NEW YORK — Kristen Wiig has just come off an average
Saturday night, one that required her to wear a 2-foot-high wig, shuffle
lethargically around a stripper pole and bury her face in Helen
Mirren’s cleavage.
“I was like, ‘Are you cool with this? ‘Cause I’m
really gonna get in there,'” Wiig said of rehearsing the “magical bosom”
scene with the 65-year-old British actress. “She was like, ‘Oh yeah. Do
whatever you need to do and stay in there as long as you want.’ And I
did. It’s pretty intense in there.”
Since joining the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in
2005, Wiig has emerged as one of the sketch comedy show’s most valuable
players for her exuberantly weird characters, including the world’s most
enthusiastic Target checkout lady, the freak sister in a family of
Lawrence Welk singers and a bug-eyed Nancy Pelosi. Now, at 37, she is
shedding the goofy costumes, accents and outlandish behavior to attempt
that trickiest of parts — a real person. Wiig’s first leading big-screen
role is in the Friday release “Bridesmaids,” which she also co-wrote.
“All my characters are someone you don’t want to talk
to at a party,” said Wiig, who off-stage is surprisingly introverted
for a woman who makes her living wearing snaggle teeth and doll hands.
“It’s always that person who’s being too loud, doesn’t have any social
boundaries or says the wrong thing.”
In “Bridesmaids,” by contrast, Wiig plays a
relatively normal, single thirtysomething woman whose life is thrown
into disarray when she’s asked to be the maid of honor in her best
friend’s wedding. “SNL” alumna Maya Rudolph is the agreeable bride, Rose
Byrne of TV’s “Damages” an alpha bridesmaid, Melissa McCarthy of “Mike
& Molly” the groom’s crude sister and “Mad Men’s” Jon Hamm a
gorgeous jerk.
Directed by “Freaks and Geeks” creator Paul Feig,
“Bridesmaids” is the first female-driven film to come out of “The
40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up” producer Judd Apatow’s mainstream
comedy factory. And though the broad outlines of the script by Wiig and
her writing partner Annie Mumolo fit comfortably in the white satin
ghetto of the wedding genre, the execution is decidedly unladylike, with
pratfalls, poop jokes and athletic sex.
“We wanted to write a comedy, not a female comedy,
just a comedy that has a lot of women in it,” she said at a hotel in her
Soho neighborhood in New York. “There’s a difference.”
Added Mumolo: “We don’t want this to be some fluffy, frilly story. … We wanted it to be real.”
Reality often comes from the serious beats in
“Bridesmaids,” as Wiig’s character, Annie, faces moments of loneliness
and self-doubt. A pastry chef whose bakery has gone under, Annie crafts
intricate cupcakes for no one and moves back in with her mom in a state
of financial and emotional defeat. She’s a woman, her nosy roommate
observes, whose diary reads like “a very sad handwritten book.”
Wiig, a native of Rochester, N.Y., moved to Los
Angeles after studying art at the University of Arizona and developed
her comic sensibility in four years spent at the Groundlings, the L.A.
improv troupe whose members have included Will Ferrell and Conan
O’Brien. It was there that she honed some of her now-famous characters,
including befuddled film critic Aunt Linda, the giggling, chirping
singer Bjork and Target Lady, who is based on an actual clerk Wiig
encountered at the discount chain’s Burbank store.
“When she’s in character, she’s really in it,” said
Mumolo, who met Wiig at the Groundlings about eight years ago. “She’s
riding it out. She’s enjoying being that character so much. You can hear
her sort of muttering in Aunt Linda all day.”
In her 20s, Wiig paid her rent with odd jobs,
including floral designing and acting in commercials — “Having to smile
while holding a box of tampons wasn’t my dream,” she said. At one point
she waited tables at the Universal Pictures commissary, where some of
the studio chiefs who would eventually greenlight “Bridesmaids”
regularly dined.
“A couple times I’ve seen executives and I’m like,
‘How do I know you?'” she said. “Oh, I used to give you Cobb salad and
Arnold Palmers, and I had a tie and khaki pants on.”
Wiig joined “SNL” just after Bill Hader, with whom
she shared a manager. “I heard there was this new girl coming in from
Groundlings,” Hader said. “I thought, ‘I’ll help her out, show her
around.’ I remember her first table read. I wrote this Vincent Price
sketch and she proceeded to do a spot-on Judy Garland. … Immediately,
it was like, oh … she’s better than all of us. She’s Michael Jordan.
