Whether in fashion or in life, Melissa McCarthy does things on her own terms.
In a cover story for InStyle's April issue, the 50-year-old actress looked back at the outfit she wore to the 2019 Vanity Fair's Oscars after-party and recalled some of the comments she received about the ensemble.
After wearing a caped jumpsuit by Brandon Maxwell to the award show, McCarthy slipped into matching Adidas tracksuits with her husband Ben Falcone.
"I'm sure it threw everybody into a tizzy because the idea came to me the day before the Oscars," she told the magazine. "I asked, 'Can we wear matching tracksuits?' And someone was like, 'For tomorrow? Like, that both fit?' It's not that easy. I just wanted to be in tennies and tracksuits. It just seemed so funny to me and so comfortable."
McCarthy certainly remembers the reaction. "I have never been flipped off or told to f--k off as much as at that party [laughs], and it was all done, uh, jokingly, but also with something real behind it," she shared. "[After the ceremony] everyone put on a different dress and different heels. They just totally were like, 'You go f--k yourself [for wearing a tracksuit].' My response was, 'Oh, OK, I'm going to go dance pretty hard right now.'"
McCarthy clearly doesn't have time for any haters. She's currently in Australia working on the Hulu show Nine Perfect Strangers—which also stars Nicole Kidman, Michael Shannon, Regina Hall and Bobby Cannavale—and Falcone's Netflix series God's Favorite Idiot. And in November, she was included on The New York Times' list of "The 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century (So Far)."
"I love what I do," she said, "but I don't think of myself in that way at all. Fifteen years ago, if you would've said, 'Oh, by the way, you and Ben are going to be able to write and make movies like the dumb stories that we used to do on the stage of the Groundlings improv theater in L.A.,' we would have been like, 'Really? Is that possible?' The way we do things still feels very grassroots. I think of us as circus people in that we just kind of travel around and put on a show. It's like getting an invite to a party where you're like, 'Oh, I didn't know they knew I existed.'"
Over the years, McCarthy has taken on a range of roles. From her Oscar-nominated performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me? to her work in comedies like Tammy, the star has done it all. Of course, fans will always love her acting in the 2011 hit Bridesmaids.
"That film instilled the best lesson of you just have to let things be what they are, because it wasn't supposed to work like that," she said while reflecting on its 10-year anniversary. "Annie [Mumolo] and Kristen [Wiig] wrote it, and they had never written anything before. And it was like, 'We're going to let your weirdness ride.' And people on set were laughing and crying full-out in almost every scene because everybody felt so free and there wasn't a lot of pressure. Certainly, nobody thought it was going to be a game changer. The fit was just perfect."