| Issue #30, October 20, 2006 |
Who’s Here
Molly Shannon
Actress
By Dan Rattiner
Molly Shannon, the comedian and actress, is probably best known for her six years on “Saturday Night Live,” where, as a regular, she created everybody’s favorite Catholic schoolgirl, Mary Katherine Gallagher. Mary Katherine would be an eager participant in one skit or another crafted by her fellow SNL team of regulars, and though she tried to smile her way through, she was just too nervous and uncoordinated to succeed. Somewhere along the line, she would suffer some kind of improbable pratfall — she would practice these — and wind up upside down, with her skirt up over her head and her cotton underpants in full view — probably the worst possible outcome imaginable from Mary Katherine’s point of view. The audience loved it. Shannon had a six year run with SNL, ending in 1999, and when it ended, she reprised the role in Universal’s hit comedy Superstar.
“You went to Catholic School,” I said.
“How did you guess?”
“It leaves its scars. So that’s why you created this role.”
“I went to St. Dominic’s School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, from grade one to eight, and I just have always remembered how anxious, accident prone and clumsy I felt. So it just came naturally.”
Molly Shannon was born and raised in that wealthy suburban town, the daughter of a sales executive and a teacher.
“I always knew I would be an actress,” she said. “I WAS an actress. The most exciting event in my grammar school year, was when we would celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by putting on skits for our parents. Sister Miss Patti would come and go over the script with us and we’d put on makeup and costumes, and Sister Miss Jackie, would teach us the choreography and we’d do these Irish dances and sing and everybody would be there and they loved us.”
After high school, Molly went to NYU where she got a BFA in Drama from the Tisch School of the Arts. She then went off to Los Angeles to make her career for a while, appearing in the Up Front Comedy Theatre and in “The Rob and Molly Show,” which she co-wrote with Rob Muir.
Back in New York, after “Saturday Night Live,” she gained credits with several appearances on “Sex and the City” and “Will & Grace,” then did numerous made for television movies, for example, “Cracking Up,” where she played opposite Jason Schwartzman and Christopher MacDonald. She’s been in more than a dozen films in the last ten years, including Analyze This with Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro, and Serendipity opposite John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. She even had a cameo role in Tim Allen’s Disney movie, The Santa Clause 2.
This week, Molly Shannon is in the Hamptons — she’s rented here with her husband, Fritz, and two small children for the past three summers — and is participating in the Hamptons International Film Festival, appearing in two films, Sue Kramer’s Gray Matters, about the coming out of a young woman who is Molly’s character’s best friend, and Shut Up and Sing, the creation of actor Bruce Leddy. Shut Up and Sing has been voted as the People’s Choice at three other film festivals, Aspen, Rhode Island and Breckenridge.
The story is about four men who, ten years earlier, had been at college together where they had formed a barbershop quartet. The four, in spite of going separate ways upon graduation, have always kept track of one another, and now, ten years later, are getting together to perform once again, this time at the request of one of the four who wants them all to sing at his wedding. They arrive filled with the baggage of the last ten years of their lives, all the hopes and dreams and disappointments, and try to re-connect with one another as they prepare for their performance. They all come with significant others, one of whom, opposite the main character, is played by Molly Shannon.
“It sounds like something of a cross between Sideways and “Seinfeld,” I suggested.
“I’d compare it more to The Big Chill,” Molly said. “People hanging out, some of them pent-up and uptight. My part is to play this sort of straight-laced Republican wife. She’s a little crazy and a little bit of fun going out to have a good time. She’s also a flirt.”
The film, which also stars Mark Feuerstein, Chris Bowers and Camilla Thorsson among others, was filmed almost entirely in Sagaponack at a big mansion down there not too far from Ocean Road.
“How did you come to take a part in this film?” I asked. Shannon, in the last two years, has been extremely busy. She’s had parts in the soon-to-released Evan Almighty, in Keenan Ivory Wayan’s comedy Little Man, Scary Movie 4 and Will Ferrell’s Talledaga Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
“Bruce Leddy, who made this film put up his own money. He got a mortgage on his house. He had the script for two years and it just reminded him of the Barbershop Quartet he was in when he went to Williams, he said. He wanted to re-create the feeling of that. And I admire anybody who does something like this. He had to SELL it. And he DID it. Not many people do this sort of thing.”
Molly loves the Hamptons. She thinks she might be in the market for a house soon. Her husband is a surfer.
Her favorite restaurant? Almond, she said. Then she asked me mine. So I told her, and one of them was one she had never tried.
“We’ll try it this weekend.”
I guess she’ll report back.
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