Melissa McCarthy: From $5 in the Bank to Million-Dollar Mogul

If you step up to a negotiating table in Hollywood, pray you never find yourself on the other side of Melissa McCarthy’s “fists of justice.” That’s how her husband, comedian and Bridesmaids costar Ben Falcone, refers to the 47-year-old actress’s fiery resolve to get the roles and production deals she wants—and to make sure she’s not being taken for a ride. The fists are not to be dismissed, because they have helped her become one of the highest-paid women in the industry. “In the fight for fairness, everything else goes to a whiteout,” she says. “I always think, Is the deal fair? Would you be asking the same thing of a guy in this position? And if the answer is ‘It probably wouldn’t be happening [to a guy],’ I’ll dig my teeth in for months.”

Onscreen, McCarthy’s characters often reflect this righteous indignation, which she balances with a down-to-earth sincerity, plus a few outrageous pratfalls. Her ability to throw herself into a role—often literally—is what makes her so funny as erstwhile White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live or amateur field agent Susan Cooper in Spy. She is utterly wild and totally relatable at the same time. When we meet, after a day of shooting in Malibu, she goes out of her way to put me at ease and make me laugh. As the sun disappears behind the hills, she asks if I need her help with a light so I can see my notebook.

Unlike many of her A-list peers, McCarthy wasn’t born Hollywood royalty. She was raised on a corn and soybean farm near Plainfield, Illinois, where she begged her parents for Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. “My God, I wanted that swan on my hip terribly,” she says, “It was like, ‘Why? You don’t need that.’ It was a great thing to grow up with the [focus] on the need versus the want.” Her parents put their money toward 12 years of Catholic school instead.

When she was 20, McCarthy moved to New York City to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) but soon dropped out to pursue a career in stand-up. She worked as a nanny and waited tables before cutting her teeth at The Groundlings comedy troupe in Los Angeles, where she met Falcone. Consistent TV work came her way (including seven seasons of Gilmore Girls), but she didn’t break out as a film star until 2011, when she stole the show as the oddball future in-law in Bridesmaids.

Within just five years she was the third-highest-paid woman in Hollywood, according to Forbes. In an industry where women tend to struggle if they don’t live up to punishing physical standards and men still dominate big-­budget comedies, McCarthy has beaten the odds. “I’ve gotten lucky,” she says, “and I’ve worked hard.”

She and Falcone now have their own production company, On the Day, which allows them to make the movies they’re most passionate about. It also allows McCarthy to flex her skills both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. In their latest, Life of the Party, which the couple cowrote and coproduced, McCarthy plays a woman who goes back to college to finish her degree and get the campus experience she never had. This is, she points out, not that far from her own decision to leave FIT. Even without the degree, McCarthy ended up a designer: Her McCarthy Seven7 line—born from frustration with not being able to find clothes she liked that fit her body—is currently sold in department stores and on the Home Shopping Network.

That entrepreneurial spirit is something she and Falcone are trying to instill in their daughters. The girls, Vivian, 10, and Georgette, eight, are currently obsessed with making slime. “My oldest daughter wants to start selling it. I was like, ‘Great. Start a business,’” McCarthy says. “It can’t just be ‘gimme, gimme, gimme.’ I talk a lot about, ‘We work hard for things.’” Like her parents, she and Falcone are splurging on their daughters’ private-school education, and they recently moved into a 9,000-square-foot Spanish colonial home. But McCarthy still knows a bargain: Earlier this year the paparazzi snapped her shopping at a 99 Cent store.

After all, the fists of justice are motivated by more than the bottom line. “Having a say in something means as much to me as getting a fair price,” McCarthy says. “I never want to lose my voice.”

Read on for her hard-earned lessons on getting heard, getting ahead, and getting paid.

Exercise caution with credit cards. “When I moved to New York at 20, I wish I did not discover that you can just get credit cards. I had a friend—Brian Atwood, the shoe designer—and I remember him saying, ‘What are you going to do, walk around New York in cheap shoes? You go to Bergdorf.’ I was such a farm girl that I was like, ‘I guess he’s right.’ Brian, I really blame you. I couldn’t afford anything in there, but they would just give you a store card, and so we were buying wonderful things. I was like, ‘I work really hard. I’ll pay this off in increments.’ No, [laughs] you will not.”

Nobody is waiting for you to ask permission. “The night after I got to New York, my friend said, ‘You’re going to do stand-up,’ and I said, ‘All right.’ I was 20; I had no sense. I remember calling my mom and dad saying, ‘I’m not going back to school.’ I was calling to ask for permission even though I didn’t really need it—I was over 18. They were like, ‘OK, can you work at comedy?’ That was their thing: Work hard, grow a craft, become good at something. Years later I asked my mom, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ And she said, ‘You always thought you were going into fashion, and that seemed very unreliable. I figured you could probably do comedy if you worked at it.’”

