What You Need To Know About Maya Rudolph

Though she grew up around the music industry, Maya Rudolph had her sights set on a different kind of entertainment. "I always had Saturday Night Live on the brain," she told Vulture. After graduating college at UC Santa Cruz, Rudolph gave improv comedy a try, joining the famous LA group, The Groundlings. And after a few years, Rudolph got noticed by SNL producer Steve Higgins, which led to an audition for SNL creator Lorne Michaels. But as Rudolph remembered, things didn't go so well. "I ended up, after that, thinking, I'll never work there. That was the worst interview I've ever had," she admitted. What went wrong?  When Michaels asked her "why [she] thought [she] should be on the show," she said, "'Because I like to wear wigs.'" Yikes.

Admittedly, Rudolph had some help in the form of Tina Fey, who, at the time, was a writer on SNL. According to The New York Times, Fey stopped by to check out a performance by the improv group and scout for talent. "Impressed with the way Rudolph handled herself in a scene with an uncooperative improv partner," Fey pushed for Rudolph to be hired, explaining of her fellow comedian, "She could read the phone book and it'd be funny!" 

Rudolph told the same outlet that landing SNL "was literally [her] everything." She also revealed to NPR, "It was my childhood dream," and recalled that her time on set was full of "beauty, love, and pain."

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