Among the breakout stars from “Saturday Night Live,” Kristen Wiig may be the most elusive.
Tina Fey emerged as the wry smart girl who doesn’t know she’s pretty, Will Ferrell as the big, lovable galoot and Adam Sandler as the overgrown man-child, but Wiig has less of a defined persona, or look, than an ability to home in on recognizable tics and expand them into memorable, if often irritating characters. These include such “SNL” staples as the hair-stroking, one-upmanship-addicted Penelope, the overly enthusiastic, nosy Target Lady and the frizzy-haired, lethal Gilly.
Wiig has exercised this talent in big-screen supporting roles as well, playing, for example, the haltingly undermining TV executive of “Knocked Up.” But, she acknowledged during a recent visit to Chicago, “I don’t know if you would want to watch two hours of that lady without wanting to kill her.”
Wiig does hope you’ll enjoy two hours of her as the star of “Bridesmaids,” a comedy written by the 37-year-old actress with fellow Groundlings improv troupe alumna Annie Mumolo. The movie, which opens Friday, represents Wiig’s first opportunity to carry a movie (we’re not counting “MacGruber”) and to showcase her naturalistic side, of which she offered a glimpse two years ago in Drew Barrymore’s roller derby comedy “Whip It.”
To switch to a basketball analogy, Wiig is sort of the point guard of “Bridesmaids,” sometimes dishing it off to her ensemble (including former “SNL” castmate Maya Rudolph who, along with fellow co-stars Wendi McLendon-Covey and Melissa McCarthy, performed with the Groundlings) and sometimes going in for the score as the reeling best friend of Rudolph’s bride-to-be.
It’s a delicate balance, and director Paul Feig — who considers Wiig to have an “Everywoman” appeal — said he and producer Judd Apatow talked her into including some of her bigger scenes, such as an intoxicated tirade on an airplane.
“When we were developing the script, we sometimes had to force her to have more things that would showcase her and not just the people around her,” Feig said in a phone interview. “Her first draft of the script, she had a funny but grounded character and was almost giving all the laughs to everybody around her. As a fan I was just like, ‘No, I want to see you be hilarious also.'”
Wiig, soft-voiced and unquirky in person aside from wearing an oversized spiky ring that looked as if it could impale a Klingon, called the airplane scene the most nerve-racking one to act. She said she and Mumolo set out to write a film with a predominantly female cast “because we know so many funny women, and it doesn’t happen that often, and plus I love working with women.”
Yet the filmmakers don’t consider “Bridesmaids” a chick flick, as the movie strikes another balance between what stereotypically might be considered male humor (active aggression) and female humor (passive aggression). It’s telling that the broadest set piece, in which the women suffer some graphic effects from food poisoning while at the posh dressmakers’, also was suggested by Apatow and Feig not long before shooting began.
“At first we were like, ‘Wait, what? We’re going to be getting sick?'” Wiig recalled. “We were a little nervous about it, so then Annie and I wrote our version of it, and Judd was really great about it. He was like, ‘Look, let’s try it. It could be really, really funny. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we won’t use it.’ And he was right: There’s something so funny about seeing all these women trying to act like they’re not sick.”
mcaro@tribune.com
Twitter @MarkCaro
