In many ways, putting an end to one part of her career from a stage in Spokane is fitting. "And I guess that makes you try to control things that you can't control because of some wonderful thing you might miss, but I like the deliberateness of that. "I'm so impressed by their intentionality about that," she said. Most of the time, actors just seem to stop showing up in things. A Gene Hackman or Daniel Day-Lewis announcing that they are retiring from acting seems almost novel. People can be retired without knowing it for years in show business." That said, "When you're in show business, you might be retired already, and you don't know it. "I really am into the simple pleasures of 'I'm going to exercise today and think about dinner.' That's it. "Quarantine kind of taught me how to not do so much and enjoy it," she said. But she also admits to being surprised at how appealing retirement looks now that her husband has fully embraced it. She's also open to any more acting gigs that come her way. She's been working on a screenplay and is really enjoying writing. "And it suddenly has become very meaningful to me because that's where I saw my first movie, I had my first job there selling tickets and popcorn, and it's such an important place." "I think this is my last show, and it just accidentally happened that I was going to film it at the Fox," Sweeney said. "It's like she has a new language that I don't understand." "It's bewildering to Michael and I, who are not sports people," Sweeney said. She talks about her mother's dementia, lessons from the pandemic and the incongruity of having a daughter who is now a football fan. Two years later, those who saw "Older and Wider" in 2018 will have the chance to see the show in a slightly new form - it has undergone some revision to reflect where Sweeney finds herself now. Those plans were interrupted by COVID-19. She performed it in Spokane in 2018 and had plans to film it at the Fox in April 2020. "Older and Wider" dates back to 2018, as Sweeney was contemplating a return to Hollywood after a decade away raising her daughter, Mulan, with her husband, Michael, in the Chicago suburbs. And as many people have re-evaluated their goals, so has Julia Sweeney. And unlike her previous monologues, which dealt with heavy subjects such as cancer and atheism, she wanted these show to be more standup in style. "That's years of material right there.Sweeney, a cast member on "Saturday Night Live" from 1990-94, intended to make her live show an annual thing. "What'll I talk about? Well, I grew up in a Catholic family," she says. ![]() An upcoming 10-city tour will use some of the material.Įventually, though, she hopes to put aside Pat, Mea and the other disguises for a while and just do stream-of-consciousness Julia. Instead, she has been working at Hollywood's Groundling Theatre on a series of character pieces. Live comedy appeals to her, too, though Sweeney says she has neither the talent nor the temperament for conventional standup. She and producer Michaels have talked about a one-woman HBO special. She also plays the part of Mea-"as in Mea Culpa, the world's most insecure accountant-type"-in a forthcoming movie based on still another "SNL" character, Al Franken's good-enough, smart-enough 12-stepper, Stuart Smalley. In September, "It's Pat," starring Sweeney as her androgynous alter ego, will open. "Why did I leave? I left because" -here Sweeney suddenly does Katharine Hepburn doing Sarah Bernhardt-"they just weren't having any epiphanies about me."Īnd, of course, because she heard the same siren song so many "SNL" predecessors couldn't resist: the call of the movies. They just weren't using me enough, and they weren't using my ideas enough. "But a lot of it isn't really my kind of humor. They do a lot of 14-year-old-boy humor-they just love fart jokes and vomit jokes-and they're very good at it. But it's like a big, alcoholic, (messed)-up family. ![]() ![]() "One week, after the show, Lorne (Michaels, the show's executive producer) told me: `You were brilliant, you were hilarious.' Brilliant! Hilarious! And you know what I said on that show, in the airline sketch? `B'bye! B'bye!' That was my line: `B'bye!' "You work a hundred hours a week, and then on Saturday night you get to say two lines in a weird wig," Sweeney says with a little grimace of frustration. That meant insanely long work weeks, usually including a couple of nights on the sofa in her office instead of home in bed.īut, more and more, Sweeney felt that her comic ideas were getting elbowed aside. Like most comedians on "SNL," Sweeney was among its writers.
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