Kristen Wiig shows up seven minutes into the movie ?Knocked Up,? an assassin in a junior executive?s suit, meeting with the television production assistant played by Katherine Heigl, who their boss has decided is ready to go on the air. Wiig?s character is every middle manager who clings to her authority by association; she shows her boss small reassuring smiles while revealing subterranean loathing toward the young woman with the promotion. She tells Heigl?s character that they cannot legally ask her to lose weight. ?We would just like it if you go home and step on a scale and write down how much you weigh,? she says. ?And subtract it by, like, 20.? ?Knocked Up? is a movie filled with slapstick, screaming and shtick, and yet Wiig, with nothing more than her small, tight smile and death-by-platitude lines, practically stole the show with that two-minute scene. ?After I saw how much people loved it in the movie,? says Judd Apatow, who wrote and directed the film, ?I instantly asked her if she had any plans to write a script for herself.?
Wiig doesn?t exactly fit the mold of a traditional leading lady ? she is more like America?s eccentric aunt than its sweetheart ? but she was, in fact, working on a screenplay starring herself when Apatow asked. ?Bridesmaids,? which she was writing with her best friend, Annie Mumolo, is a comedy about the friendship between two women: one planning her own wedding while the other, the single girl played by Wiig, is on a steady downhill slide. After Wiig?s character melts down in a key scene, her best friend, played by Maya Rudolph, shouts, ?Why can?t you just be happy for me and then go home and talk behind my back like a normal person??
The kinds of characters Wiig has perfected on ?Saturday Night Live? ? carefully observed, idiosyncratic and, yes, occasionally annoying ? have served her well in the scenes she has stolen in other films: as an oddball surgeon in ?Ghost Town,? an oddball yoga instructor in ?Forgetting Sarah Marshall,? an oddball theme-park owner in ?Adventureland,? an oddball crime fighter in ?MacGruber.? But could that sensibility carry a whole movie? Apatow decided to take the chance, hoping to marry Wiig?s sharp sense of character and fascination with minute human details to the broad, bawdy set pieces and fail-safe physical comedy he is known for. The film, one of the better-reviewed movies at the South by Southwest festival this spring, plainly shows the commercially successful hand of Apatow, but it also reveals that Wiig can be as funny in the role of a relatable everywoman as she can in those absurdist characters. Watching the movie, you do not have the sense of Wiig as a comedian stretching to take on a big role on the big screen; she seems more like an actress who has been trapped in the successful career of a comedian.
In person, Kristen Wiig comes off as a little nervous. When we met, she was wearing a black wool cap that hid most of her dark blond hair, giving her the same anonymity that sunglasses would, and she was worrying about the restaurant she chose. She had never been there before ? what if it were weird? She seemed to reconsider every statement shortly after making it. Did she just say she could draw? Just a little ? it?s not as if she thinks she is some great artist. Talking about ?Bridesmaids,? she said, ?It?s my first . . . starring role, I guess, is the term?? as if owning up to an embarrassing disease. ?And it is a comedy, and comedy is very subjective, and yeah, I?m nervous.? Once again, she autocorrected: ?But in a good way.?
She is not explosively anxious, or neurotic and hyperverbal, like many of her best-known characters on ?Saturday Night Live?; all that energy seems tamped down into a more controlled cautiousness. She is unfailingly reserved and polite.
Wiig, who started on ?Saturday Night Live? in 2005, quickly established herself with characters like the Target Lady, a gung-ho checkout clerk with boundary issues and an unplaceable accent. Many of Wiig?s characters are embarrassingly enthusiastic about something: a surprise party or the physical appeal of a love interest (in one sketch, Wiig plays a local newswoman awkwardly hitting on her female interview subject). Their unchecked excitement ? the raw wanting ? makes the characters painfully nervous; and the combination of emotions bumping up against one another makes for comedy. The roles she invents are ?always smiling on the outside and dying on the inside,? says Paul Feig, who is best known as the creator of ?Freaks and Geeks? and who directed Wiig in ?Bridesmaids.?
So much of what we think of as the comedic impulse comes from a performer?s neediness ? the need to be the center of attention, no matter what humiliation it requires. Wiig manages to be a scene-stealer whose attention seems focused outward, on the small-time weirdos of the world whose mannerisms she adopts and then builds on, finding their humanity and their specificity. No one can point to someone who is, in fact, just like the Target Lady ? and yet there is something instantly, almost eerily recognizable about her.
The character was inspired by a few words Wiig actually did exchange with a clerk at a Los Angeles Target ? ?just the accent, nothing she actually said,? Wiig says. Other creations have sprung from as little as a facial expression or a gesture. Gilly, a fiendish Orphan Annie with intent to kill, was what Wiig and her co-writers attached to a pulled-back smile Wiig thought was goofy enough to merit a character. A 1920s character who keeps telling her friends not to make her sing ? none of them, in fact, have asked her to ? evolved when something about the way Wiig was dramatically hunching her shoulders inspired her co-writers to start riffing.
Wiig is clearly a darling of Lorne Michaels; she seems to be featured in more sketches than any other performer on any given episode. Asked to rank Wiig among the show?s top performers, Michaels did not hesitate. ?Top three or four,? he says (lest anyone need reminding, the group?s alums include John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Will Ferrell, Mike Myers and Dan Aykroyd). He also appreciates her quiet containment, so different from her bravado on camera. ?An old shrink of mine would say she doesn?t ?spill over,? ? Michaels says. ?There are people who I have worked with ? and quite a few people I?ve worked with ? who are always in some state of crisis: their boyfriend left, their agent is lying. What I?m getting at is she?s ?still waters run deep.? ?
Wiig is a more polarizing figure for viewers: they either love Gilly, with her mischievous mugging and her ?Sor-ry? catchphrase, or find her excruciating. (Some small subsection of viewers have started a Facebook group called Kristen Wiig Is NOT Funny. ?That Gilly skit makes me want to punch a baby,? one member rants.) And many of her characters are, by their nature, annoying, like Penelope, a hair-twirling nudge who one-ups everyone with a trailing voice and a steady patter of increasingly surreal tall tales.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 30, 2011
A picture credit on Page 26 with an article about the comedian Kristen Wiig misidentifies the photographer of the opening portrait. He is Peter Yang, not Eric Ogden.
Chat about this story w/ TalkitaSource: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/magazine/mag-01wiig-t.html
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