Nathan Lane says flashing butt was ‘longest laugh I’ve ever gotten’

Nothing is off limits for the sake of Nathan Lane’s art. Well, at least his butt isn’t.

The inveterate stage and screen star tells Entertainment Weekly he was reluctant when he was asked to bear all by Terrence McNally for the original Broadway production of his play Love! Valour! Compassion! in 1995, but it a cheeky compromise ended up paying off.

“He had written that this character I was playing entered naked serving drinks,” Lane says during EW’s Awardist Comedy Actors Roundtable. “It’s a group of gay men at a country house. I said, ‘I’m not doing that!’ There’s nothing funny about that, at all. It would just be upsetting to the audience.”

The Mid-Century Modern star explains how he got out of the predicament while still satisfying McNally’s demand for a pound of flesh to his fellow panelists, who include Uzo Aduba (The Residence), Liza Colón-Zayas (The Bear), David Alan Grier (St. Denis Medical), Sheryl Lee Ralph (Abbott Elementary), and Michael Urie (Shrinking).

“I said, ‘I don’t want to do that,’ but the character is a costume designer, so he could improvise a costume,” Lane remembers.

What happened next would be recorded into Lane’s personal highlight reel of his career in perpetuity.

“I said, ‘What if I’m in an apron and a big picture hat and sunglasses and sweat socks and high heels, but I’m not wearing underneath the apron?’ So I made this entrance, and it might have been the longest laugh I’ve ever gotten on stage,” Lane recounts.

“They saw me come on, and there was a laugh when they saw the outfit, and as I went by and they saw my ass, the laugh went on for a very long time,” he recalls.

Lane remembers that the late, Tony-award winning actor, Stephen Spinella, whom he shared the stage with in Love! Valour! Compassion! “kept trying to cut the laugh off, so I would bend over and serve drinks, sit my ass in his face, and the laughs went right through.”

Looking on with admiration, Ralph proudly declares, “That’s how you steal the scene.”

While the nominations for the 2025 Emmy Awards won’t be announced for another month, Lane and his fellow panelists ranked among EW’s likeliest picks for nods in the Comedy categories.

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Lane stars on Hulu sitcom Mid-Century Modern — created by Boston Common and Will & Grace showrunners David Kohan and Max Mutchnick — following the misadventures of three gay best friends (Lane, Matt Bomer, and Nathan Lee Graham) in Palm Springs, Calif.

Lane previously won an Emmy in 2022 for his performance as Teddy Dimas on Only Murders in the Building, and was previously nominated for his work on Mad About You, Frasier, The Good Wife, and Modern Family.

You can watch the rest of EW’s Awardist Comedy Actors Roundtable above.