Kristen Wiig usually ends up in the MacGruber sketches, counting down the time before MacGruber inevitably gets everyone blown up. In the MacGruber movie, she plays a love interest and partner on MacGruber’s mission, Vicki St. Elmo. We talked to Wiig about her latest character in a roundtable interview at the South by Southwest film festival.
Q: Where do you start with a character? Do you begin with a costume and develop a personality or come up with a voice and build a look around it?
Kristen Wiig: I guess it kind of depends on the character. Mostly if I’m writing with someone, we just kind of think of something like probably how they talk and how they look usually comes after, I would say probably. I guess it depends. Sometimes it depends. What they look like, and usually for me, I have a turtleneck on and some sort of like patterned cat sweater.
Q: As established comedians, do you feel like you have to top what you’ve previously done every time you come up with something new?
Kristen Wiig: Well, I mean, just for SNL, every week, yeah, you try to think, because you always think when that show is over, okay, I don’t have anything else. Because it’s hard to think of new things. So I’m constantly thinking I don’t have any new people inside my head, but you kind of just challenge yourself, I guess, and try. Sometimes it doesn’t work, though.
Q: How does the show gauge what characters become recurring, and how long they return?
Kristen Wiig: I never know when I come off, I never know how well things go. Sometimes the person that I write it with will say, “Let’s do it again,” and I’m like, are you sure people want to see that again? I never really know. Sometimes they know. The producers or Lorne will order a sketch and say, “I want you to write that this week.”
Q: Was it easy to be more understated here since the rest of the movie was so big and broad?
Kristen Wiig: I think you just have to adjust it to what project you’re doing. I think SNL is probably the biggest that I act, just because it’s that charactery comedy stuff. But it just depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing something in a movie that’s supposed to be understated and real, I try to do that.
Q: How did you get through that sex scene without cracking up?
Kristen Wiig: Oh, if you watch the movie again, you will see that I’m fully laughing. I turned my head, and when I saw the screening of it, I was like, “They can’t use that take!” Because I’m fully laughing. No one else noticed it, but I’m turning my head and fully laughing. It was probably 100 degrees, and then when they would cut they would just turn on a little fan. It wasn’t even an air conditioner, it was just like a little fan and we would stand in front of it. We had like sweat and he had his little sock on, and I had this weird nightgown tube thing. It was my birthday. I was nervous for Lorne to see that scene because I was like, oh, I don’t want Lorne to see me do this. Because he’s like our dad.
Q: Did they play Richard Marx on the set to get you in the mood?
Kristen Wiig: No, no music. They just had the sound of our, well, [Will Forte’s] grunting.
Q: When you’re doing a wild scene like that, how do you know how long to keep it going for?
Kristen Wiig: I would say probably editing. You have to find that time in between because when it gets to the point when it’s too long, then you get that second wave of people laughing because it’s so long, but you have to figure it out.
Q: What kind of character do you get to play in Paul?
Kristen Wiig: I play a girl who lived with a very sort of controlling, very religious father and don’t believe in evolution or any of that stuff, so when I finally see Paul, I kind of like freak out and question what God is and all of that stuff?
Q: Are you up on all of the sci-fi references that Nick and Simon and Edgar make?
Kristen Wiig: Some of them, yeah, some of them. Like there’s a scene in a bar where they’re actually playing the Star Wars bar song.
Q: The Cantina theme?
Kristen Wiig: Yeah, it’s like that, but it’s a country version and it’s really slow, so you have to kind of know that. But a lot of people who know it would go, oh my God! But I didn’t know.
Q: It seems like a lot of you characters are defined by your physicality. Is that something you practice or develop?
Kristen Wiig: I don’t know. I don’t know where that comes from. I think it just comes from the characters, I guess. I don’t have a good answer for that.
Q: Does your neck hurt after you do Gilly?
Kristen Wiig: My mouth hurts sometimes. When the camera’s not on me, I’m going like this [stretching my mouth open.] I’m like stretching out my cheeks a little bit. But yeah, sometimes.
Q: Are you gunning for a Gilly movie?
Kristen Wiig: I don’t know. Do you want to see an hour and a half of Gilly?
