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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, secluded from the jamboree 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 preeminent comic actress, 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. Sitting in an armchair at the Four Seasons, in a oversized burgundy tailored jacket, ox-blood leather trousers and heels, she is in promo-glam mode, but it has not been her focus in recent years.
She made her reputation as an improviser and then as a sketch performer on Saturday Night Live, via some memorable small 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 so in 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. This time [in the children’s lives] is almost addictive.’
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. In the first scene, she climbs over the back wall of the club, rights herself and emerges from the bushes ready to mingle: Becky Sharp, with better tailoring and more poolside cocktails. Although set in Florida, the show was largely filmed within LA County, so Wiig could return home at the end of every day.
The cast is impressive even by the standards of Wiig’s previous ensembles. Allison Janney plays Evelyn, the queen bee of the club, who instantly sees through Maxine’s façade. Laura Dern plays a worthy hippy, Linda, who tries to persuade Maxine that the feminist and civil rights movements can offer her something more meaningful than frocks and fundraising galas.
Ricky Martin, better known as the pop singer who gave the world Livin’ la Vida Loca, plays a bartender who has to keep his homosexuality guarded. Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford’s 22-year-old model daughter, appears as an ingénue nail technician.
While Palm Royale looks and sounds exuberant, over its 10 episodes the gloss gives way to something darker and more explicitly political. President 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 Mar-a-Lago, now Donald Trump’s resort there.
‘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.’
For McDaniel, who started writing the book in 2016, it was expressly a response to the rise of Donald Trump. ‘It’s definitely speaking to how, if we’re not careful, we’re going to go very hard, very fast, backwards [on reproductive rights],’ she says. In the very first episode of the series, Maxine realises that a feminist group might be able to help a society friend of hers get an abortion.
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 root for her 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 to Maxine.
‘We didn’t want to show a bunch of rich people running around,’ she says. ‘These people want more and more and more, and there’s such an emptiness in that. On the surface they’re just going to lunch and having lobster and martinis and you think that’s wonderful. But they’re miserable on some level.
‘It was so important that it wasn’t just about this lady who was trying to go from A to B, because who cares?’ she adds. ‘It could be funny for an episode, but there had to be so many other things. On paper that character could be so unlikeable, so I was trying to find that likeability where you’re rooting for someone who wants something that seems so shallow. The greatest comedies have heart or pain. You have to have that other side to appreciate the funny stuff.
‘So many of the themes are so relatable today, the simplest one being the characters desperately doing everything they can just to belong.’
McDaniel, who visited the set during filming, says Wiig adds a sweetness to the character that wasn’t on the page. ‘In my book Maxine is more openly conniving,’ she says. ‘When Kristen plays her there’s just this warmth about her. You instantly want her to succeed. She’s fantastic at playing these characters who are a chaotic mess but with incredible purpose and ultimately lovable.’
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. At the Golden Globes earlier this year, her skit with Will Ferrell when they presented an award together proved that her gift for riffing with a co-star is intact. But in conversation she is more hesitant, second-guessing herself, imagining how what she says will look written down. And, she says, ‘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.
‘With people who do comedy,’ she adds, ‘there’s an expectation of performance if you invite them to a dinner party. Sometimes I think people are disappointed because I’m like’ – she drops into a mouse-like whisper – ‘“Pass the salt.”’
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. She was born in Canandaigua, New York, but largely raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, moving back to Rochester, New York, at 13. The surname Wiig is Norwegian – her paternal grandfather emigrated from Norway as a child.
Her father Jon ran a marina, her mother Laurie was an artist; the two divorced when she was nine. She has an older brother, as well as two step-siblings on each side. 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, ill-advised tattoos, English music like New Order and The Smiths.
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. ‘Without going into details. But I mean, nothing expensive. Maybe an eyeliner.’
She went to college, majoring in art at the University of Arizona. ‘I kind of knew I always wanted to act, because everyone does and everyone was so obsessed with actors, but I didn’t really know how to get into it.’ After she tried an acting class as a way to meet a course requirement, a teacher suggested she pursue it further, but she was on the verge of starting a summer job doing drawings for a plastic surgeon before 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. An improv 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. She worked in a hotdog restaurant, painted interiors, tried her hand at floral design. ‘I didn’t love market research, or answering calls for a computer company,’ she remembers.
