The truth about Jane Lynch: from sucking face with Jennifer Coolidge to sexually harassing Steve Carell, Jane Lynch will do anything for a laugh--except hide in the closet.

Call her the female Bill Murray. Jane Lynch doesn't sweat to be funny; she gets laughs just by being. If you don't yet know her name, you surely know Lynch's screen persona. Tall, pretty, and self-possessed, she reads as a proper lady from the country club. Except she's really twisted. Picture Lynch as the unnerving electronics-store manager who's hot to deflower Steve Carell in The 40-year-Old Virgin. (Sidelong whisper: "Ever hear the term ... 'fuck buddy'?")

Considering that Lynch is gay, it's strange that she's never been interviewed in The Advocate. But Lynch assures us that the delay hasn't been about any reluctance on her part. "I'm way, way, way out," she says.

It was a lesbian role, in 2000's Best in Show, that put Lynch on the map. As a long, tall poodle trainer with an eye for trophy wife Jennifer Coolidge, Lynch deployed deft timing and an undercurrent of wistful neediness to steal every scene she was in. She has since continued to work with Show director Christopher Guest, earning her place in the unofficial repertory company that performs his ensemble comedies.

"Jane has an unbelievable intelligence, and it really goes to strange and dark and great places," Guest tells The Advocate. "She's always surprising to me and always exactly right on the mark."

In Guest and company's last outing, 2003's A Mighty Wind, Lynch played a porn star-turned-folksinger. In his new Hollywood spoof, For Your Consideration, she's an Entertainment Tonight-style TV personality cohosting a show with Fred Willard.

Says Guest: "I thought it would be fun to have her opposite Fred, who is a force of nature. Jane is one of the few people who can stand up to that. Fred's a steamroller, which can be a challenge, and she could just wipe the floor with him if she wanted to."

Raised in a suburb on the south side of Chicago, Lynch attended Illinois State University--"In Normal, Ill.," she notes--before joining the graduate acting program at Cornell. After a brief stint in New York City, she headed back to Chicago, where she appeared with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Stoppenwolf Theatre Company, and--maybe most significantly--the Second City Touring Company as well as playing Carol Brady in the cult hit The Real Live Brady Bunch. But it was a role in the feature film The Fugitive that brought her out to Hollywood, where she began landing numerous TV guest spots.

Despite the recent uptick in her profile, Lynch seems to have maintained a decidedly un-Hollywood manner--warm, open, and unpretentious. She has accepted the mantle of "gay in Hollywood" with grace and ease. Active with the Los Angeles-based networking organization POWER UP since the group's inception, Lynch has donated her acting services to the film projects sponsored by the group. She was named to its 2005 list of "10 Amazing Gay Women in Showbiz." It was at a Power Up event that she met L Word creator Ilene Chaiken, which led to Lynch's recurring role on the series.

If Lynch is currently enjoying the kind of moment most actors (at any age) hope and struggle for, she is still taking full advantage of all available opportunities. She filmed a small role as Amelia Earhart for Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator that ended up on the cutting room floor. Supporting roles in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the Lifetime Network series Lovespring International, and upcoming roles in Boston Legal and Help Me Help You personify the old cliche of the hardest-working woman in show business. We sat down during her cover shoot on the one day she was in Los Angeles (the interview itself was rescheduled from the morning to the afternoon due to a last-minute voice-over session). Merely a brief stopover before she flew to Vancouver, Canada, to film another episode of The L Word.

At the screening I saw of For Your Consideration, the first time you come on-screen is the opening of the entertainment news show, and you're just standing there, but you got a huge laugh--just standing there. That's good to know. I did my job. It's no longer just Entertainment Tonight with Mary Hart: There's Access Hollywood, Extra, and everything on the E! channel. There is a style to doing that kind of job now--a style of talking, the way you stand--and for each woman it's different. It's what makes my waist look smallest, my legs look longest, and minimizes my ass. It's planting yourself and speaking as loudly and bombastically as you can. And for people like me and Mary Hart, we're a little long in the tooth for this kind of thing. They're younger and younger all the time. Some of those people seem 15 years old. One of the things I wanted to do was look inappropriately young, so I have a really short skirt and heels that are so high. I could never wear these heels with any other cohost except Fred Willard, who's like 6 foot 4. We were eye to eye for most of it.

