Mean Girls The Musical's Barrett Wilbert Weed Is Channeling Her Middle School Anxiety

inside of the initial 40 minutes of knowing her, Barrett Wilbert Pot has already mentioned also much. At least twice. "I'm sure a lot of people could be really furious about what I just mentioned, although that's what I think," she notified me in her dressing room at the August Wilson Theatre. Nevertheless that's just who Pot is; she has no time for bullshit.


Even before she landed the role of Janis Sarkisian (née Ian) in Mean Girls on Broadway, Pot had been channeling her inner Janis for years, projecting the sort of on-stage confidence that you only learn by not having any of it in your formative years. Although that middle-school angst has fueled her explosive efficiency because the emo teen outsider in Tina Fey's musical adaptation of her 2004 hit — and cost Marijuana "thousands of dollars in therapy sessions," she joked.


It's that sort of grit that has amassed her a fervent fan-following right after starring as Veronica Sawyer in off-Broadway's Heathers: The Musical. Right now, with Mean Girls, Marijuana has role — along with a show-stopping number — she can really sink her teeth into. MTV News chatted with the performer about the middle-school trauma that led her to Janis, working with Fey, and why she learned to embrace her awkwardness.


MTV News: I remember relating to Janis a lot While I first saw Mean Girls because she was so bold. She didn’t fit in, and she didn't care. Did you share that connection to Janis as well?


Barrett Wilbert Weed: She's the most real character. I don't know a lot of Cadys or a lot of Reginas — I know several Gretchens. However I know probably a hundred Janises and around a million Damians, both the versions from the movie and versions that Grey [Henson] and I have made. They're the most real characters because they're the most susceptible, and they're the most dramatic and stepped on. I think that's how everybody tends to feel in high school.


The greatest people you'll ever meet: Damian (Grey Hanson) and Janis pot) introduce themselves to new girl Cady (Erika Henningsen)


MTV News: High school is a really weak time. Do you ever wish you were more like Janis as a teen? Because she has such confidence.


Weed: Yes! She's remarkably intelligent, in a way that not a lot of teenagers have the confidence to be. I think a lot of teenagers are incredible. Once I'm not working, once I'm technically unemployed, I teach a lot, and I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with boatloads of teenagers for the past three years.


They are really smart. It's just they, well, I think ladies are expected not to be… It’s like that whole study that I keep reading about where in the event you mention mean things to a plant and the plant dies, it can't grow. Human beings are like that also. In case you converse with human beings in a certain way, then they act that way right over time. As soon as I'm teaching teenagers I habitually attempt to treat them like a little more gently, nevertheless the same that I treat adults.


MTV News: It's about respect, also. Young people don't desire to be spoke down to.


Weed: Yeah. I went to a high school that was really aggressive in that way. They treated us all like adults. I think it was really nice.


MTV News: What do you teach once you’re not working?


Weed: I teach voice, and I teach pretty much just like whichever people need. So if they want me to work on a monologue with them, or if they want me to do some work with them, I do that. And then I do master classes, like at high schools — which is my most preference thing to do. Because you just hang out with kids for two days and get to know them and work on stuff. I get to really encourage them to be themselves, which is the most valuable thing you could be as an actor.


MTV News: I love that you work with young people because teens were the audience for this film as soon as it came out. It’s about that coming-of-age experience. School can be really unforgiving…


Weed: It's really trash.


MTV News: I know you had your own terrible experience. What got you through it?


Weed: I got rescued like halfway through that experience. Because middle school was the worst time in my life. That's still a first date question that I ask people Once I go on dates. I'm like, "Have you ever been or will you ever be a Republican?" And if response The answer then is yes or perhaps, I’m like, "I can't visualize you anymore." Also, I routinely ask, "How was middle school for you?" Because I really feel like in the event you had a OK time in middle school that are a jerk. In the event you were able to just slide by, it meant that you either weren't helping people or that you were the person who was beating up on everybody.


Weed throughout the Mean Girls original Broadway cast recording


MTV News: Why middle school?


Weed: My father passed away Once I was seven. I sort of internalized that as there's something wrong with me, and that's not something you could verbalize as a kid — it's something you figure out any time you're an adult, whenever you're paying someone thousands of dollars in therapy sessions to aid you figure out what's going on. Plus it made me feel really separate from everybody, and it also made me feel like there was certainly something wrong with me and it also was certainly my fault, and yes it sort of made me feel like no matter what I did I would routinely just sort of be wrong.


