Julia Sweeney didn’t make it into Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special—and neither did her most controversial creation. But it turns out Pat came closer than we (and Sweeney herself) knew.
In a new interview with Cracked, the former cast member described watching the “canceled characters” segment of the NBC celebration unfold from her seat in the audience—and wondering whether Pat would be included.
“I thought, ‘Do I want Pat to be in it? At least I’d be mentioned. Or do I not want Pat to be in it? Because then the only reason I’m mentioned is as a canceled character,’” Sweeney said. “So I was watching it going, ‘I guess I don’t want it to be in there?’”
Sweeney’s internal back-and-forth got even murkier after the show. “I saw Tom Hanks, and he said, ‘Oh, how did you feel about Pat being in the canceled characters?’ And I said, ‘But Pat wasn’t.’ And he said, ‘Oh, it was in dress rehearsal.’ I would love to know how it got cut between dress and air and who it was that did it.”
The moment felt like a microcosm of Sweeney’s relationship with SNL and its creator, Lorne Michaels—which she describes as “complicated.”
“I left early before my contract was up—Lorne was unhappy about it,” she said, adding that “harsh” comments she made about sexism at the show to the author of New York Magazine‘s now-infamous 1995 “Saturday Night Dead” cover story “really f*cked me over.” Since then, while she says she’s been invited to each anniversary special as an audience member, she’s never been asked to participate.
“There’s a whole hierarchy of who gets a plane ticket and who just gets an invitation,” she said. “For the 30th, 40th, 50th, I was just a person in the audience.”
Still, she says she and Lorne Michaels exchange “friendly” emails once a year. “So there’s this other thing happening,” she added, laughing.
Sweeney was on hand earlier this month at the Tribeca Film Festival for the premiere of the new documentary We Are Pat, which follows a group of trans and non-binary comedians as they reimagine the character through a contemporary lens.
I admire Julia for many reasons, not just for her creation of Pat, which history tells us was ahead of its time, but for her outspokenness and courage in using her performing platform to skewer the hypocrisy of religious beliefs.
Hmm. Julia and I have differing opinions on religious beliefs. But in the Cracked article, she said that the *reporter* F’d her over, and that there were things in there that she didn’t say. she just didn’t feel like arguing with the SNL crew. Her words