An interview with Sarah Ramos
We talk to the actress and pop culture expert about her childhood Mary-Kate & Ashley obsession, the life-altering power of physical media, and that time she got Kelly Clarkson a job.
Today we’re joined by Sarah Ramos — actress, writer, director, sometimes podcaster, full-time pop culture aficionado, all around Renaissance woman, our first female interviewee and (full disclosure) my wife. That being said, this wasn’t an easy get just because we happen to share a dog and a bank account. She’s always been one of the busiest people I know. When I met her, she was a series regular on NBC’s Parenthood and had just won a Jury Prize for Comedic Storytelling at Sundance for The Arm, a short film she co-directed with Brie Larson and Jessie Ennis. Since then, her IMDb page has continued to expand, with credits ranging from HBO’s Winning Time and Showtime’s The Affair to Hallmark’s A Kismet Christmas and Christmas in Notting Hill. She’s currently in her “Chicago era,” with dual roles on FX’s The Bear and NBC’s Chicago Med. And if that’s not enough, her feature script Zaddy, which she adapted from her Audible Original, was recently featured in the latest edition of The Black List, an annual survey of the “most liked” scripts in Hollywood. We managed to corner her for a few moments to ask about the physical media collection she keeps on a shelf in her office and, as you’ll see, her answers were surprising and informative.
MS: Thanks for doing this. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your physical media collection for a while now, because I think our taste levels diverge in really interesting ways.
SR: Yeah, you like “slow borings” and I like popular entertainment. You’re pretentious and think the movies that shaped me have no artistic value whatsoever, and I have a respect for high art as well as low art.
MS: [laughs] That’s not fair. I think we both have an appreciation for physical media and cinema in general. For instance, one of the areas where our tastes converged early on in our relationship was Todd Solondz. Happiness was the only film of his that I’d seen prior to meeting you, which was a huge mistake on my part. And I remember you sitting me down and showing me Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling and Palindromes.
SR: Just to clarify, I have not seen Palindromes in over ten years so I don’t know how well it holds up.
MS: Well, you'll be happy to know that Radiance — one of my favorite boutique indie labels — is releasing a 4K UHD limited edition of Palindromes in June, so I look forward to reappraising that film through the lens of 2025.
SR: As you can see, I have a very limited physical media collection compared to yours, but I do have a Palindromes DVD that I borrowed from some library and never gave back because at the time it was impossible to find and I was obsessed with it.
MS: It's clear from looking at your collection that there’s one particular, um… I don't know if you’d call it a genre, it’s more like a niche… that you’re more interested in than any other, and that would be the Mary-Kate & Ashley movies. Would you care to talk about those at all?
SR: Of course. So there used to be three types of movies: theatrical movies, made-for-TV movies — like Hallmark and Lifetime or The Disney Channel — and straight-to-VHS movies, such as Our Lips are Sealed or Passport to Paris. Did anyone else do straight-to-VHS other than [Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen]?
MS: A lot of people made straight-to-video movies, but they were one of the biggest success stories to come out of that era, at least in terms of what they were able to build. Arguably, we wouldn't have luxury fashion brand The Row without the success of the Mary-Kate & Ashley movies. Can you give our readers a little bit of the backstory?
SR: By the way, all of this is based on my memory from when I was growing up, so you should fact check everything, but I believe they were on Full House, and then they did a couple made-for-TV movies and maybe an album or two. And then they made It Takes Two, which did receive a theatrical release.
MS: So coming off the success of It Takes Two, they started releasing their own movies, is that right?
SR: That’s my understanding. Their manager was behind a lot of it. Don’t ask me how I know this, but his name was Robert Thorne, and I think we have him to thank for Dualstar Entertainment [the Olsen twins’ production company] and their unparalleled output of products, such as this Mary-Kate and Ashley Coast to Coast eau de toilette which was sold exclusively at Walmart, and these Mary-Kate and Ashley Movie Magic dolls which let you host your own movie premiere.
[Robert Thorne] was sort of the mastermind behind all of that. And it wasn’t just movies. They had other projects too, like You’re Invited to Mary-Kate & Ashley’s, which was a series of videos centered around different types of parties — dance parties, slumber parties, etcetera — and they all started with a theme song. [singing] You’re invited, you’re invited, come on, we’ve got a lot to do. You’re invited, we’re excited and delighted to see you. Bring your friends along, laugh and sing a song. The party’s about to start, you’re invited…
MS: Wow. Okay.
