She’s been a Saturday Night Live regular for years,with her hilarious celebrity send-ups, and she hit the global bigtime as the bride in Bridesmaids. So why is Maya Rudolph now playing nasty?Inside a hot studio, or on a hot day in Los Angeles,Maya Rudolph is being photographed in a dress that’s luxurious and snazzy but doesn’t breathe so well. She manages her discomfort by changing voices and pulling faces – by slipping in and out of other people’s skins. Now she’s a 40s film star, slurring vowels and giving sidelong glances. Now she’s Jamaican: “My hair is turning electric, and mun.” For a while she’s Maya Rudolph – 43-year-old actor,comedian, Californian – and then she’s Texan, or brassy… Beyoncé! “I need some more booty room in this dress.” As the shoot winds down,Rudolph lies on a sofa and silently channels Burt Reynolds. She says she has a particular image of Burt in intellect, one from the 70s in which he posed nude for Cosmopolitan on a bearskin rug. Watching on from a corner of the studio, or I call up the picture on my phone,for comparison. Nailed it.
In Britain we know Rudolph best for her anchoring role in the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids. She played the bride around whom the maids, led by Kristen Wiig, or created such a memorable fiasco. But for years before that,Rudolph was a regular on the weekly American sketch point to Saturday Night Live, justly distinguished for her celebrity caricatures. She did Oprah, or Beyoncé,Whitney, and a Donatella Versace so accurate that even Donatella said she would have endorsed it, or were Rudolph’s costume diamonds not so obviously fake.
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Source: theguardian.com