Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Julia Sweeney talks about her new movie, "God Said 'Ha!'" -- the feel-good cancer comedy of the year.
Feb 11, 1999 | Julia Sweeney had plans. It was 1994. She'd just left "Saturday Night Live"; her divorce was both amicable and final; her film, "It's Pat," based on her sexually ambiguous "SNL" character, was about to be released; and she was happily doing the Martha Stewart thing in her newly purchased dream house in L.A.
Then, as the title of the new film of her one-woman Broadway show proclaims, "God Said 'Ha!'"
"It's Pat" flopped. Far worse, two days after it opened, her younger brother, Mike, collapsed in a restaurant and was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma. ("There is no stage five," Sweeney observes in the show. "Stage five is dead.") She immediately moved him in with her. Her parents, who live in Spokane, Wash., descended on her house as well, forcing Sweeney to replay the less savory aspects of adolescence: sneaking cigarettes, calling pasta "noodles with red topping" and muttering about how cool it would be when she got to college and would have her own dorm room. Finally, Sweeney herself was diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer. The situation was catastrophic, it was Job-like and, as portrayed in "God Said 'Ha!'" -- which opens Friday -- it was also absolutely hilarious.
So, Julia, you've made a "feel good" cancer movie ...
[Laughs] I know. It's so hard to convey. I went on "Roseanne" yesterday and she hadn't seen the movie, of course. She didn't even know it was a movie. It was a little embarrassing. She thought it was still a stage show. Or on "Regis and Kathie Lee" it was the same thing: They want to be very serious about cancer and be very sad and empathize with how horrible things have turned out in your life. And I'm like, "This is so not helping me." If I really felt that way about myself I wouldn't be out here talking to the world about it.
One of the things no one tells you before you get cancer is that it is funny. I went through treatment for breast cancer two years ago, and so much of the experience just felt patently absurd.
People say, "How could you find humor in this?" Well, how could you not? You're in such weird situations all the time, it's like you've gone to Mars.
Was it scary, though, to start making it funny, to make it from life into a routine?
It seemed really organic because I was performing on Sunday nights at this place called "UnCabaret" at Luna Park. It's like a cross between self-help and stand-up comedy. It has to be true stories, there can't be punch lines, it has to be the first time you've told it, it can't be part of your routine. I'd never been a stand-up, but I got involved with this group, and it seemed really natural to me. It was like I was talking to my friends and I had the floor for 15 minutes every Sunday. So that's how it evolved.
It's a very different thing than what you previously did. On "Saturday Night Live," you were a character in a sketch. You were wearing a giant amount of padding ...
Me in particular, yes. And I was kind of a little bit of a snob about being an actress that wasn't selling her personality. Like, "I'm an actress, and I play characters. I'm not Suzanne Sommers, whose going to tell everybody about myself." That's the part I had to get over the most. But now I don't know why I had such a big hang-up about it.
Is there a character of "Julia" now, though?
The way I relate to that idea is when I was on Broadway and I'd done the show for a year and I was really, really sick of it. I felt like I had to impersonate myself in order to get through the show. And it was almost like I had to impersonate myself as a younger person, because by then it had been two and a half years and I had different feelings about stuff and different attitudes. And some of the things I said in the show were much more flip than I felt about them later.
Like what?
Like about not having had kids. Although, I still partially feel that way -- that hasn't been enormously traumatic to me. If I were writing that now, I'd be more upset on a deeper level about it. But I still had to do the show where I had to talk like that, so in a way I was doing the character of Julia Sweeney. But it was me, a couple years younger.
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