Friday, April 30, 2021

‘SNL’ Star Julia Sweeney Reveals She Still ‘Gets A Lot Of S**t’ For ‘Pat’ Impression

Julia Sweeney says she still gets “a lot of s**t” for her “Pat” character on “Saturday Night Live”.

“Pat”, an androgynous person whose not-so-obvious gender made people around her uncomfortable, was one of the show’s most popular recurring skits in the early 1990s.

Thirty years on, and in the current climate, the 61-year-old says that while she’s criticized for the character, she never intended for ‘Pat’ to be hurtful or offensive.

“In my mind, I was actually trying to explore how uncomfortable not having a gender was for the people around that person,” she tells Page Six. “That was the joke of it. But also, Pat was conventionally unattractive and intentionally gross — so I definitely got laughs on that.”

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Sweeney says she “actually loved Pat,” despite the character’s boom-and-bust turn in the spotlight. But she does admit that if she could do it over, there’s one thing she would change: She “wouldn’t [make] Pat unattractive.”

But, the “God Said Ha!” star is back playing Aidy Bryant’s mother in the Hulu series “Shrill” after a decade-long break from showbiz while raising her daughter with husband Michael Blum.

Sweeney says she was content with her decision — until her daughter went to high school and became more independent.

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“I thought, ‘Oh I really f**ked up! I really dropped the ball … then it really became important for me to come back [to Los Angeles] and then it wasn’t until the last few years that I realized how likely it was that I would not be able to get my career back,” she says.

Sweeney says she looks back on her four-year run on “SNL” fondly — with the benefit of a little hindsight.

“It was such a great opportunity,” she explains. “I had my dramas, but I was myopic about myself. I didn’t see the big picture — like anyone wouldn’t at 30 but would at 60. I think a lot of my difficulty there was my own sense of entitlement, like, ‘I’m a genius, why aren’t you putting me in everything?!’”

 



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