Photo-Illustration: Joe McKendry; Photo: Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images
The Maria Bamford Questionnaire is a series of 25 questions designed by the beloved comedian to unearth surprising truths about its respondents. In this edition, you’ll learn about Audra McDonald, the Tony-, Emmy-, and Grammy-winning actor and singer best known for her work in Broadway productions like 1998’s Ragtime, 2004’s A Raisin in the Sun, and 2014’s Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. She earned a Tony nomination for Gypsy in 2025. Since 2022, she’s played Dorothy Scott on HBO’s The Gilded Age, which returns for its fourth season on November 1.
You’re not really supposed to do anything other than water right before bed, but the thing is, when I get into bed I get the munchies. So what I like to eat before bed is some peanut M&Ms. It becomes a vicious cycle. You get in bed, you’re not ready to go to sleep, and you want some peanut M&Ms, but then you do that, and you have to get up and brush your teeth again.
It would be a religion in which the people who believed would have to commune with the dirt and the earth and animals — other living beings that aren’t necessarily humans — and through that find the divine. Some of the things you’d have to do would be sit with elephants or gorillas for a minute, plant something, weed something, touch a tree, put your feet in the dirt, or put your feet in the water.
I believe we are all energy, and you can call that the divine. And I think a lot of times, religion gets in the way of your own access to the divine. It puts a middleman in there — this dude, or these people at this church over here — instead of realizing that you can commune with that on your own. When you do, it makes you more open to the divine that is all around you, and I think that brings you closer to your humanity. You see it in other people, and in plants, and in trees, and in the the eyes of an elephant. I’m obsessed with elephants. So for me, it means easier and more authentic, organic, and truer contact with energy, which is the divine.
Probably a line of garden implements for gardening for dummies like me. I love gardening, and I’m terrible at it, and I don’t know what I’m doing. “Follow me off a cliff into gardening!”
I used to try and grow more food stuff. Herbs I can do okay, but we live in the woods and we get all kinds of thieves. Not “thieves” — I’ve just spoken about communing with nature and whatnot — but deer and groundhogs and foxes, and things that very much love to eat what I’m planting. So it’s better for me just to do flowers and stuff to help the bees. I’ve got lots of hydrangeas. That was my main thing this past season.
From the time I was about 6 until I was about 25 or 26, I would have a dream at least once a month that I was watching a plane take off, and I knew that it was going to crash, and I couldn’t get anybody to believe me. I had that dream over and over again until I just happened to mention it to my dad one day when I was in my 20s, and he told me, “Well, you saw a plane almost crash.” He used to take us to air shows, and apparently there was a plane that didn’t come out of a maneuver in time, and my dad could tell it was going to crash, so he took my face and my sibling’s face and pulled us into his body so we wouldn’t see it. After he told me that, I never had that dream again. But it’s kind of sad because, years later, my dad would end up dying in a plane crash.
I travel so much for work, and it’s a constant exercise of trust and understanding the mechanism of the plane and and how safe they actually are. I’m constantly reading up on that and following Instagram accounts of pilots who talk about safety and all that stuff.
I got my teeth cleaned. I have the coolest dentists who, among the usual things that a dentist will offer to keep you calm, also have a dog. So if you want it, the dog can come in and sit with you while you get your procedure done. As a result, I’m very happy with them, and I’m fine at the dentist.
I have some wire Container Store closet systems that I installed in our apartment a million years ago, and I don’t feel like spending the money to upgrade them too much, but I’m tired of the wire, so I just got a bunch of those faux shelves that you can put on top of them. I had to read the instructions on how to convert the faux shelves, and I put them on, and it looks a lot better now. I’m not handy, but I’m obsessed with renovating and all that stuff. It’s not good. I’ll have to ask my therapist what that’s about.
We took it a queen-size headboard off a friend’s hands. She was getting rid of it, and we said, “Yeah, we’ll take that!”
Well, there’s an easy answer to that: 47. Knowing what this person thinks or feels, or how he’s treated people of my gender and my race, he’s a nonstarter with me, because he’s already starting from a place of absolute hostility. And that’s putting it mildly.
My fourth-grade classroom. It wasn’t a good year for me. I had a teacher who really didn’t like me and was borderline abusive. There’s part of me that’s still so traumatized by it. She has since passed away, but I saw her in a grocery store in my hometown when I was about 25 or 26, and I started trembling. I was a grown woman! By that point, I’d won a Tony Award, and the sight of this woman just sent me into complete fear, so I don’t want to go back there.
I have someone that I could turn to for shelter, and that’s probably not the same person I would turn to for financial help. Sometimes those are different things, you know? But I know that I have a home I could go to if I needed to indefinitely.
I love Shrinking. I’d want to be someone in Jessica Williams’s character Gaby’s orbit. I don’t know who that would be — a fellow therapist, or I don’t know if I’d want to be an adversary. But I just love the show, and I think they’re all wonderful, and I especially think Jessica Williams’s work in that is spectacular.
