At the 2023 Sundance Film Festival premiere of the film A Little Prayer, Celia Weston shared her favorite moments from working on the TV classic Alice. In 1980. Weston joined the show to play truck driver turned waitress Jolene Hunnicut at Mel’s Dinner.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview founder Erik Meers, Weston reflected on her favorite episodes of the show.

“My favorite episodes, selfishly, are a couple of episodes that featured Jolene, my character,” she began. “One was when I was trying to train, to moonlight, as an airline stewardess and Alice and Mel and Vera all came on my first flight and, of course, it was disastrous.”

“Then the one that I loved was – we just loved Vic Tayback, he was our big daddy – and we had a scene one time where he gets locked in the freezer in the diner and he comes out and of course, it’s overplayed completely, it’s just so corny,” Weston laughed. “He’s shivering and the makeup is like, frost all over him and he wore this- back at that time, the fashion was that bomber jacket men wore out of some sort of polyester with a zipper and had epaulets on it, I forget what it was called, but Mel wore one as well as Vic, so we’re getting him out of the freezer and trying to warm him up and I remember Lynn [Linda Lavin] grabbed that bomber jacket and started ad-libbing and putting it on and she said, ‘come on now, let me put on your jackie.’ So we talked about, you know, his ‘jackie’ from then on.”

Watch Weston’s full interview at Sundance here.

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