‘If I ever have to talk in front of more than four people, I get nervous’: Kristen Wiig

This story is part of the April 21 edition of Sunday Life.See all 12 stories.

Beverly Hills, three days after the Oscars. Hollywood’s glitziest caravan has rolled through town and the dust is still settling. Oppenheimer has exploded, Emma Stone’s dress has ripped, Ryan Gosling has crooned I’m Just Ken in a bright pink suit.

Kristen Wiig was nowhere near any of it. Instead, she was at her home up the road with her husband, Avi Rothman, also a comedian, writer and actor, and their four-year-old twins, Shiloh and Luna. “I love to watch the Oscars from my couch,” she says. “It’s nice to go, once in a while. But it’s nice to be in your sweatpants and socks.”

Wiig, who at 50 may well be America’s pre-eminent female comic actor, appears to have achieved something close to nirvana for a film star: not just the freedom to take the roles that suit her, but also the perspective to know what she doesn’t want to do.

She made her reputation as an improviser and then as a sketch performer on Saturday Night Live, via some small but memorable film roles, before breaking out with Bridesmaids, the raucous 2011 comedy she co-wrote and starred in as part of a comic phalanx including Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Maya Rudolph and Rebel Wilson.

Wiig played Annie, who suffers a series of mishaps after she is asked to be maid of honour for her best friend. Her performance was a masterpiece of dishevelment and comic timing, and made her a bona fide international star. Others might use such a platform to swing for an Oscar or become a production mogul. Wiig has used it to slow down and maintain a healthy distance from the frenzy.

“I can’t just pack up and go across the world somewhere for months and months,” she says. “Things change as to what you want to do – and how much you want to work, to be honest.”

It is surprising to hear someone in such high demand openly prioritise parenting, considering the usual be-busy-at-all-costs Hollywood treadmill. “Oh gosh, I just don’t want to be away,” she says. “People say, ‘[Your children] are so young, they won’t remember.’ But I want to be there.”

Wiig’s new project, Palm Royale, a 10-part series for Apple TV+ set in late-1960s Florida, fits her requirements perfectly. Based on Mr and Mrs American Pie, a 2018 novel by Juliet McDaniel, Palm Royale is a comedy-drama centred on an exclusive Palm Beach members’ club. Wiig stars as Maxine Simmons, an outsider from Tennessee desperate to be accepted by this bitchy but beautifully dressed society.

“Being in character is so much easier.”Credit: Tiffany Nicholson/Telegraph Media Group Limited 2024

While Palm Royale looks and sounds exuberant, over its 10 episodes the gloss gives way to something darker and more explicitly political. President Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, lurking in the background, remind the audience that there is a world beyond the manicured lawns, while a show about Florida’s high society can’t help but bring to mind Donald Trump’s resort there, Mar-a-Lago.

“Oh God, don’t ask Trump questions,” Wiig jokes. “I think there’s a nod to Mar-a-Lago in there. We didn’t want to hit anybody over the head politically, but at the same time we touch on a lot of important things. I don’t think you can do a show about 1969 without mentioning reproductive rights and the Vietnam War.”

Maxine, who steals, lies and blackmails in her quest for acceptance, is not an easy character to admire, but Wiig gives her unexpected warmth. Her gift for physical expression means we’re on her side even as she is plundering a helpless old lady’s jewellery. We may not think the ends justify the means, but Wiig persuades us that they do for Maxine.

In person Wiig is warm and thoughtful, quieter and more measured than on screen. Unlike many other comic actors, especially those who came up through stand-up, she is not boisterous or commanding one-on-one.

She says she has always preferred being a collaborative rather than competitive performer. “If I ever have to talk in front of more than four people, I get nervous or self-conscious. If I’m on stage in a wig and I’m someone else, those nerves are rerouted. Being in character is so much easier.”

Given her talents for mimicry and improvisation, typically symptoms of a childhood spent as a class clown, it’s notable that Wiig didn’t consider comedy until she was an adult. Her father, Jon, ran a marina, her mother, Laurie, was an artist; the two divorced when she was nine.

Following her mother’s example, her first love was art. She drew detailed, perfectionist studies of people and things. She also had a teenage tearaway phase: drinking, smoking, being suspended from school and ill-advised tattoos.

In Palm Royale, Maxine steals to fund her new lifestyle. Did Wiig have any thievery of her own to draw from? “Doesn’t every kid do something like that once in a while?” she says. “But I mean, nothing expensive. Maybe an eyeliner.”

“I have a high-school yearbook and a lot of people wrote that I was funny, but I don’t remember being funny or thought of as funny at all.”