One of her 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 with her audition for Saturday Night Live (SNL), NBC’s long-running weekly sketch show, which has been the main incubator of American comic talent since it began in 1975. Wiig joined 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 hairsprayed Midwestern Aunt Linda) that made her stand out even in illustrious company. Lorne Michaels, SNL’s creator, has called her one of the best performers in the programme’s history.
‘One of the things I loved on SNL were those in-between days where you had to think of what you were going to write,’ she says. ‘There’s a lot of people-watching involved, observing what’s going on in the world. I like to absorb.’
Described like this, building a comic character sounds a bit like sketching something on paper: you observe closely and try to recreate it as faithfully as possible. The difference is that on SNL you are doing it week in, week out, in full view of America.
‘That’s definitely something I miss, doing it at such a rapid pace. Every week, thinking and thinking, doing the show, leaving it behind and going on to the next one, and living in New York. There’s something about that time that was so special.’
Hollywood came calling, as it invariably does for the stars of SNL. The 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 which an ambitious TV presenter (Katherine Heigl) has an unplanned baby after a one-night stand with an unemployed slacker (Seth Rogen). In a small role as a bitchy TV executive, Wiig risked stealing the whole film. ‘This is Hollywood. We don’t like liars,’ she said, deadpan, chastising Heigl’s character for keeping her pregnancy secret. Immediately you wanted to watch a whole film of her.
‘Kristen is one of those rare people who can play really broad comedy, grounded, human comedy, and drama,’ Apatow says. ‘I haven’t figured out what she can’t do.’
Impressed by Wiig’s work on Knocked Up, Apatow asked her if she had any screenplay ideas knocking about. She and Annie Mumolo, a friend from The Groundlings, quickly came up with the idea for Bridesmaids, then thrashed out the script over several years around Wiig’s SNL obligations. Paul Feig came on to direct. As Annie, Wiig captured perfectly a woman on the edge, the only one unable to see that she is falling apart.
‘Certain people just have comedy DNA,’ Feig says. ‘But then on top of it, Kristen’s a really good actor. Sometimes with comics you get funny, but not a nuanced dramatic performance. She hits both, and that makes her everybody’s best friend. You want your lead character to be in every person. That character is the audience. You want somebody who’s lovable on top of being believable. She doesn’t have the thing that stand-ups have, where comedy is very competitive.’
In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Wiig’s character, to ease her nerves on a plane, knocks back a pill and a glass of whisky. A few moments later she looms into the first-class cabin, swaying and abusive. ‘Someone told me that the secret to acting drunk is that when you’re really drunk, you try not to act drunk,’ she says now. ‘You’re trying to keep your head up because you don’t want people to see how wasted you are. When you act drunk, you’re trying to keep it together.’
In grossing close to $300 million at the box office, and picking up two Oscar nominations, including for Wiig and Mumulo’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. They lived in Hampstead, drinking at The Holly Bush and generally carrying on like Londoners. ‘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 must 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 comic ones, 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.
‘It was difficult for everyone,’ Feig says. ‘The good thing for Kristen is she’s not on social media, which is a grounding thing. If you weren’t online, you weren’t getting the brunt of it. [The backlash] was so stupid. It’s a sore spot for me.’
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 adds. ‘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 surrogate, just before the pandemic took hold. ‘I went through a phase where I wasn’t sure if it was going to happen,’ she says. ‘It was a challenge, but worth it.’
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.”’
By prioritising home life, everything else becomes easier. ‘The kids and my relationship have so much to do with it. It’s hands-down the most important thing to me, so the choices become easier to make.’ If Palm Royale does well, she hopes there will be more of it, still filmed in easy reach of her house.
‘I just hope people have a good time watching it,’ she says. ‘There’s something to be said about escaping into a fun world and I hope – without it sounding really cheesy – that it brings joy, and that people escape whatever they need to escape.’
As she says this she cringes, as if in physical pain. Naturally, this is very funny, a glimpse of the gifts that got her to this point. Finally she has a character to improvise with: ‘actor worried about seeming naff’.
‘I’m seeing it in print as I’m saying it out loud and I’m like, “Oh God, how is this going to read?”’ she says, before gathering herself. ‘But you know what, that’s how I feel! I want this show to bring joy!’
When Kristen Wiig’s involved, they usually do.
Palm Royale is streaming now on Apple TV+, with new episodes premiering on Wednesdays