At some point you have to start adulting. “I remember when you could still get a $5 bill out of an ATM and I couldn’t get it because [my balance] was under $5. I would never quite have the money for rent, so I would call my mom and dad or my sister and say, ‘This is how much I’m short.’ They never made me feel guilty, because they knew I wasn’t lying around doing nothing. And then I thought, I don’t want to continue this pattern. I want to be able to pay the phone bill and not panic. [I found a job as a] production coordinator and got an actual check. It was the first time I stopped calling my parents, and it was an amazing feeling.”

Get in the game. “I think you have to play. It’s like this: You can stay in a local theater and work for the art of it, and that’s great. Or you can say, ‘I can make this my business.’ And if you want to do your business well, you’d better learn how to handle those negotiations, how and when to push, and when to lay off.”

And fight every step of the way up. “There were some jobs when I was paid what most [of my costars were]. And then people who climbed the ladder with me were suddenly making 15 times what I made. I was like, Wait, wait, wait. I thought, This is based on bullshit. This is not based on anything factual to me. I hated that feeling of not being in control and not being able to do anything about it. I think that feeling is what keeps the fight in me.”

You have to be willing to walk. “When you finally are like, ‘Thanks so much for asking, but I’m going to pass’—that’s power. That’s easier said as you get a little more power, but as you start up the ladder in whatever field you’re in, you have to walk if people won’t give you what you’re worth. Once people don’t respect you enough to give you what you’re worth, they’re never going to.”

Success is sweeter after a long struggle. “When you spend 20 years working your butt off, you know yourself better. If you’re handed everything you want at 19 or 20, you may actually believe all of the people who are like, ‘You’re amazing.’ I think I would have been probably cuckoo [if I’d been successful] at 18. I think the best thing I could have done was struggle until I was 30. I always assume every job is my last. Twenty years of desperately trying to get a single job gets deep in your DNA.”

And luck helps. “I have a very, very high level of gratitude. There is not a single day that goes by that I don’t think, I can’t believe I’m doing this. And there is no world where I confuse the fact that I’ve gotten lucky with the idea that there’s something special about me. I think entitlement is a really, really scary thing to possess. For me, it’s like, ‘No. I’ve gotten lucky, and I’ve worked hard.’”

It’s OK to say yes for the money. “I think everybody has a rate for when [your gut is saying], ‘Why would I do that? That’s not interesting.’ And so you name a crazy rate to make somebody go away. And then, if they are like, ‘Sure!’ you will literally own the moon after this—you just have to shut up and do it.… I’ve been lucky that in the last 10 years I’ve only taken things I had the highest hopes for, but the time will come when I’ll be like, ‘Does anybody need me to sell cheese slices?’ Because I’ll do it. Just give me a paycheck. And I will work really hard to sell those cheese slices.”

If you pay people, they should really work for you. “I give pretty strong advice to costars, like, ‘Dig in deep and don’t sell yourself short.’ And, ‘Don’t confuse someone working for you with them doing you a favor.’ You show up and do your job; it should be the same with agents, managers, the tax guy. Jennifer Coolidge, who is one of the funniest creatures on the planet and the reason I got my first job in a movie, taught me, ‘The second they stop working for you, fire them.’ Don’t think, I don’t want to be a bitch, I don’t want to cause trouble. If you paid for a bottle of water and then that person told you to just take off, you’d say, ‘Give me my water. I paid for it.’”

Know when the fight isn’t worth your time. “Someone once demanded that we pay them or else they were going to go to the tabloids and make things up. We were like, ‘But it’s not true.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, I know, but it would be pretty terrible if that came out.’ Ben was like, ‘Let’s not spend the next 10 years in court.’ I hate that we paid that person instead of fighting. Fists of Justice was not happy, but I know I saved five years of my life—and a ton of money—by not going to court.”

Eat the damn blueberries. “I used to think that buying blueberries or an avocado was absolutely unnecessary—they were too expensive. Then once I started being able to buy a pint of blueberries, I would not eat them. I just kept throwing them away because I was like, ‘I should wait and do some­thing special with them.’ For 15 years I would just throw away blueberries and avocados. I can’t tell you how much I wasted. At one point I was just like, ‘How about you just start eating blueberries? It’s getting weird.’”

Ann Friedman writes for New York and the Los Angeles Times; get her newsletter at annfriedman.com.

Lead image fashion credits: Mara Hoffman at 11 Honoré coat, $575. Zero + Maria Cornejo dress, $895. Ariana Boussard- Reifel earrings, $425. Yael Sonia gold ring. Tomas Maier rings, $280 each.

This story originally appeared in the May 2018 issue of Glamour.