You first met Christopher Guest while working on a commercial?

I did a Frosted Flakes commercial that he wrote and directed, and it was improvised--as improvisational as a commercial can be. I was a big fan of Waiting for Guffman. He said, "You know, I do movies," and I said, "I know." When Best in Show rolled around I just happened to be eating in the Newsroom in Beverly Hills, and he walked in, and he went, "Oh, Jane, yeah, listen, I have an idea, come to my office." I remember making the decision to eat at the Newsroom that day, and I'm so glad I didn't go to the Urth Caffe.

The actors are really given a lot of leeway in his films. What's the process like?

They give us a really good thumbnail sketch, and then we just take it from there. We improvise all the dialogue; there's no written dialogue. The script looks like a regular script with no dialogue. It's probably 13 or 14 pages, just scene after scene and what happens in each scene. What's great about his movies is that they're very actor-centric. The set designer comes up to you and asks what you want your office to look like or what your house should look like, and the wardrobe designer asks what you think your character would wear, and then you go shopping together. You have basically 100% say on what you wear and do, whether you want an accent. We get to choose all that stuff.

In Best in Show, did you add the lesbian attraction between your character and Jennifer Coolidge?

No, that was there from the initial idea. Jennifer Coolidge and I went to a Great Dane dog show before we started shooting, and there were at least five or six lesbian couples with their dogs, and there are always three or four gay men. They're so obsessed with their dogs. It's a really interesting microcosm. Gays are big in the dog show world.

Have you had any difficulty balancing your identity as an out lesbian with that of a working actor?

I thought I would. It's a good question because I really thought I'd have to have that conversation with myself. And I haven't had the need for that conversation. I'm doing what feels right for me. If people turn me down or don't ask me to do work because I'm gay, it's behind my back; I don't know about it. And I haven't been pigeonholed into one kind of role, so it's been really good. I haven't had to have that moment of, Gosh, should I do that? I haven't had a horrible moment. As a younger person I'd lie in bed at night and wonder, If I do make it and start getting work and people know who I am--how will I handle this? What will I do? I had some angst about it, and gratefully I haven't had to deal with that at all.

In your professional life was your sexual identity something you ever felt you had to keep to yourself or cover?

No. I'm not an ingenue. I play character parts. I came of age and came out of the closet in the theater, which is just teeming with the gays. So there was no problem being gay in the theater, or even in the Midwest where I grew up, and in Chicago not at all. I went through some kind of requisite Who am I? phase around 19 or 20, but everybody goes through that. It was a little more complicated with my sexuality. I had some shame there, but I never felt I had to hide it. I think if I was in banking or retail or a schoolteacher, it would be a different thing.

It's interesting that your role in Best in Show, which really was something of a breakout role for you, was not only the first time you played a lesbian character but also came later in your career.

I was 39 when we shot Best in Show. And I felt successful the whole time: I was making a living. I always wanted something bigger and better, but I felt pretty successful until then.

Were you surprised when bigger success and recognition finally started to come your way?

Yes and no. In a way I was like, Yup, this is right, and in another way I was like, I can't believe this is happening. In one case it was like, Well, of course, and on the other hand it was, I can't believe how lucky I am.

And you're still doing commercials and voice-over work even as your feature career has taken off?

I haven't. They've just been replaying some things. I know they've been replaying the Washington Mutual ad, which was directed by Christopher Guest; he wrote and directed those. I think we did those around the time of A Mighty Wind. I hadn't done a voice-over in probably three years. I used to do it for a living for a few years. I've been out here 13 years, and for a chunk of time in there I did just voice-overs. It popped up and I thought, Sure, I'll do it.

Besides your work in the Christopher Guest films, you must also have a lot of fans from your role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

There s a certain demographic. It starts in middle school and goes into college, and they know my lines from The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I went into the Starbucks in a big mall in the [San Fernando] Valley to get coffee, and it was loaded with high school kids, and I was literally afraid. I've never had that feeling before of everybody turning and looking, and even though it was, "We love you; we really like the movie," it felt threatening on some level. I felt so alone. And, of course, they meant nothing but the best. They were my peeps.

Olsen is a contributor to Film Comment, the Los Angeles Times, and Interview.