It takes a mighty woman to hold her own with Meryl Streep. Margo Martindale is that woman.
From the moment she appears in the film “August: Osage County” — stomping off to a grieving household, lugging a storebought cake — it’s hard to take your eyes off her.
Then again, you don’t have to. Suddenly, she’s everywhere — on CBS’ “The Millers,” where she plays a bossy mom; FX’s “The Americans” (a steely KGB agent) and HBO’s “The Masters of Sex” (a prudish nurse). Add her Emmy-winning Mags in “Justified” and her heartbreaking performance in “Paris, je t’aime” — as an American abroad, her plaintive face turned hopefully toward the Eiffel Tower— and you might just call her Hollywood’s new “It” girl.
Just don’t call this 62-year-old an overnight success.
“She’s been working her tail off,” says Chris Cooper, who met her 33 years ago at Kentucky’s Actors Theatre, and plays her long-suffering husband in “August,” out Friday.
“She brings out richness in everything she does,” adds Matthew Rhys, who plays Philip, her fellow spy in “The Americans.” And she’s a terrific raconteur: “You’ll pass a bar and she’ll say, ‘Me and John Goodman used to drink beers there when beers were 50 cents a pop!’ and you think, ‘Oh to have been a fly on the wall!’ ”
You didn’t need to be a fly on the wall the other day at the Essex House, where Martindale’s hearty laugh resounded past two sets of closed doors.
An Upper West Sider for the past 39 years (“Fairway, Zabar’s, all the way!”), she still has a Texas twang, which sounds just right for the dusty backdrop of “August.”
The film was shot outside Bartlesville, Okla., where the cast lived side by side in adjoining townhouses. They weren’t far from a Goodwill, where Martindale — whose Mattie Fae is sister to Streep’s Violet — found “a perfect Violet skirt.”
“It was green with black sequinned work on it, very Westerny, and it cost $3.50,” she says. “We had a party someplace and what did [Meryl] come in?” She nods, triumphant.
“Everyone went, ‘Oh my God. That skirt! Where’d you get it?’ and Meryl said, ‘My sister got it for me — for $3.50!’ ”
Martindale had no sisters back in Jacksonville, Texas, just two athletic brothers. It wasn’t until she was 12 and her mother was hemming her dress when they realized that “something was wacky” with her body.
“She said, ‘Stand up straight!’ and I said, ‘I am!’ ” It was scoliosis, so severe she was forced to wear a body brace well into high school.
“And you know what?” Martindale says. “It made me a different person. I became very outgoing — it really built character!”
She won 22 theater scholarships before heading to Michigan State. In 1974, she came to New York with two actor friends who split the rent on an apartment that cost $375 a month. She even met her husband here — musician William Boals, with whom she has a 25-year-old daughter.
“We were both working at the Prime Time restaurant at 77th and Amsterdam,” she says. “I think a Chirping Chicken is there now.”
A pause, and then a hearty laugh: “Man, that’s good chicken!”