Busy Philipps on Personality Hangovers ('Did I Talk Too Much?'), Maintaining Friendships, and Doing Her Best

In her New York Times bestselling memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little, Busy Philipps proudly asserts one of her more singular qualities. “I’m sparkly,” she says, explaining how she got into college. (She delivered her application by hand.) We agree there’s something fizzy and lovely and dazzling about her. The multihyphenate landed her first major role on the cult-classic comedy-drama TV series Freaks and Geeks and joined the cast of Dawson’s Creek during its fifth season. You may have seen her on Cougar Town, in movies like White Chicks and I Feel Pretty, and memorably as the “cool mom” in this year’s movie-musical reboot of Mean Girls. She deftly embodies Summer, one quarter of an aggressively clueless quartet in the sitcom Girls5eva. Except she’s anything but clueless. She is whip-smart and really shines on Instagram, where her 2.4 million followers hang on to every soul-baring post—whether about her latest haircut, her ADHD, her kids, a garage sale with her ex-husband (“who we love,“ she says), or rights for LGBTQ+ youth or reproductive freedom. When it was time for our interview, we were led to a windowless conference room at the studio where the photo shoot would later take place. Philipps found us a spot outside instead. “I love bright light,” she says. “It just has to be superbright wherever I am.” In keeping with our June 2024 issue's theme, we went outside to sit in the sun, chat, and sparkle.

REAL SIMPLE: We have to start with your Instagram. It’s famous, and The New Yorker even called you “the breakout star of Instagram Stories.” What do you think draws people to you and your account?

BUSY PHILIPPS: I started using it in 2016 in this way that made the most sense to me: to be very open and transparent with my life and what I was experiencing. Anytime I was profiled by a magazine, it would be up to a journalist to get across who I was, and it always fell short of the complexity of who I think I am and, honestly, who everybody is. With Instagram, I was able to show all sides of myself, and it was incredibly freeing. I also found so much connection. I spent so much of my life feeling alone in my thoughts and feelings, afraid to share them because I thought they made me weird or different. And then, here I am on this big platform, and people from all over the world are reaching out, saying, “Not only do I get it, I feel the exact same way about these things.”

RS: How do you approach something you're not good at?

BP: With a lot of curiosity! I’m not good at math, and I choose to not do it. It’s not my journey. I started playing tennis when I was 40. I realized, when it was challenging, that I would grip too tight. And sometimes with pottery, when I'm at the wheel and it's not going well, I can get into a place where I want to force it, and that’s when it's not going to work. So I have to kind of let it go a little bit, and then it will sort of fall into place. It’s an ongoing lesson.

RS: That’s such a great metaphor! What do you say to yourself when your inner critic isn’t being super kind?

BP: I always return to You’re doing the best you can. And also the thing that’s cropped up on TherapyTok and that my therapist has said before, which is You did the best you could with the tools you had at the time. It’s a great reminder to let things go—not without taking responsibility or acknowledging how you may be able to do better in the future, but at least giving yourself a bit of a break. That being said, it’s hard.

RS: It’s like your podcast, Busy Philipps Is Doing Her Best. That’s also our motto around the REAL SIMPLE office! And it’s important to remember that we’re always evolving.

BP: I would hope that we’re able to be people in progress, and that we’re able to adjust and change when new information is brought to us. I'm fascinated by this turn of people digging their heels in and thinking they know the answers to everything. That seems like an impossible way to live. It doesn't allow for the reality of what the world is, and it leads to so much unnecessary strife—to not be malleable and to not be willing to say that you don't have the answers for everything.

RS: How do you deal with the external critics?

BP: I know people get really bogged down by what others think of them. The truth is, other people aren’t actually really thinking that much about you. And if they are, what they think about you has to do with them, not you. I did a weeklong therapy retreat in 2021, and there’s this exercise they do. You openly identify whether your first impression of someone was negative or positive, and then figure out what it’s about. I was dreading it. I said to my teacher, “I don’t want to do this exercise. It's going to really bum me out; everyone is going to have something about me. I’m a lightning rod!”

It did hurt my feelings. But then it was fascinating. Hearing them say, “I felt this way about you, and it’s because you reminded me of this person,” or “I'm afraid that you being loud takes focus away from me.” And ultimately, we discussed how, sometimes, there are societal things that are ingrained in all of us—deeply misogynistic ideas that both men and women hold about what a woman should be like when they walk into a room of strangers.

RS: Say more therapy things.

BP: Well, there’s a lot of work on patterns. It’s important to be able to identify what they are and then be able to identify, Is this keeping me safe? Or Is this hindering my connection or my ability to be myself? Or Am I going to leave this interaction feeling bad, with a personality hangover the next day?

