Kaitlin Olson taps into ‘High Potential’ with high heels and fur coats

Kaitlin Olson has a knack for playing underestimated women.

On her long-running sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” she’s Dee, perpetually insulted by her pals and coworkers at Paddy’s Pub. She’s been Emmy nominated twice for her guest turn on “Hacks” as DJ Vance, the floundering adult daughter of a self-involved comedian. And now, on her new ABC series “High Potential,” she plays Morgan, a mother with an extraordinarily high IQ who is working as a cleaning lady when recruited by the LAPD for her crime-solving prowess.

During our Zoom interview, I ask Olson about this recurring thread throughout her work.

“If you ask my therapist,” she says with a giggle, “It is 100% because when I was very little, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be an actor,’ and everyone’s like, ‘so cute.’ ”

Her parents were always supportive, but no one else in Tigard, Ore., was. The situation got worse when she was in a bike accident before entering seventh grade. She flipped over the handlebars and landed on her teeth. The recovery required facial reconstruction surgery.

“I spent all of middle school and high school just feeling like I wanted to hide and nobody wanted to talk to me,” she remembers, before correcting herself. “My perception was, ‘No one wants to talk to me.’ I’m sure their perception was, ‘I don’t know what to say to this poor mangled thing.’ ”

Throughout all of that she still wanted to be an actor. Perhaps that explains why she’s so good at inhabiting characters whom people overlook at first.

Deniz Akdeniz, left, Daniel Sunjata, Kaitlin Olson and Judy Reyes in a scene from”High Potential.” In the show, Olson has to navigate a plot that involves murder, family drama and funny quips.

(Carlos Lopez-Calleja/Disney)

Morgan, however, is in a different mode than the usual Kaitlin Olson character. After all, she’s in the center of an hour-long crime procedural rather than a pure comedy, requiring Olson, who also produces, to navigate a plot that involves murder, family drama and funny quips. So far, the mix has been a success. In the first half of its inaugural season, “High Potential” averaged 10.42 million viewers a night and became the most watched new show on ABC in six years. Now, it returns for the second half of its first season on Tuesday

Filming the show has been what Olson describes as a “fun challenge.”

“It’s really hard to make the tone that we’re making because we’re combining a few different things, so once we all got on the same page about what that tone was, each different part of her life became easier for me to understand,” Olson says.

Drew Goddard, who developed the series off a French format, always knew Olson could tap into all the different facets of Morgan, simultaneously making you laugh while breaking your heart.

“You always feel her soul even when she’s making you laugh,” he says. “I just knew, trust that. Let’s follow that and see if she’d be up for joining our merry band.”

She wasn’t at first. When her agent sent her the script, explaining it was an hour-long drama on ABC, she responded, “No, thanks.”

“I’m more of a dick-and-ball joke kind of streaming person,” she says.

When Olson’s agent sent her the script for “High Potential,” she said, “No, thanks.” But once she read the pilot, she fell in love with the character.

(Marcus Ubungen/Los Angeles Times)

But she finally acquiesced to reading the pilot and fell in love with the character. It was also an opportunity to stretch herself. She always infuses comedy into her characters but had been itching to do something that wasn’t just comedy.

“I wanted to play a real person,” she says. “Dee is not a real person. I try hard not to make her into a cartoon character, but she’s not a real person. I wanted to play somebody who had ups and downs and good days and bad days.”

That is certainly true of Morgan, a mother of three, whose reasons for becoming a police consultant are twofold. She’s in need of a steady job and paycheck, but she also thinks the head of the major crimes division, Selena, played by Judy Reyes, can help her find her teenage daughter’s father. It looks like he abandoned the family, but Morgan knows there’s something else afoot.

But with a new pursuit came new pressures, and Olson was worried she was going to disappoint longtime fans who wanted pure silliness from her, including those who are still lamenting the 2018 cancellation of her Fox sitcom “The Mick,” where she played a hilariously scuzzy woman in charge of raising her rich niece and nephews. Morgan has Olson’s wry delivery, but she’s not pratfalling, gangly limbs akimbo. To that end, Olson not only wanted to sign on to “High Potential” to star, but also to produce.

“I was really hell-bent on making this just as good, just different,” she says.

“High Potential” also arrived at the right time for Olson, when she could throw herself into something all consuming. After she had two kids with her husband and “Sunny” costar, Rob McElhenney, Olson never stopped working, but she considered being a mother her No. 1 priority. Now that her children are old enough — one is 14, the other 12 — she felt she could step back.

“I was really hell-bent on making this just as good, just different,” Olson says of “High Potential,” which she also produces.

(Marcus Ubungen/Los Angeles Times)

“My kids are old enough now to be like, Dad’s going to take you to school in the morning, Dad’s going to put you to bed,” she says. “I was home every night for bedtime, maybe a couple exceptions, but it feels good to jump in and give all of that creative energy that I was pouring toward parenting to give this project my full attention.” She adds, “I wouldn’t be able to do this show half-assed.”

Olson and McElhenney always check in with one another before taking on a new project. “Sunny” films when all the members of the cast can make it happen, but in addition to “Sunny,” he also created and stars in Apple TV+’s “Mythic Quest” and has an FX documentary series about the Welsh soccer team he co-owns, “Welcome to Wrexham.”

“When we sat down and talked about what she wanted to do over the next couple of years, I feel like she really put the effort, the time and love into her role [as caregiver], and I felt it was my time to return that,” he says.

McElhenney has been wildly impressed with her ability to transform into Morgan on-screen.

“There were, I don’t know, maybe half a dozen, maybe 10 different moments across the first half of the season where it felt like I was watching a different person than I knew,” he says. “That’s just a testament to her skill.”

Olson attributes Morgan’s eccentric look — a nod to the French series — with high heels and faux fur in the midst of a crime scene, to helping her transform. During filming of the pilot, she was very specific about how she didn’t want the makeup artist to do the best possible job with her eyeliner, choosing an offbeat red color at that.

Morgan’s eccentric style is a nod to a French series the show is based on.

(David Bukach/Disney)

“I don’t dress like that, I never wear heels,” she says. “This particular costume is very helpful for getting into character.”

The scenes she has to work on the most are the ones where Morgan is spouting off facts, which are difficult to memorize and can’t sustain any improvisation. She also wants to convey Morgan’s frustration that everyone else doesn’t think as fast as she does.

“I’m always trying to toy with that idea of her brain works too fast for her mouth,” she says. “I kind of want it to look in my face like, ‘Don’t you guys get it? I’m giving you like 50%, you should be able to fill in the other 50%.’ ”

In the second half of the first season, Goddard says, audiences can see how Olson has found her footing with the character.

“By the finale, you can just see, ‘Oh, we can take this character to some pretty spectacular places,’” he says. “I, quite frankly, don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of her potential.”

If it took Olson a little while to sink herself into Morgan, Dee on “Sunny” is like a second skin at this point.

When we talk, she has just finished shooting the 17th season of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and this season includes a crossover episode with “Abbott Elementary.” She had three or four days off between wrapping “High Potential” at the end of October and starting the latest “Sunny.” Dee is easy, though.

“She lives inside of me at all times,” she says. “She’s really made me a better person.”

How has anyone from the notoriously rotten gang at Paddy’s made someone better?

“It just sort of allows you to be like, ‘Oh my life is pretty good,’” Olson says. “I don’t need to be awake at 3 in the morning thinking, ‘I’m not doing things right.’ Dee’s not doing things correctly. You’re fine.”