SR: And there was another series called The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley where they played twin detectives and their motto was “We’ll solve any crime by dinnertime.” Caroline [Goldfarb] and I actually used the artwork for that show as our inspiration when we were promoting The Renner Files [their “true crime” podcast about Jeremy Renner’s failed social media app].
MS: So there were various subgenres within the Mary-Kate & Ashley Cinematic Universe?
SR: Yeah. They were all musicals as well. So for example, The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley was billed as “a musical mystery series.” The songs were all pretty low-fi and had titles like “Gimme Pizza.” [singing] Gimme pizza! P-I-Z-Z-A.
MS: I have a younger sister and she was very into Mary-Kate & Ashley as well and I remember they had a song called “Brother for Sale.”
SR: That was one of their very first music videos.
MS: Do you remember what project that was a part of?
SR: No idea. I’m not really a student of them per se. But they did have a huge impact on my life and anyone who knows me knows that the whole reason I became an actress is because, at the beginning of one of their VHS tapes, there was an ad for a Mary-Kate & Ashley cruise. Basically, you could pay to go on a cruise with the Olsen twins and, like, go to pool parties with them or whatever. And I saw that ad before one of their movies and asked my parents if we could go on it and they said yes. So we went on this cruise to the Caribbean with the Olsen twins and after that I was like, I have to become an actress.
MS: What I’m hearing is, physical media quite literally changed the trajectory of your life. Is that why you’ve hung on to this stuff for so long?
SR: Well, to be clear, a lot of this “stuff” I inherited from a friend of mine who I bonded with over our childhood love of Mary-Kate & Ashley. She was cleaning out her closet and taking all of her Olsen twins movies to Goodwill and I said, Absolutely not. Bring them here. And she dropped them off in a box on our doorstep.
MS: I see. So these are all recent acquisitions.
SR: The dolls are from my personal collection. I don't know what Olsen twins stuff is still at my parents' house. I did have the Mary-Kate & Ashley Game Boy game. I had the Mary-Kate & Ashley PlayStation game, the graphics for which are stunning. It was called Mary-Kate & Ashley: Magical Mystery Mall and you could do different challenges, like being a waiter at a diner in the mall. There was a snowboarding challenge. There was a photography challenge. But I was particularly fond of their narrative films, such as Billboard Dad and How the West Was Fun. There was Passport to Paris where they go to Paris on spring break. Our Lips are Sealed was about them ending up in the witness protection program in Australia.
MS: They witness a murder or something?
SR: I think it was a robbery. They're pretty much all travel movies, except for Billboard Dad, which was one of their first. It was set in Venice and they’re like, surfer girls. Their dad is single so they put his picture on a billboard, like a dating ad, and he gets all these dates from it.
MS: Who plays the dad?
SR: I’m forgetting his name right now. He’s the dad from Everwood.
MS: Treat Williams?
SR: No, the other dad from Everwood. I worked with him on Parenthood. There was also the movie you helped me reenact a scene from during the pandemic called Holiday in the Sun, where they go to the Bahamas with Megan Fox. They also had Mary-Kate & Ashley Magazine, which of course I read, not to mention multiple TV shows, like Two of a Kind and So Little Time. You truly cannot overstate their impact on the culture. It was basically the first Goop, but for children. And they were billionaires by the time they were 18, all thanks to physical media.
MS: I’d love to talk about some of the other pieces in your collection. There isn’t much, but I think what you do have is incredibly powerful. Let's talk about some of the stuff you were in.
SR: I have seasons two and three of Parenthood, but not season one for some reason. I have the first TV show that I was on, right after I went on the Mary-Kate & Ashley cruise, a show called American Dreams. It was about the show American Bandstand, which was kind of like TRL in the 1960s. They’d have musical guests perform live and teenagers would dance to it and they shot in Philadelphia, which is so random. So American Dreams was basically a fictionalized version of that, and I played Britney Snow's precocious and bratty sister, and we would have stars from the early 2000s playing stars from the 1960s. We had Kelly Clarkson playing Brenda Lee, JoJo playing Linda Ronstadt, Usher playing Marvin Gaye… But unfortunately no one’s ever heard of this show because the music was so expensive and it’s not available on streaming. The only version of American Dreams you can still access are these DVDs of season one.
