Dana Carvey Talks Learning Jennifer Coolidge Impression Last-Minute For ‘SNL’: “I Still Don’t Quite Understand It”
Dana Carvey has learned to remain nimble every week on Saturday Night Live Season 50.
Two weeks prior, he thought on his feet for an unplanned ice cream shenanigan featuring Maya Rudolph, and last week, the Joe Biden impersonator was tapped as a last-minute Jennifer Coolidge doppelganger for a sketch featuring Chloe Fineman and Ariana Grande. It was a gig he relished, even if he perhaps didn’t understand its absurdist elements.
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“It was kind of an acid-y, esoteric sketch,” Carvey said on a recent episode of his Superfly podcast co-hosted with David Spade. “I still don’t quite understand it, but that was fun.”
He recounted that he had never appeared in drag before, not counting his previous SNL appearance as Church Lady. “They threw it at me Thursday night, and I just thought, in my age group, I never really was in drag because Church Lady, whatever you think she is, there’s no lipstick,” he said.
In the lauded sketch from last week, titled “Maybelline,” host Grande and star Fineman have a Coolidge-off as they spoof a fake lipstick product whose title becomes increasingly more convoluted and tongue-twisting. As they mirror each other, Fineman opens up a third panel to check her reflection, revealing a previously dormant Coolidge in Carvey.
“Then they explained to me the character, it was like a Snow White thing or something, that my Jennifer Coolidge had been trapped in the mirror for hundreds of years, Chloe told me,” Carvey said.
“Thank God you opened the mirror, I’ve been trapped in here for years,” Carvey’s Coolidge exclaims in the sketch, as the trio get on with aggressively applying Maybelline’s “Super Stay Longwear Liquid Lip Color.”
“I was casually aware that lipstick commercials do have long phrases,” Carvey said. “Maybelline’s lip, lip, lip color, color, lips, special lip, lip.”
During the podcast, Carvey included a behind-the-scenes video snippet of him rehearsing lines backstage in full glam, which he posted to his Instagram earlier this week. In the clip, filmed by former SNL costar Jon Lovitz, the actor and comedian is seen speaking lines about corn that don’t actually end up in the final skit.
“Between dress and air, for time, they had to remove about four beats,” Carvey explained, donning his best Coolidge voice. “One was we eat corn. It was a lot wilder, but it was amazing. It was just a non sequitur like, ‘Hey. Wow. Let’s eat some corn.’ They suddenly have corn. ‘Can I have your corn?'”
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