She’s gonna be running the place.”
Wiig’s focus helped her navigate “SNL’s” adrenalized
culture, with its overnight writing sessions and cast-member competition
for airtime. “The schedule was figured out in the ’70s when everybody
was on cocaine,” Hader said. “On writing night, most of us are hanging
out. Kristen’s door is always closed, and she’s in there working.”
Her first notable film role came in 2006 as a slutty
mom in a little-seen film Feig directed called “Unaccompanied Minors,”
but it was a small scene in “Knocked Up” in 2007 that won Wiig fans
outside the “SNL” audience. As a passive-aggressive E! channel staffer,
Wiig told Katherine Heigl’s character, “We don’t want you to lose
weight, we just want you to be healthy, by eating less.”
“It was a part that didn’t really exist,” Apatow
said. “I just knew I wanted two people to play folks at E!. I had never
seen anybody stronger with nothing. She created this amazing character
and tore down the house.” Apatow asked Wiig if she had any projects in
the works, and she and Mumolo began working on the script that would
become “Bridesmaids.”
Wiig would go on to provide some of the most
memorable laughs in the films “MacGruber,” “Adventureland” and “Paul,”
and play a rare straight-woman role in the roller derby movie “Whip It.”
Between films and “SNL” seasons, she and Mumolo spent years honing
their script.
Over time their friendship weathered the kind of
potentially chasm-creating lifestyle changes the characters in
“Bridesmaids” face — she moved to New York and focused on her career,
Mumolo stayed in L.A., got married and had two babies.
“We wanted to tell a friendship story and it really
resonated with us,” Mumolo said. “Our relationship survived a lot.
Things that could easily tear two people apart. This process could
really cause trouble between two people. You have to make big decisions
together. Big ones. You have to consider the other person.”
By the time they turned in their first draft, Wiig
and Mumolo had carefully shaped Annie’s emotional arc but neglected
their leading lady’s key asset, Apatow said. “There were stages where I
felt Kristen was writing herself as a straight person too much,” Apatow
said. “She was very comfortable giving others the joke. I had to
convince her to give herself the joke.”
Apatow and Feig added some of the movie’s
trailer-friendly set pieces — a food poisoning breakout in a bridal shop
and Annie’s pill-and-booze-addled meltdown on a plane.
When “Bridesmaids” began production in 2010, Feig and
Apatow encouraged their cast — which includes many Groundlings veterans
— to improvise. In an engagement party scene, Wiig’s and Byrne’s
characters vie for status as the bride’s primary friend with
increasingly antagonistic toasts. “We kept saying, ‘Do another toast, do
another toast,’ all night long,” Apatow said. “Many of the great
moments came from taking the handcuffs off of the women and seeing what
else they could do.”
Apatow, whose oeuvre has largely been devoted to the
extended phase of twenty- and thirtysomething male adolescence, said he
sees little difference between “Bridesmaids” and his other films besides
all the skirts.
“We said, ‘We’re gonna make a great, funny movie that stars primarily women,'” Apatow said. “If it works, men will come too.”
Like her character in the film, Wiig is not married.
But she has known her boyfriend, actor and producer Brian Petsos, since
high school. “I relate to that ridiculous social pressure women have …
that person we’re supposed to be in our 30s — married, kids, house,
dog,” she said. “If we did have a message with the movie, we didn’t want
people to think that you have to be married, because you don’t.”
Her next film role is as a mom in “Friends With
Kids,” written and directed by Hamm’s girlfriend, “Kissing Jessica
Stein” co-writer and star Jennifer Westfeldt. Eventually, Wiig said,
she’d like to transition to more dramatic roles and try directing,
citing “Wendy and Lucy,” a contemplative drama starring Michelle
Williams and directed by Kelly Reichardt, as an inspiration.
“A lot of comedians are big and broad and they hide
their actual personalities,” Apatow said. “Kristen’s willing to expose
her guts.”
In the meantime, Wiig is content to inhabit the ridiculous for 90 minutes Saturday nights.
“Once you have the costume and the wig, it’s easier
to commit than not to,” she said. “Two minutes later you’re someone
else, which is the best acting job you can have.”
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