Maya Rudolph made her grand return to Saturday Night Live last week, reviving her Emmy-winning impression of Senator Kamala Harris. But in a recent interview with Jimmy Fallon, the comedian revealed she was “terrified” to go back to the show, frazzled by all the new COVID protocols.
“I wasn’t even thinking about what Kamala speaks like. I was just worrying, ‘Do I have pants on? Is there a booger hanging out? Is everything okay?’” Rudolph recalled. She was “terrified out of my wits, looking at the wrong cameras—I was out of my body.”
Rudolph, who was an SNL cast member from 2000 to 2007, revealed how much things have changed at Studio 8H in the last few weeks. Thanks to the pandemic, the show’s production team has had to ramp up testing, dole out PPE, and change up how scripts are passed around, putting everything on iPads. “They’re doing an unbelievable job…but it’s SNL, everything happens at the last minute,” Rudolph said. “Imagine that with PPE and masks and people spread apart.”
“I didn’t see my lines that I said on the show until air,” she added. “So it was really scary.”
Rudolph originally portrayed Harris on SNL while Harris was still a presidential candidate, bowing out after the senator ended her campaign. When Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate, Rudolph—who won an Emmy for her portrayal of Harris in the interim—had to get back to New York. But first, she had to overcome her fear about shooting during a pandemic.
“We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and I was like, how am I going to get to New York? Oh shit. That’s complicated. That’s really complicated,” she said. But she pushed through “because it’s my civic duty. I gotta do it. I gotta get there and do whatever I need to do to make sure she wins this election, and also that I do a good job.”
Rudolph is likely gearing up for another big week, as the upcoming SNL episode follows Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate between Harris and accursed fly magnet Mike Pence.
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