fliers to see the show for $9.99. The reviews were positive.

She then moved to Los Angeles, where in 1990 she continued performing Bat Girl in a venue she rented. The enterprising actress “pretended” to be her own publicist to generate reviews, which attracted comic Jerry Seinfeld and members of Saturday Night Live to the show. Hogan’s day job was teaching English as a second language. The night the comedians came, audience members were mostly Japanese, and it’s not clear if they understood what she was saying.

Still, the celebrities enjoyed the performance. As it happened, two SNL cast members had just left the show, and Hogan was asked to fill one of those spots. She appeared in sketches in 1991 and 1992, during which time she developed friendships with late cast members Chris Farley and Phil Hartman, as well as Chris Rock, Mike Myers, and Dana Carvey. Then she got the call to be on Seinfeld, where she played Elaine’s roommate, Tina, for three episodes before, she said, “SNL wouldn’t let me do any more.”

“I loved being on Seinfeld,” she said, adding that she lived one building away from Jerry in New York. “The cast were incredibly hard workers and took it very seriously. It was a classy group.” Hogan’s first major film was 1994’s Greedy, starring Michael J. Fox and Kirk Douglas. In her next role she played the chain smoking school bus driver in Forrest Gump.

She subsequently landed the role of Beatrice, wife of Edgar (Vincent D’Onofrio), in 1997’s Men in Black, a role that turned out to present unexpected challenges. A massive snowstorm had hit Manhattan, shutting down all transportation. Hogan had to walk through Central Park, her baby in tow, to an audition, only to discover they wanted her to play a woman who had birthed an alien. To play the farmer’s wife instead, she imitated a woman in a carpet commercial and got the part she desired.

The movie was filmed on the same set as the TV show Little House on the Prairie, and the rain and mud were relentless. A shoot that Hogan thought would last just a few days ended up taking a month.

Still, she said, all in all it was a good experience. “Will Smith is a great guy; it was a fun set,” she said.

The acting chameleon, who Vulture called a “scene stealer,” was on a field trip with her daughter in Sussex County’s Stokes Forest when she got the call to appear on the NBC series 30 Rock. In the episode, she played Alec Baldwin’s character’s sister (Nathan Lane played his brother).

“I caught pneumonia on that Stokes trip, but luckily my cough fit the character, who was a drunk,” she recalled. Hogan had met 30 Rock creator and SNL alum Tina Fey while making the film Baby Mama in 2008. “Tina Fey is another hard worker,” Hogan said. “She had just had her baby, so we bonded over working with kids.”

Hogan’s television credits began with The Golden Girls in 1990, and have since included roles on Law & Order, Rescue Me, Wayward Pines, Billions, and Elementary, to name but a few. From 2014 to 2018, she appeared in the CBS truth based series Scorpion, about a team of geniuses that solves international crimes. The show starred Elyes Gabel, Katharine McPhee, and veteran actor Robert Patrick.

“A lot of it becomes who you know,” Hogan explained of her TV success. “I was in several CBS shows directed by Christine Moore. I had known Robert Patrick for years. In Scorpion, all the actors were young except for Robert and me. It was an interesting set.” Her showbiz friends include actor/ writer Patrick Clifton of Matawan, cousin of state assemblyman and former Monmouth County freeholder Robert Clifton, with whom Hogan is developing a comedy/drama aimed at a streaming service like Netflix.

Hogan met the late Lauren Bacall through Danish film director Lars von Trier, with whom she made several films, including Dancer in the Dark (2000), which starred Bjork, Catherine Deneuve, and Joel Grey, and which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. That led to her appearance in von Trier’s acclaimed film Dogville (2003), which starred Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany. She flew to Sweden with her three young children for the filming.

“It was right after 9/11, and I was eager to get out of the United States,” Hogan recalled. Bacall was on the same plane, cast in the same film. “We became great friends. Lauren lived in The Dakota in New York, and I was on Central Park West, so we were neighbors, too. She told me that, at her stage of life, she didn’t think she could meet new friends. She actually mentioned me in one of her books. Lauren was always looking for her next job. Acting is such an up and down business. She felt the same way I did. That was extremely comforting and inspirational.”
Hogan, who lives in Monmouth County, recently finished The Shed, a horror flick due out in 2019 starring Timothy Bottoms and Nolan Miller (the latter from Modern Family). The movie, in which Hogan plays a sheriff, was filmed at the new, $15 million studio complex close to her second home near Syracuse. During breaks she was able to drive home for lunch.

Today her oldest child is a reporter, her middle child is in college, and the youngest is a senior in high school. The life of a character actress meshed “perfectly” with being a mom, Hogan reflected. “We went to Australia to film Charlotte’s Web, and the kids went to school there, and also in Sweden. They got to see the world. This spring we went to the Cannes Film Festival. We stayed in a fabulous hotel—but we were like the Beverly Hillbillies.”

Prompted by her neighbor, the fine artist Lori Desmond Oakes, Hogan began writing children’s books that Oakes could illustrate. The first, Suzy the Scene, was based on her own childhood as a “terrible athlete.” The second, Peter the Polluter, got its themes from Oakes’ environmentalist son (it’s available on loridesmondoakes.com). A third, Suzy’s Problem, will be about the challenges of math and reading, based on experiences of Hogan and her own children.

Hogan, who’s a member of New York’s Atlantic Theater Company, is currently writing her next one woman show, She’s a Lady, a comedic take on the “Year of the Woman.”

Asked about her philanthropy, she defers to her husband, Peter, a commodities trader actively involved with Lunch Break, a food pantry and social service organization in Red Bank. “He’s the goody goody,” she joked. But she has also contributed by emceeing events and doing one woman shows for Shore House in Long Branch and Dreams for Kids.

You have to develop your life outside of acting, and be careful what you wish for you either work too much or not enough,” Hogan observed. “Now I get a lot of scripts where the character is described as ‘She’s got a lot of miles on her face,’ and you ask, ‘What the heck!?’ But I love playing new characters.”