Jane Krakowski Recalls Getting Evicted from Her Rent-Stabilized Apartment After Ally McBeal Premiere

Jane Krakowski knew she made it when she got evicted from her New York City apartment.

The actress, 55, recalled how her fame quickly began to rise after landing the role of Elaine Vassal on Ally McBeal on the latest episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson's Dinner’s on Me podcast.

"I remember the first time I came back to the East Coast after Ally McBeal aired because my parents were still here. I'm very close to my family, and I would come back on hiatuses and go see everything I could on Broadway too, you know, see everybody," said the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt star.

Continuing to reflect on her time on the show, the New Jersey native said, "I literally got evicted because I was on Hollywood Field. I had, like, a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side."

The 30 Rock alum laughed as she revealed that she tried to hold on to the apartment because she did not know if Ally McBeal — which ran for five seasons from 1997 to 2002 — would be a success.

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"I tried to keep it the whole first year, and as Ally McBeal got more and more known, I got, like, a certified letter from my landlord's lawyer saying, 'We know you don't live here. We know you're not living here. You need to evict the premises,' " she said. "And I was like, 'What? How could this even happen?' "

Krakowski said she ended up losing her apartment and was forced to stay with her parents.

Her experience on the show, however, is something she looks back at with a smile.

"There was a little bit of trust of what we were, you know, getting into, but it was so funny and so original and so different. I have such a clear memory of the first screening that we watched the pilot," said Krakowski.

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"And I think because we all had no idea what we were making or what it really was gonna be. I mean, we knew we all loved the script," she recalled. "And I remember sitting with all my other castmates, and we all just kinda looked at each other, and I felt like a little shaky inside because I think we knew it was something so different that it might really change our lives."

Calista Flockhart starred as the title character in the Fox dramedy. The show also starred Gil Bellows, Lisa Nicole Carson, Greg Germann, Peter MacNicol, and in later seasons, Portia de Rossi and Lucy Liu.