Saturday Night Live alum Maya Rudolph revealed that her seven years as a cast member did not make her feel invincible on stage.
Rudolph joined Ana Gasteyer and Rachel Dratch for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, published on Monday, in which the three alums compared their Broadway careers to their time on SNL. The former cast members overlapped on the show in the early 2000s: Gasteyer from 1996 to 2002, Dratch from 1999 to 2006, and Rudolph from 2000 to 2007.
Rudolph told her former castmates that she was “f---ing terrified” to do Broadway.
Rudolph made her Broadway debut on April 28 as Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary!, while Dratch and Gasteyer were both nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical this year—Gasteyer, for her role as Mildred Layton in Schmigadoon!, and Dratch for hers as the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show.
Rudolph said that even though she’d performed so many live shows on SNL, she still felt stage fright when she joined Oh, Mary!. “It’s different,” Rudolph explained. “Because there’s no tightrope.”
“And I really didn’t know my lines on opening night,” she continued, after which Gasteyer quipped, “Now you’re going public to say that?”
Laughed Ruolph, “I’ve been saying it for a while.”
Despite the stage fright, Rudolph said the “beautiful part” was that she had “the support of the cast,” who “know the show so well.” On SNL, she said, there’s less “connection” to your castmates when performing.
On SNL, she said, “We read from cue cards, so we’re actually not really looking at each other when we’re performing, and that connection’s totally different. And now when I really lock in and focus on the other actor, I’m so much more present and clearer, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m really acting.’” Rudolph’s point about cue cards prompted Gasteyer to set the record straight about why the show uses them.
“The reason that they have cue cards, and I want to say this ‘cause a lot of people don’t know this,” she said. “They think it’s a laziness move, but because of the nature of live television and the fact that it contracts and expands with the audience, there are rewrites that are happening in real time, which is why it’s cue-carded to begin with.”
Gasteyer continued, “So, you are kind of really married to those cards, even if you wrote the sketch, because it could be changing.”
“There were times, I don’t know if this happened to you guys, but where like, somebody on the ground is literally rewriting your lines, you know, as it’s happening,” Gasteyer went on. In that way, she explained, performing on SNL “starts to become an exercise in multitasking or ADD management or hypervigilance—less about performance.”
She concluded, “The luxury of doing something eight a week is that beautiful, ‘I get to do it again tomorrow,’ moment. It’s relaxing in a strange way.”
