‘Baroness’ comedian gives credit to humble beginnings
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. — Canadian comedian Meredith MacNeill was down to her last pair of slacks, her coat spliced with duct tape, when she landed the job of her life in her native Nova Scotia.
“I got this job as a writer-performer for a couple of weeks and on this show, ‘This Hour Has 22 Minutes,’ which was in Halifax, back in Canada. I was so thrilled to have a job,” she said.
MacNeill had already spent 12 years in England training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts performing Shakespeare. She seemed destined for a career in the theater. But life got in her way.
“I was pregnant and knew I was probably going to be a single mother, so I lost everything and moved back home in my parents’ house, back in the fishing village,” she said. “And I had to start over at 36. But the most incredible thing came from it.”
That “incredible thing” turned out to be her joining three other women and forming “Baroness von Sketch Show,” which returns Oct. 30 to IFC and IFC.com for its fourth season.
While she was performing in England, she’d landed a part in her first sketch comedy, “Man Stroke Woman.”
“In the U.K. I noticed there were lots of female-fronted shows like Catherine Tate’s, Victoria Wood’s,” she said. “In the states there was Amy Poehler, Tina Fey. And in Canada I wasn’t seeing the same thing. So I took the idea of ‘Man Stroke Woman’ — sketch comedy because I knew the model — and put the feminist voice behind that. And I started to write just the basic idea of what the show was.
“And I met the amazing Carolyn Taylor there, and I approached her and said, ‘I have an idea for a show.’ I literally just met her, and she was a writer on the show, and we barely knew each other. Then she said, ‘Great,’ and introduced me to Aurora Browne, Jennifer Whelan. They all worked together for, like, 20-plus years. And the four of us created the sketch show together.”
When “Baroness” was picked up by Canadian television, MacNeill and her daughter left her parents’ home and moved to Toronto.
“But I still don’t give up my Nova Scotia residence,” she said. “So whenever the show is down, which is only two months of the year, I go back to Nova Scotia.
“I grew up in Amherst, which is up against the massive Tantramar Marsh.
It was a really beautiful place. And in junior high I started running,” she recalled. “I ran on this dirt road all by myself, and having that time alone was just my own, and that really changed me. I used to spend that time visualizing how I would succeed in life, how I would tackle a problem, how I would get out of my town and move on. I’ve always gone back to that.”
From the time she was 7, she also enjoyed performing.
“There were two women in town that started a theater program called Beverly True and Betty Douglas, and I owe them everything,” she said. “If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be doing this . ... I joined the children’s group and stayed with them until I was in high school.
“They made me feel OK at it. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be an actor.’ It was just, ‘I’m OK at this,’ and just kind of threw everything at that. I just didn’t know I would be good at anything else.”