And, at a few different points, she did flirt with the idea of launching her own line, though admittedly she’s more interested in the clothes than the business. In fact, Behrens just assumed Rudolph would go into fashion. “She was always so inherently cool with her style, never trying too hard, never following others,” says Danielle Renfrew Behrens, a veteran producer and friend since kindergarten who now runs Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne’s production company. Fashion became as much a form of self-expression as it was another suit of armor. “She’d have flowers in her hair and a microphone in her hand, and how could that not have a dramatic effect on me?”įor years after, Rudolph would show up to school in her mom’s vintage gowns, which she’d pair with cowboy boots or whatever else she’d thrifted the weekend before. “The fact is, I saw my mom with a spotlight on her and total command of the stage,” she says, having tagged along to sound checks and tour dates. It’s not lost on Rudolph that her memories of her mother are larger-than-life too. If you think about it, she says now, “most of my characters are drag queens because all I wanted was to be a ‘real girl.’ ” What she couldn’t learn through observation, she worked out through performance.
Playdates were often an excuse to rummage through friends’ medicine cabinets to see what exactly womanhood required.
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Part of it, she’s certain, is that she was raised in a house full of men, which meant she spent much of her childhood obsessed with what it was to be a woman. Where the draw to Mae West-style characters comes from has long been a source of fascination for Rudolph, whose everyday energy is considerably lower-key. “Most of my characters are drag queens because all I wanted was to be a ‘real girl.’ “ - Credit: Photographed by Christian Cody “Like, it’s not just a lady, it’s a lady with a feather boa and that feeling of, ‘I’m here and I’m very loud.’ ” “I think the word we’d probably use today would be ‘diva,’ ” she says, seated in the backyard of her residential office, acknowledging that she could just as easily be describing any number of characters she’s released into the world as an adult. Between renditions of Annie and Fame, the pair would play “talk show.” Her friend was the host, Dinah Shore, whom they’d renamed Dinah Snore, and Rudolph would be her ridiculously confident larger-than-life guest. Long before she was mangling the English language as Donatella Versace or caressing a loaf of bread as Oprah Winfrey, Rudolph was channeling that energy into a video camera in her best friend’s living room.
I just wanted to be normal.” Rudolph stops herself there and backtracks: “But I also didn’t want to be normal.” “There were so many factors that made me feel like there wasn’t anyone else like me growing up - because I was mixed, because I didn’t have a mom - and I just wanted to fit in. It was also a way to try to extinguish any lingering sadness, to make everyone around her feel more comfortable - to make herself feel more comfortable. “I don’t remember the dance at all, but, like, coining it The Heart Attack? Of course I’d do that,” says Rudolph, who now, at nearly 50, has four children of her own with her longtime partner, director Paul Thomas Anderson. Inside were photos from her first motherless birthday party, including a shot of young Maya treating her guests to a dance she’d titled The Heart Attack, inspired, she’d said, by the comic stylings of Sanford and Son’s Redd Foxx. "Cancellation's Just to Give Boring People Something Interesting to Talk About": Jerrod Carmichael, Danny McBride and THR's Comedy Actor Roundtable
Maya Rudolph Is a Divorced Billionaire Finding Herself (and Saving the World) in Apple's 'Loot' Trailer Jackson, Michael Keaton, Oscar Isaac and the THR Drama Actor Roundtable "You Went to Therapy for That?": Samuel L. It’s fitting, then, that Rudolph has devoted so much of her existence to becoming other people: a collection of divas on Saturday Night Live, the briefly incontinent bride in Bridesmaids, a hormone monstress on Big Mouth and, soon, a billionaire divorcée on the Apple TV+ comedy Loot. The first on that list could actually kill her, and the latter two require her to be herself, which is “just so naked and vulnerable,” she says as she forks into a Goop salad on an overcast afternoon this spring. The list is basically black widow spiders, stand-up comedy and walking into a roomful of people she doesn’t already know and having to introduce herself. There aren’t too many things that terrify Maya Rudolph.
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