Ask Grace Under Fire star Brett Butler, and she will be quick to tell you that she has had her share of life’s ups and downs.
Indeed, she didn’t even realize just how dire her circumstances had become until she became six months behind in the rent from her L.A. apartment and she was facing imminent eviction.
This was a far cry from the $250,000 per episode during her work in “Grace Under Fire.” She actually confided in one of her closest friends – supernatural blogger Lon Strickler – in regards to how dire her situation had become:
“I told him, ‘I might’ve waited too long to do this, but I am so screwed right now,’” Butler, 63, recounts in her Georgian lilt. “‘I’ve been ashamed. Almost ashamed to death.’” Says Strickler: “I decided that it was in her benefit if I tried to form a GoFundMe account for her.”
Of course, Butler is no stranger to hard times. When she was discovered on the stand-up comedy circuit in New York City, she had already endured an abusive marriage to an abusive alcoholic that mirrored the actions of her father, who was also an abusive alcoholic. During her first sitcom, called Grace, she developed an addiction to painkillers because of a sciatica condition. The drug abuse made her very erratic on the set and they ultimately had to cancel about half of the fifth season.
“At the bloody bitter end, I really was difficult,” Butler concedes. “I was out of my mind. Drugs will do that to you. The show should have been pulled sooner than it was.”
It was just a few years after that when Butler decided to flee Hollywood for Georgia, where she eventually bought a bucolic property she had found on the internet. However, that also ended badly because she had difficulty keeping up with the mortgage payment. After literally “losing the farm” she became fodder for Entertainment Tonight, who even claimed that she lived “in a homeless shelter”! Instead, she claims that an ET producer had just fabricated the story so that her appearance would have higher ratings.
This might come as a shock to a lot of individuals, but Brett Butler actually credits Charlie Sheen with saving her life in 2012. The two had been acquainted since the Grace Under Fire days, and he lobbied producers to get Butler a role as a cocktail waitress on his show “Anger Management”. Grace was on the show for two years. “It literally saved me,” she claims.
However, if you fast forward to 2021, it appeared to Butler on several occasions that she would indeed end up being homeless.
Due to her pride, the Grace Under Fire actress had to convince herself to go ahead and do a crowdfunding campaign. Despite the fact that she thought her enemies would be greatly satisfied, she finally agreed to it.
“He talked me into it,” she says of Strickler’s urging. “The way he put it was, ‘You can’t live your life based on being afraid of what haters will do.’ “
Strickler decided to ask Butler how much she wanted to raise. “And I said, ‘I don’t know — what’s the cutoff line between needing something and being absolutely greedy?’ ” They decided on a goal of $15,000. The campaign raised $12,583 from 246 donors — enough to keep the wolves at bay for a little longer. Strickler since has pushed the target up to $20,000.
“She still needs a little more help,” he says. “She just needs one more little nudge to get back on her feet.”
Butler would go on to film about 112 episodes of Grace Under Fire in all. She can only remember about 80, and she really cannot bring herself to watch any of this early work – even the early efforts of the show where she was sober and at the top of her game. “I try not to go into yesterday,” she says. “I think the last time I watched anything I did that was old, it was my first Tonight Show.”
Butler tried a lot of jokes on that Grace Under Fire show, and a lot of them worked and a lot of them didn’t. Some of the jokes really pushed the boundaries, including one dealing with domestic violence: “My husband was cleaning his fist, and it went off.” However, Butler would lock horns with producer Chuck Lorre and he would ultimately quit the show after that first year.
Butler finally got sober in July 1998 — “I should not have lived through 1998, honestly” — and insists she has not touched drugs or alcohol since. The journey to recovery was an incredibly trying one, and wounds persist. “In sobriety, people make amends,” she says. “And my list was exceptionally long. I called one particular person, and she said, ‘Oh, you want to apologize? Well don’t bother. I forgive you. But there’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you: There’s nothing that special about you.’ I could tell how long she’d been waiting to tell me that. I wanted to blurt out, ‘Yeah, people always go on drug-fueled death rampages because they think they’re really special.’ ”
Butler made about $25 million on Grace Under Fire, a fortune that she blew on what she termed on “profligate” spending and carelessness. “I was a little bit too trusting with some people that worked for me, and I had a lot of things stolen,” she says. “That’s just stupid on my part, not to have insurance for those things. And to loan and give a lot of money away. I really just felt so guilty for having it — I almost couldn’t get rid of it fast enough.”
There is no question that Butler is self-eviscerating as well. “I’m not the only one in this boat,” she says. “Most people that are in it never had the opportunities I did. It doesn’t really lessen my self-loathing or fear about it, but I do realize that.”
Butler had a lot of deals fall through since then, but she has had her share of successes as well.
Since her Grace Under Fire days, Butler has done some work. She appeared on the HBO series The Leftovers; played an adoptive mother to Aja Naomi King’s character on ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder in 2016;had a recurring role on season nine of AMC’s The Walking Dead; and most recently played the mother of Reese Witherspoon’s character on Apple TV+’s The Morning Show.
Nowadays, her reputation on Hollywood sets is vastly improved. “Brett came in to read for some FBI agent that was a one-off character,” recalls fellow Leftover actor Damon Lindelof. “She made all these really interesting choices. When an actor is on a show like Grace Under Fire, you don’t really view them as an actor — they’re playing a heightened version of themselves. But in her read, she gave a real performance. She was so good that I was basically like, ‘We’ve got to do something really cool for her.’ ” Lindelof ultimately decided to write her a new, apocalyptic part on the series where she played played Sandy, the gatekeeper of a Texas tent city who pays Christopher Eccleston’s character several hundred dollars to physically assault her son with an oar. Says Lindelof, “She came in and crushed it.”
Even though these infrequent appearances don’t pay Brett Butler as much as her Grace Under Fire work did, she seems to be happier these days. No, her life is not perfect, but she has overcome plenty of obstacles and came forth as gold.
What is in the cards for Butler in the future? Will she return to stand-up? She can definitely see that happening for sure. Either way, it is just like that old Grateful Dead song. She knows that one way or the other, she will get by.