Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Aidy Bryant: From SNL to Shrill, she found herself
Usually if you ask Aidy Bryant why she got into comedy and onto
Saturday Night Live, she’ll tell you it’s because she’s good at it and she enjoys it. But sometimes a cruel supposition creeps into her mind.
As she explained recently, “There is the little voice in my head where it’s like, I’m there because I’m fat.”
This is not how Bryant has ever been made to feel at SNL, where she has starred for seven seasons, specializing in effervescently clueless characters and earning two Emmy Award nominations.
But it is a mindset she’s been driven to, she said recently, by a constant barrage of negative reinforcement, “which includes your family and things you see on TV that tell you you’re innately a problem and wrong for existing that way — that’s a lot to overcome.”
The conflict between how Bryant sees herself and what an often unforgiving world has told her is one that she could not stave off forever. “I just got fed up,” she said.
“It’s so exhausting to be like, I’m going to hate myself, all the time, forever,” she added. “Every time I get dressed. Every time I go to dinner. Every time I do anything.”
Her long-simmering rebellion takes narrative form in Shrill, a new Hulu series. Adapted from Lindy West’s memoir of the same title, it stars Bryant as a fledgling writer at an alt-weekly newspaper who learns to find her voice amid a maelstrom of online and real-life criticism.
RADICALLY DIFFERENT
Although Shrill is, at heart, a comedy, it is radically different from anything Bryant has done in her career and has a bittersweet candor that would not fit easily into a Saturday
Night Live sketch. At the same time, the story it tells is a simple one about a woman similar to her, who is tired of being treated as if her size were a problem that needs to be solved.
Shrill has deep personal resonance for Bryant; she said the series helped provide her with “an interior makeover on how you approach life but also how you receive people calling you a fat pig. To not let it penetrate and ruin you.”
When she joined the show in 2012, she feared constantly that she wasn’t up to its standards and that she’d be fired. But now Bryant feels confident she has found her groove playing a panoply of oblivious and outrageous teachers, students, executives and homemakers. Although she frequently impersonates Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, Bryant said the political sketches were handled by other writers.
“I’ll stick to my wocka-wockas,” she said. “If they need me, they’ll let me know.”
Notwithstanding her occasional stabs of self-doubt, Bryant has been defined throughout her career by her spirit, not her size. “There’s a decency that has always been there,” said Lorne Michaels, the creator of SNL. “She’s a very caring person. She radiates a goodness, and I think everybody feels that way about her.”
But from an early age Bryant took
notice of what she saw — and didn’t see — in the films and TV shows she watched.
“Almost no one ever looked or sounded like me,” she said. “If there was a fat character, they were often, like, with a tuba underneath them. There wasn’t a lot of dignity there.”
She grew up in Phoenix, obsessed with the women who commanded the SNL stage in that era, like Molly Shannon, Ana Gasteyer and Cheri Oteri. By the time she was 15, Bryant was already performing improv comedy and attending theater camp.
POSITIVE FEEDBACK
In her personal life, Bryant said, she got little positive feedback from friends. And she said her mother had struggled with her own weight.
She became a standout performer in Chicago’s improv and theater scene, building her resume at the Second City, iO and the Annoyance Theater before she was recruited by SNL, a goal that seemed unattainable until she saw her friend Vanessa Bayer achieve it two years earlier.
But there was a part of her that never felt spoken to until
she read Shrill in 2016 and connected with West’s own stories of navigating life and the modern-day media environment while being constantly degraded for her size.
“This is my body,” West wrote.
“It is mine. I am not ashamed of it in any way. In fact, I love everything about it. Men find it attractive. Clothes look awesome on it. My brain rides around in it all day and comes up with funny jokes. Also, I don’t have to justify its awesomeness/attractiveness/ healthiness/usefulness to anyone, because it is mine. Not yours.”
Bryant said she could also relate to West’s painful experiences of being cyberbullied by online trolls. Every time she played Sanders on SNL, Bryant said, “I would just be inundated with tweets.”
She added, “Fifty percent of them were liberal people being like, ‘You are too gorgeous to play that fat, ugly pig,’ and the rest were conservative people saying, ‘You are a fat, ugly pig who should not be playing that strong, independent woman.’”
“It was so absolutely brutal that they’re reducing me and her both to being pigs,” she added. (Bryant has since quit Twitter.)
At the end of 2016, West began developing Shrill with actor and producer Elizabeth Banks, intending to turn it into a TV series that, while not quite autobiographical, would mirror aspects of her life: West wanted its protagonist to work at a newspaper and have a contentious relationship with her boss; she wanted her to have a fulfilling sex life and to have an abortion, as she did.
Most crucially, West said: “This is not a show about someone struggling to lose weight. At no point in the course of this series will the protagonist step on a scale and look down and sigh. She’s not miserable all the time. It’s about her shrugging off those expectations.”
To the extent that Bryant had been pursuing projects outside SNL, she spent this same period auditioning for what she called “big-girl movies” — roles that would have cast her as some version of the fat, funny best friend — and growing discouraged with the process.
REINVIGORATED BY SHRILL
Bryant was reinvigorated when the opportunity arose to be part of Shrill, and she sought out Michaels for his advice.
Michaels, who is also an executive producer of Shrill, said that Bryant had an inherent sensitivity that had served her well on SNL and would come through in any other role she chose.
“I would never get the thing where someone’s saying to me, ‘I think Aidy’s going through it right now, I think she’s really depressed,’” he said. “I think she’s resourceful and strong, and clearly from a generation where it’s all right to feel what you feel and to not be tormented or hurt by idiots.”
The six-episode season of Shrill was produced rapidly. In April, Bryant married Conner O’Malley, a fellow comedy writer and actor; she finished the SNL season and went to Italy on her honeymoon. The day she returned from Italy she packed a bag for Los Angeles, where she and her colleagues spent June and July writing and casting the show, then traveled to Portland, Ore., to film it in August and September.
West, who is also a writer on Shrill, is used to seeing even her most amicable work treated as a provocation. Still, she said she hopes the series comes as a surprise to viewers who are used to seeing fat characters derided for their weight.
Bryant said she was proud to see herself tap into a different skill set on Shrill and excel at a much quieter style of storytelling from the broad sketch comedy of Saturday Night Live.
“We made a real effort to keep things grounded, and that’s something I’ve always felt I’m good at, just finding out what’s genuine about a scene,” she said.