Friday, November 10, 2017

Aidy Bryant On Representation

Saturday Night Live star Aidy Bryant recently sat down for an interview with The Cut. Here's what she had to say:

On crystals:
“I don’t know anything about crystals; I just go and buy these rocks. I have the most millennial crystal collection ever. I don’t know what any of them mean and I never charge them.”

On best friend Kate McKinnon's success:
“It never changed our relationship. I think maybe it’s made us closer. I’m not in a race against anyone. I probably have never been more happy in my life than when Kate won her first Emmy.”

On choosing roles outside of SNL:
“I turn down so many things, because so often movie stuff that I get sent is demeaning in some way. Characters where an entire plot point is, How could any man want to fuck me? Stuff like that, where it’s like, Well, that’s not reality and that’s psychotic and offensive.”

On self-acceptance:
“I was spending so much energy on something that really, no matter what I did, wasn’t changing. And I truly got to a breaking point. I was like, How much longer can I do this? Can I do this for the rest of my life? I finally was like, What if I put all of that energy into just trying to like myself and focus on the things I actually want to do as opposed to this thing that’s like a made-up concept? And I’m not kidding, my entire life changed after I did that. Within two years, I was hired by Second City; two years later I was hired by SNL. I stopped letting it be an all-day, everyday thing that defined everything that I did. And it worked.”

On why she is starting a clothing line:
"[I did a photo shoot for SNL where] the other girls had racks of clothes to chose from and were wearing these thousand-dollar dresses, and I had two sacks or like one matronly mother-of-the-bride dress. Those were the first times where I was like, Something is different here and this isn’t fair. This is a fucked-up situation, and it’s purely because of my body. Not because I’m less funny — it’s my body. It’s the only reason that I’m treated differently right now. And it lit a fucking fire in me.”

On the importance of representation:
“I didn’t try to get on SNL to be a body-positivity activist, but apparently just being there makes you one. It’s this weird kind of thing where you’re like, I guess I kind of am. It’s literally just not what I came here to do. It sounds so corny now, but representation does fucking matter. And I remember how as a child I was obsessed with Rosie O’Donnell even though that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do, but I was like, Oh my god, someone who’s a little bit like me on TV.”

Read the full interview at The Cut.

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