MS: You’re literally on one of the discs. That’s incredible.
SR: There were two more seasons, but NBC never bothered with the rest.
MS: Season one must not have sold very well.
SR: Okay, calm down.
MS: [laughs] I’m not saying the show wasn’t good. I've seen it. It’s a very high-quality show. I think it was just a little ahead of its time.
SR: Well, all I can say is that it was right on time for me as somebody who was obsessed with pop culture. I was so obsessed with Kelly Clarkson on season one of American Idol. I would call in to vote for her like 150 times per night and I would talk about her so much on the set of American Dreams that they banned me from mentioning her ever again. I was begging them to put her on the show and they finally cast her in the premiere episode of season two as Brenda Lee and she was incredible.
MS: You literally got Kelly Clarkson a job.
SR: Yeah, she signed a headshot for me that said “Thanks for the job.”
MS: You’re kidding.
SR: I was eleven years old. That’s on taste. That’s on talent. That’s on starmakers. I will say, the people who were fans of [American Dreams] are really fans of it. Maybe because it's not available on streaming it looms larger in people's memories, because they’re going off of the feelings they had about it at the time.
MS: Speaking of shows that were unavailable for a long time due to music rights, I was a big fan of a show called The State, with David Wain, Michael Showalter, Ken Marino, Joe Lo Truglio… And because it was an MTV show, they used a lot of contemporary music, so they had to spend years going back in and putting generic music underneath all the sketches so they could release it on home video. But one of the movies you own is Drop Dead Gorgeous, which was actually directed by a member of The State, Michael Patrick Jann.
SR: Drop Dead Gorgeous is a movie that is deeply connected to my childhood, along with other classics like Bring It On and Legally Blonde, that I would watch over and over and over again. It’s a mockumentary about a bunch of teenage beauty queens getting murdered in Mount Rose, Minnesota. I remember when I first showed it to you, you were like, this is really dark for you to have been watching at 11 years old. One girl gets blown up by a tractor. Ellen Barkin plays Kirsten Dunst’s mom and in one scene her trailer explodes and her hand ends up getting fused to a beer can. Also, one of the men judging the teen beauty pageant is obviously a pedophile.
MS: It’s sort of a cross between Heathers and Michael Ritchie’s Smile. And Amy Adams is in it too, right?
SR: Yes. Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, Brittany Murphy, Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney… It’s an incredible cast. For the longest time, it wasn’t available on streaming, which is why I own it.
MS: There’s this misconception that everything’s available on streaming, and that’s really not the case. The more you dig, the more you realize there’s a huge library of stuff that’s only available on physical media.
SR: Well, I mean, look at my collection of Mary-Kate & Ashley movies. I don’t even own a VCR, but they’re incredibly valuable to me and provide important energy to this workspace.
MS: Anything else in your collection you'd care to talk about?
SR: Well, there’s another show I was on called Runaway, which was the first new show that The CW network ever made. Before it was The CW, it was The WB and they had hit shows like Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars, but Runaway was the first original CW show. It starred Donnie Wahlberg as a man who goes on the run with his family. I played his daughter and Dustin Milligan played my brother.
MS: Hot Frosty himself.
SR: Exactly. Anyway, it was canceled after three episodes so they cut the season short, but the network let them rewrite it to wrap up the mystery. So this box set is the entire series, including the episodes that never aired.
MS: Judging by the cover, it doesn't really seem like a CW show.
SR: Look, they were trying something, okay? Thankfully the artists involved have all gone on to great success, so it wasn't the end of anyone's career.
MS: On that note, are there any upcoming projects you’d like to promote?
SR: Nothing I can talk about right now, but you can still catch me in Chicago Med.
MS: Well, thanks for taking us through your collection. I really appreciate it.
SR: It's been a pleasure. I love educating people.
You can follow @saraheramos on Instagram and you can catch her in Chicago Med, Wednesdays @ 8pm on NBC or streaming 24/7 on Peacock.
That’s all for now. We’ll see you next time.
- MS
Thank you for this great interview. For the record, while "American Dreams" is (sadly) not found on streaming, most of the episodes from all three seasons, can in fact be found on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12SsJ04psvk&list=PLQMWLje6g7-EzDXTxqyihlFNuhAATM4p1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAuB8BK7j1Q&list=PLbBF8gEFBzOSQ2vzjmcpuuDSPhvAN-w4S
Enjoy!