And she said her mother had struggled with her own weight. In her personal life, Bryant said, she got little positive feedback from friends.
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(Sabrina Santiago/The New York Times) POSITIVE FEEDBACK By the time she was 15, Bryant was already performing improv comedy and attending theater camp.Īidy Bryant stars in 'Shrill,' a new comedy now streaming on Hulu. 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. "If there was a fat character, they were often, like, with a tuba underneath them. "Almost no one ever looked or sounded like me," she said.
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She radiates a goodness, and I think everybody feels that way about her."īut from an early age Bryant took notice of what she saw - and didn't see - in the films and TV shows she watched. "There's a decency that has always been there," said Lorne Michaels, the creator of SNL.
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Notwithstanding her occasional stabs of self-doubt, Bryant has been defined throughout her career by her spirit, not her size. "I'll stick to my wocka-wockas," she said. Although she frequently impersonates Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, Bryant said the political sketches were handled by other writers.
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But now Bryant feels confident she has found her groove playing a panoply of oblivious and outrageous teachers, students, executives and homemakers. When she joined the show in 2012, she feared constantly that she wasn't up to its standards and that she'd be fired.
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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. 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. RADICALLY DIFFERENTĪlthough 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. 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. Her long-simmering rebellion takes narrative form in Shrill, a new Hulu series. "It's so exhausting to be like, I'm going to hate myself, all the time, forever," she added. 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. 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.īut 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." But sometimes a cruel supposition creeps into her mind.Īs she explained recently, "There is the little voice in my head where it's like, I'm there because I'm fat."
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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.