Any time while you feel that way about yourself you project that. And people who are susceptible to being bullies or susceptible to being sort of aggressive towards other kids, they pick up on that feeling. If you're feeling susceptible, or you already don't feel good about yourself and don't have good self-esteem, they feed on that so you become the person at the bottom of the pecking sort. I didn't really have anybody in my life telling me to have more confidence or more self-esteem or telling me that nothing was wrong with me.


MTV News: And then you noticed theater.


Weed: I got really interested in performing, and I got really interested in acting. It's very funny; singing has routinely been a very separate thing for me, up until I went to college. I just studied musical theater because I was like, "That means I can study voice and acting in the same major and I won't have to double major." Right now I do musicals for a living.


MTV News: Although that was never the plan?


Weed: That was never the plan. It's still not the plan! Yet it's been a very fun sidetrack for awhile. A fun chapter.


MTV News: Do you wish to pursue film and television?


Weed: I would love to do stuff on camera. That's what I'd like to do. It took me a really long time to feel confident as an actor. I think also because there's a weird stigma about musical theater where we treat the males who do musical theater differently than we treat the ladies in musical theater. It's very rare in my experience, from my perspective, that I have seen girls who star in Broadway musicals to go on to do really phenomenal acting roles in film and television.


MTV News: In your freshman year of high school, you transferred to a private performing arts school. How did that change things for you?


Weed: That school for sure saved my life. It was the opening time I had companions. It was the opening time I was around people who wanted to be around me. It was the initial time that I felt like people were taking the thing that was the most special to me as seriously as I'd routinely taken it.


MTV News: What was your first production once you were there?


Weed: I was in a children's musical. They would do children's theater for the community, which was cool. It's the most competitive place I've ever been. I had a hard time getting cast While I was in high school. We did a bunch of Chekhov plays. I think there was a Shakespeare play thrown in there. I did Urinetown my senior year. I was the mom in Bye Bye Birdie — the head of the theater department cast me in that role. I was like, "What?" And then I saw that part is so funny. Also, Bye Bye Birdie is such a good show. Any time it's done well, there's nothing funnier than that show. It's absurd.


Janis sings "I'd Rather Be Me" in Mean Girls


MTV News: You tend to gravitate to characters who have a little bit of weirdness to them. Is that crucial to you?


Weed: [Mean Girls] is the only thing I've ever done that's actually a real comedy, where we have to land jokes and also you need to get the timing right. There really are all these very mechanical things, and also you have got to get them right or the scene doesn't work. Or the scene falls apart. Or the joke that comes three scenes later won't land in case you don't do this exactly right. So I'm so not used to comedy in that sense, although my life is just filled with the funniest people in the world. I firmly believe that all of my best companions are geniuses, and they're so funny and weird. That's how I live my life. So I think that comes through in the things I play because I don't really learn that that's awkward.


MTV News: So not only was Mean Girls your first real comedy yet you're also workshopping these jokes in front of Tina Fey, who's a genius at what she does — and she created these characters.


Weed: It's cool to watch someone who means so much to so several people sort of live up to those standards and some. She's also a remarkable mom. She has two daughters and so they are both so weird and great, and she just doesn't ever attempt to reign that in for them. As far as having her around and the standards that she holds things to, she'll let people work on things, especially in this environment because as soon as you're doing a theater show you have so much time to develop the characters and to work things out. Then at the very end, as soon as she can tell that you're piecing things with each other, she'll be like, "Maybe just observe the comma there."


She is such a machine. It's the only time I've ever worked on something where if something isn't working it's gone in the day. It's replaced. Generally you must deal with these very fragile male writers who cannot performer name their work being cut or fine-tuned.


MTV News: What's it like singing "I'd Rather Be Me" night immediately after night? Because it's such a powerful, anthemic song for young women.


Weed: It's the initial time I've ever sung a song where a character has something figured out that they didn't really have figured out, or that they did not have confidence in at the starting of the show. It's very stream of consciousness, the way that it's written. It's written so fast that it's almost a patter song, which is such a gift to me because I don't have time to think while I'm singing or talking or speak-singing, whichever I'm doing. There's only one pause toward the end of the song where Janis wakes up from talking and realizes that she's just been carried around and supported — physically and emotionally — by all of those ladies who she didn't know she had anything in normal with.


Our ensemble is filled with some of the greatest people I've ever met. They're so talented, yet they're also just delightful and cooperative, especially the females in this cast. To get to share that moment, where you look on both sides and there's just females listening to you, and then to run around the circle and high five all my companions, it's the perfect. It's hard to articulate what that feels like, other than it just feels like a really genuine delivery of a message that people need to hear.