The layers that go into her performances, however extreme, are a key to Wiig’s ability to pack interest into even the lightest moment. “There’s a high-octane whimsy, an effortless imagination, and a seamlessness between what you look through to the joy or tragedy underneath,” says Penn. “She has the kind of mystery you generally associate with an actress and not so much with a comedienne.” Wiig starts out on an impression—of Michele Bachmann, for example (now sadly out of range)—by just listening to the voice, and avoids making fun of her subjects. “I try to make up my own version of a person,” she says. She’s out there without being kooky, and she understands that emotion—the surprise, winning ingredient of Bridesmaids—only makes the humor funnier.
Wiig landed at SNL at a time when the show had an unprecedented roster of female talent, including Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, and Rudolph (soon to return from maternity leave), but, says her costar Seth Meyers, “I don’t know if anyone ever showed up better equipped for the show than Kristen did. She was immediately great at it, and it’s a very hard job to be great at. Her characters were broad but built out of incredibly subtle observations.”
Thirty-eight-year-old Wiig grew up in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, came to comedy by accident, and took time to launch her career while honing her skills with the Groundlings improv group in Los Angeles, years in which she worked all manner of part-time jobs that no doubt fed into her repertoire of outrageously ordinary people and situations. The worst? “I answered phones in a law office,” she remembers. “This is going to make me sound so stupid, but the phone system was so confusing, I literally couldn’t figure it out. Someone explained it to me. . . . ‘OK-well-you-press-this-and-you-put-them-on-hold-and-you-have-to-transfer-them-through-this-thing-and-then-you-have-to-press-these-two-buttons-and-press-0–0. . . .’ ” She lasted a day.
Working at SNL, where she’s been for seven years, is by all accounts like diving into a pool, swimming underwater, and not coming up for air for eight months. “It’s a six-and-a-half-day week,” Wiig says, by the time you count the live show, the after-party, and the after-after party. “This year I’ve been an after-after sort of girl. Sometimes I need to blow off steam and go dance really hard.” The Saturday after she squeezes the VOGUE shoot into her workweek, she will get home from the show at 2:00 A.M. to be picked up at 4:00 for a 6:00 A.M. flight to L.A., where she will immediately go into hair and makeup to appear at the Golden Globes, where she has been nominated as Best Actress in a Comedy for Bridesmaids. “I’m going to need a lot of under-eye work,” she deadpans. “Concealer.”
