Comedian’s Emmy Shines Here in Suburbs
By Carmen Greco Jr.
Sept. 12, 2000
No one was cheering louder than Glenbard West High School teacher Lucy Matune when Sean Hayes scooped up his Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Television Comedy Series Sunday night. A 1988 graduate of the high school and a Glen Ellyn native, Hayes won for his inspired flights of lunacy on the hit NBC series Will & Grace.
“It was really exciting for me when he won last night,” Matune said Monday. “Think the important thing is that he is such a good person. It’s wonderful to see such a good person succeed. We’re all very proud of him at West.”
Matune taught Hayes for two years in her Spanish class at Glenbard West. She said it did not surprise her those Hayes-who plays flamboyant homosexual Jack McFarland on the show-was announced the winner during the televised awards ceremony in Los Angeles Sunday night. Hayes’s knack for humor, she said, was readily apparent during his years at Glenbard West.
“When you saw students in a crowd laughing in the hallways, you can bet Sean was usually in the middle of it,” Matune said.
Now in its third year, Will & Grace also won for Best Comedy Series and for Outstanding Supporting Actress. High school friend Diana Martinez, who is currently director of entertainment at the Pheasant Run Theater in St. Charles, where Hayes once worked and performed, said she talked to Hayes the night before the Emmy awards ceremony.
"He called me to say he was a little nervous,” she said. “There was a lot of pressure, particularly when you saw who he was up against.”
Hayes topped David Hyde Pierce of Frasier, Peter Boyle and Brad Garrett of Everybody Loves Raymond, and Peter MacNicol of Ally McBeal. Martinez said she and other old friends of Hayes’s from Pheasant Run attended a party Sunday night to watch the Emmys and to root for their friend and former colleague. It did not surprise her much either after Hayes walked away with the awards.
“I can’t tell you how proud we are of him,” Martinez said. “We all know how hard he worked to get there. Hayes was musical director at the Pheasant Run Theater in the early 1990’s and later went on to work at the prestigious Organic and Steppenwolf theaters in Chicago. He also was a member of the famed Second City comedy improvisational group.
“I think Sean’s edge is he has a gift for physical comedy,” Martinez said. “It’s his expressions. He’s got a really zany side to him, and this character allows it to come out.”
Matune, his former teacher, said she has been following the show and likes how his character has been getting bigger chunks of the script. She said students and other staff members at the school also were excited after the news of his Emmy.
“Most of the kids know that he went to Glenbard West,” she said, “and they’re very interested in him.”
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