RS: A personality hangover!

BP: It’s a Paula Pell phrase, and it’s so genius. I’ve definitely had moments when I wake up the next day and I’m like, Oh my God, did I talk too much at that dinner? Should I have been quieter? Should I have not fought back so hard with that person about whatever it was? As soon as she said it, I was like, Oh, I get those all the time! I think women especially get them.

RS: Speaking of friends, Paula Pell is on Girls5eva with you. You seem to be the kind of person who collects friends from every chapter of your life. Discuss!

BP: I’m always in interviews where they’re like, “Talk to us about your long friendship with Michelle Williams.” I don’t know. We’re friends! What is so hard for people to understand? What is so hard about people maintaining friendships? For me, it’s not enough to just say, “Hey, checking in,” or to just tell people that I’m great. I was at a birthday party on a Sunday in the middle of the day, and I got pretty deep for 35 minutes with a friend about some real stuff. And, I don’t know, I’m just not afraid of that. Things are complicated. I also like listening to people, so I ask questions. I’m always astonished when people don’t ask more questions. 

RS: Here’s your next one, then: You just joined the American Civil Liberty Union’s Artist Ambassador Program to advocate for reproductive freedom. What do you want to say to our readers?

BP: I think that so many people, myself included, can fall for the trick of apathy, especially now. It feels so overwhelming. There are so many things, on top of the fact that we’re just trying to parent our children, make sure they’re safe, hopefully make sure our health needs are taken care of, or our friends’ or our sisters’ or our mothers’ or whatever. Then there’s all this nasty rhetoric, and we’re just inundated. It can really take me to a dark place, where I’m like, It doesn’t matter what I do. It doesn’t matter what any of us do. It’s just going to be terrible. And I think it’s important to remember that’s not true. It’s important what we do. It’s the small things. It’s paying attention to who is being elected to the school board, because those are the people who are banning books. Or paying attention to who your comptroller is. Or how the districts are being drawn in your cities. All these things are super important—not just the presidential candidates. I’m continually trying to remember that myself and encourage other people to find ways to go small, to think, to be participatory in their own neighborhoods and communities. What’s the saying? “You judge a society based on how they treat the most vulnerable among them.”

RS: Right. And how are we doing?

BP: We’re doing the worst job right now. But just because a lot of people are doing a terrible job doesn’t mean we can’t try to make things different. It’s not how I want to live, and it’s not how I want to raise my children. I can’t shut off the fact that we live in a society where everyone needs to be participatory. You cannot be singularly focused on yourself, and you have to be tolerant of other people’s beliefs.

RS: You talk a lot about the importance of sharing our stories. Why’s that?

BP: People’s hearts and minds are changed by storytelling. They’re changed by hearing other people’s experiences. If you don’t have access to seeing someone else’s lived experience, then it’s very easy to shut down and not be empathetic. Storytelling engenders empathy and the idea—the correct idea—that we are more alike than we are different. I really believe that it ends up being beneficial for everybody. 

RS: Your kids seem amazing, by the way. What’s something you’ve learned about them or as a parent?

BP: They’re awesome. Birdie is almost 16. And Cricket is 11. I’m learning that I don’t have all the answers. And that I have to be able to put my own s—t down because they deserve their own experience that’s not mine. I’m definitely a different kind of mom. I’m a little weird, and I’m just trying to figure it out as I go along. Most parents don’t do what I do for a living. My kids have a wildly different experience from their friends, and sometimes they hate it. And I don’t blame them. 

RS: You’re now on QVC+ with a new late-night show, Busy This Week. Congrats! It’s still a struggle for women in late-night television, huh?

BP: Thanks! You know, if there’s not a seat at the table, you’ve just got to build a whole new table. It’s annoying that there’s not a seat at the table. But listen, we’ve got to find ways to build new tables. And QVC was very down to try something new, which is rare in this industry.

RS: Love that. The show puts an emphasis on how we’re all busy and also on shopping, which brings up a two-part question. First: being busy! How do you prioritize your time?

BP: I don’t know if I’m good at it, honestly. I used to be really inflexible about certain things. This morning, I woke up early and got coffee. I was supposed to work out and then come here, but I really started to get into this pitch I’m working on. I decided to give myself a break and do that. I used to have this mindset like, If I miss one workout, everything will fall apart. It was just this perfectionist thing. I’m glad I’m not like that anymore because, honestly, I got all this work stuff done, and now I just have two little parts I have to finish.

RS: Yay! Second: What kind of shopping are you best at?

BP: I love all kinds of shopping. All of it.

RS: Same, Busy. Same.