My deeply intense, toxic relationship with anxiety. There is nothing that I don’t get anxious about, and I’ve been that way my entire life. I have ADHD, and I was diagnosed very early, so anxiety follows, and it’s something that’s always been a part of my every waking moment. I think age helps with some of it because you just get exhausted, but I’m constantly on guard and worrying about what’s coming next instead of being in the moment.
How would I go about it? One of the ways I’m doing that right now is I garden. I try to slow my thoughts down, slow my brain down, and settle myself.
We did Shuffle Along, the reunion concert last night, so that was an opportunity for me to be in a room with George C. Wolfe again, who is one of the most brilliant directors of people and minds. I was just talking to a fellow cast member one day as George was giving us notes and spouting wisdom like he does, and I just turned to him and I said, “What must it be like to be inside his brain.” One of the things we joke about is that George already knows what happens tomorrow because he’s already experienced it. His brain is so brilliant, fast, and operating on such a high level that the rest of us are always scrambling to catch up.
I don’t mean to make this entire conversation about George Wolfe, but it was his birthday this past week, and I wanted to get him a blueberry muffin before rehearsal. So I went to get him one right across the street from the rehearsal space, and being a New Yorker of 38 years, I decided to jaywalk. I had my bags, my dance bag, my script, my chai tea, and his muffin in a bag. I started jaywalking, and I tripped and fell in the middle of the street. Everything went flying between cars on Eighth Avenue, so all I could do was grab everything and get up and run to the rehearsal space.
When I got there, I was shaking and I thought, Oh God, I’m all right. I’m all right. And then I realized, No, I’m not, because my knee swelled up. And this is a show where I was getting ready to tap five days later, so I blamed George: “It’s your fault because I got you a damned muffin for your birthday.” When I know, in fact, it’s my fault because I decided to jaywalk with too many things, and I wasn’t watching where I was going. Anyway, I’m trying to decide if I regret jaywalking or I regret going to buy the muffin.
My aunt Susan’s incredible optimism. She always finds the positive in everything, and you can see it in who she is. She’s in her 70s, and she looks younger than I do, and it’s because of her outlook on life. Is “jealous” the right word? No. But I wish I had that, and I try to learn that from her.
One, and now two because the grays are starting to come in. My mom and my aunt Susan live right next door, and my mom came over the other day, and as we were sitting at the table and talking, she came over to me and was like, “You’ve got a string in your hair” and started pulling. I was like, “Ow!” It was a gray hair that she just yanked out of my head.
Oh, wait! I’m remembering I dyed my hair black my sophomore year of college! I got a box of dye from Love’s drugstore — which you wouldn’t know about because it used to be the thing in New York City before Duane Reade took over — but I didn’t know what I was doing and I put it in one night with one of my roommates, and then it all fell out over the next couple of weeks. So brown, black, and gray.
Portugal. I have a farm there, and I love it! We have cows, sheep, goats, and olives. We have incredible olive oil too.
Who not to be. That person lets me know exactly what I don’t want to do and who I don’t want to be. Specifically when it comes to bitterness — bitterness that rules your life so much that you can’t move on.
I didn’t have breakfast this morning because I had to go to the dentist. I’m always afraid to eat before I go to the dentist, so I didn’t eat anything for breakfast today. That’s not my usual. Usually, it’s Greek yogurt with berries and walnuts.
Recently, RuPaul just posted some video where he said — I’m gonna get the quote wrong — “To really make sure that you have financial health, you need a side ponytail.” It just wasn’t what you were expecting, and it made me laugh so hard that I watched it about seven times in a row. So that’s the last thing that made me laugh my ass off.
When I see desperation in somebody trying to be funny instead of just being organically funny. I don’t find it funny even when I do it. There’s a famous theatrical story about this about “asking for the tea gets a laugh.” I don’t remember which British actors were doing this, but someone was asking for the tea and they got a laugh. And then one night, they asked for the tea and they didn’t get a laugh, and they were trying to figure out why, and a wise actress said, “It’s because you asked for the laugh instead of the tea.”
The sound of my children laughing. It’s the most glorious thing in the world.
Bitterness.
I have no freaking clue. I don’t live a super lavish life. But I have kids, so for me, it would need to be enough money to make sure that they’re taken care of and they have what they need, that my mom is taken care of and has what she needs, and that me and my husband are taken care of and we have what we need. And then also to be able to support charities and things like that and have an animal sanctuary one day.
I’m going to say what I hope it is: ripe old age, knowing that my family is happy and healthy, and being peacefully surrounded by them. I wouldn’t want to be in some state where it’s a struggle and a burden to keep me alive. So as long as it was just because I laid down after a great day of drinking wine and having some olive oil and stuff on my farm, and then I just went to sleep, with everybody happy and healthy? I’ll take that.