‘Awards Chatter’ Live: Maya Rudolph on Reprising Kamala, the Oscars & Her Four Emmy Noms
“I have to tell you, it has been an experience,” says Maya Rudolph upon being asked about the mounting calls from the public, since Joe Biden’s July 21 announcement that he will not be seeking reelection, for her to reprise her Saturday Night Live impersonation of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who she previously portrayed on the show in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Speaking exclusively to The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast in front of an audience at the San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood, Rudolph, who is currently nominated for four Emmys — best comedy guest actress and best original music/lyrics for NBC’s SNL, best comedy actress for Apple TV+’s Loot and best character voiceover for Netflix’s Big Mouth — continued: “My phone has not stopped. It’s like if I had 50 grandmas and they were sending me articles like, ‘This is the thing I saw you were in!’ It’s non-fucking-stop. And it’s fascinating because everybody’s excited about this idea, and I have nothing to do with it. It’s just happening in front of me. It’s wild.”
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“It’s terribly exciting to be associated with, I’m not going to lie,” she continued, adding, “I could tell it was happening around me when Kamala was running the first time. This just feels a lot bigger. You mentioned Condoleezza Rice [another politician she once impersonated], and I balked because I was like, ‘That wasn’t a good character.’ But in those days, I never really played many political figures because there weren’t any that looked like me. That was just the truth of it. It wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough to play them; I didn’t look like them. So you could not have paid me any amount of money to believe that this would be anything that I would be associated with — someone who’s running for president of the United States. It’s incredible. So I hope it works out; it would be cool.”
Rudolph, 52, the daughter of the late “Lovin’ You” singer Minnie Riperton and music producer Richard Rudolph, shot to fame 25 years ago. In 1999, following years of performing with the LA-area improv troupe The Groundlings, she embarked on a seven-season run as one of the greatest cast members in the history of SNL, playing 72 characters — including Donatella Versace, Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé — over 137 episodes. She co-wrote many of her characters with her friend and fellow Groundlings alum Emily Spivey, and describes many of them as “divas,” in the best sense of the word.
After leaving SNL in 2007, Rudolph appeared in sitcoms (Up All Night), variety shows (Maya & Marty) and films (such as 2009’s Away We Go, 2015’s Sisters, 2019’s Wine Country and, most famously, 2011’s Bridesmaids) — while occasionally returning to Studio 8H at 30 Rock to make cameos and, on three occasions, to host her former show. The third time came on May 11 of this year, when Rudolph was asked by Lorne Michaels to host the annual Mother’s Day episode — and wowed viewers from the start by featuring in her opening monologue a hilarious ‘Mother’ song that she co-wrote (modeling it after Madonna’s “Vogue”) and performed throughout the studio’s bowels. Both Rudolph’s guest turn and song are now Emmy-nominated.
Ironically, it was a shortlived Amazon dramedy series, 2018’s Forever, that introduced her to the two people who would create the greatest acting vehicle she has had yet outside of SNL. The co-creators of that series, Matt Hubbard and Alan Yang, would later create Loot, a comedy series in which Rudolph plays a woman who divorces her billionaire husband, walks away with half of his money and then struggles to figure out how to coexist with regular people, including those who work at the philanthropic foundation that she didn’t even realize she had.
“It just felt very much of the time, and it felt interesting to enter the conversation about philanthropy and wealth and social responsibility,” says the actress, who is also an EP of the show through Banana Split Productions, which she runs with Danielle Renfrew Behrens, a friend since kindergarten. Fun fact: Rudolph’s comedy actress Emmy nom for her performance in the show’s second season marks her first-ever performance recognition outside of the categories for comedy guest acting (which she won in 2020 and 2021 for work on SNL) and voiceover acting (which she won in 2020, 2021 and 2023 for work on Big Mouth).
Prior to Loot, though, Rudolph, who is biracial, found that many in the industry weren’t quite sure what to do with her. For that reason, she found nothing more freeing than writing characters for herself at the Groundlings or SNL (“People were not planning on writing me as a lot of things, so I had to tell people how they need to look at me”) and voicing animated characters like Connie The Hormone Monstress on Big Mouth (“You can be anything, which, for me, is a dream”).
Finally, it seems, the times are catching up to Maya Rudolph.
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