Julia Sweeney as Pat alongside Harvey Keitel in a 1993 Saturday Night Live sketch. Could she play it meaner? But she doesn't want to be too mean, either. During her last audition, the producers told her she was a bit too nice. This is Sweeney's second callback for the show. The Hulu series, premiering in March, is inspired by former Stranger writer Lindy West's memoir and will star SNL cast member Aidy Bryant as an alt-weekly journalist living in the Pacific Northwest dealing with her Dan Savage-like editor (to be played by Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell) and, of course, her eccentric mother. The show Sweeney's trying out for is called Shrill, and one of its producers is Lorne Michaels, who gave Sweeney her big break on SNL back in 1990. She offers dubious dieting tips ("almonds are the cheeseburgers of nuts") as she prepares dinner, while her husband, sick with cancer, vomits in the next room. The character is concerned about her 30-something daughter's weight. Observations tumble out of her mouth that are no doubt meant to salve emotional insecurities, but land instead with all the delicacy of a knife in the gut. In the scene, Sweeney is playing your standard sitcom mother - well-meaning but overbearing, protective but suffocating. She brought it up in passing but quickly changed the subject, because there was just no way she'd ever land such a great role on a show as high-profile as this, and what if she blabs about it to every journalist in town and then doesn't even get the gig?īut now I'm sitting at her mom Jeri's dining room table on a Friday afternoon in early July, as she runs through a short scene - some of which she's written herself - in front of a camera, and it seems pretty damn effortless. She's nervous, which is surprising when you consider she was once on Saturday Night Live, which has one of the most famously cutthroat audition processes in all of show biz. Ten years? Maybe longer.Ī day earlier, Sweeney had been hesitant to even mention the audition to me, let alone invite me to watch. It's the first role in a major production that she's tried out for in. They've become props in an audition she's filming in the kitchenette of her mother's Spokane apartment. ![]() J ulia Sweeney has cracked nearly a dozen eggs before she's satisfied with the scene. Julia Sweeney at the Fox Theater, where she'll perform her show Older & Wider.
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