KRISTEN WIIG

She went to college, majoring in art at the University of Arizona. After she tried an acting class as a way to meet a course requirement, a teacher suggested she pursue it further. She decided to drop out of college, move to Los Angeles and give showbiz a whirl.

“I have a high-school yearbook and a lot of people wrote that I was funny, but I don’t remember being funny or thought of as funny at all, which is weird,” she says.

A show by The Groundlings, an LA troupe which has been running since 1974 and whose alumni include Will Ferrell and Maya Rudolph, opened her eyes to the possibilities of improvisation. “It was the first time I’d ever seen improv and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” she says.

Wiig started performing with them, working odd jobs to support herself. One of those odd jobs was babysitting for Bob Odenkirk, the comedian (and more recently star of Better Call Saul), and his wife Naomi, a manager. Naomi helped her audition for Saturday Night Live (SNL).

Wiig joined SNL in 2005 and during her seven years on the show exhibited an obvious talent for impressions (Drew Barrymore, Kim Cattrall) and an eye for characters (the over-chatty checkout woman Target Lady, the hair-sprayed Midwestern Aunt Linda) that made her stand out even in illustrious company.

“It’s good for your brain and soul to be social.” Credit: Tiffany Nicholson/Telegraph Media Group Limited 2024

Hollywood came calling, as it invariably does for the stars of SNL. Director Paul Feig gave Wiig a small part in a Christmas comedy called Unaccompanied Minors, and Judd Apatow cast her in 2007’s Knocked Up. In a small role as a bitchy TV executive, Wiig almost stole the whole film.

Impressed by Wiig’s work on Knocked Up, Apatow asked her if she had any screenplay ideas. She and Annie Mumolo, a friend from The Groundlings, quickly came up with the idea for Bridesmaids. As Annie, Wiig captured perfectly a woman on the edge, the only one unable to see that she is falling apart.

In grossing close to $300 million at the box office and picking up two Oscar nominations, including for Wiig and Mumolo’s screenplay, Bridesmaids proved that female-led comedies could be commercial as well as critical hits. Wiig became a bankable star. “That movie changed my life,” she says. “It gave me a lot of opportunities. I’m so proud of it and I love every person involved in it.”

Wiig left SNL in 2012, removing herself from the Manhattan fishbowl, and her roles since have been diverse. She’s continued to voice parts in animations (How to Train Your Dragon and its sequels, Despicable Me and its sequels) and played Ben Stiller’s love interest in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And not everything has been comedy. In The Skeleton Twins, she and Bill Hader, also formerly of SNL, were estranged siblings. In 2015, she was Nasa’s head of PR in The Martian.

When Wiig was cast as Cheetah, a villain, in Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), she and her husband spent nine months in the UK. “I loved the social part of being in London, just going to the pub, having a date every Sunday and being out with people in person,” she says. “It’s good for your brain and soul to be social like that. Sometimes in LA you get stuck in your own house.”

One of the themes of Palm Royale is the tightrope that women walk to get ahead. They must be well dressed but not too showy, intelligent but not intimidatingly so, ambitious but not grasping. Female performers, especially comedians, have long endured such difficulties: having to be funny but not too funny, attractive but not too attractive. When Wiig reunited with Feig for a 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, the film’s female-led cast prompted a backlash from the more ghoulish and misogynistic parts of the universe.

Thanks in no small part to Wiig’s work showing that female ensembles can be bankable, producers today are far more likely to trust them than they were 15 years ago. And in Palm Royale, it’s women over 50 who are firmly in charge. American comedy legend Carol Burnett, who plays the rich heiress Norma, is a sprightly 90.

Wiig is too modest to claim to have blazed a trail, but admits she has had to learn to tune out the noise. “Criticism can be [about] anything from looks to performance to choices to clothes,” she says. “I do not read it. I tell people not to send me things. I don’t really want to know, because if you listen to the good you’re going to listen to the bad.”

If having a family has brought perspective on her career, that may be in part because it was hard-won. She and Rothman went through years of unsuccessful IVF before having their twins via a surrogate, just before the pandemic took hold. “It was a challenge, but worth it,” she says.

It sounds as though the twins, at four, are already earning their keep in the Wiig-Rothman troupe. “We have a little basket of wigs in our playroom,” she says, “and it is comedy gold, right there, sitting down and not expecting a child to walk into the room with a wig on. It’s the greatest thing ever.”

Are wigs a condition of entry into the household? “Yes,” she says, laughing. “‘You must wear a wig if you’re going to be living in this house.’”

Palm Royale is streaming now on Apple TV+.

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