Maya Rudolph on the Power of Her Female Friendships from Saturday Night Live

Maya Rudolph is a comedy legend. The beloved comedian is known for some of the most memorable impressions on Saturday Night Live, from Donatella Versace to Beyonce to Kamala Harris, and for her unforgettable performance in the blockbuster comedy Bridesmaids alongside SNL castmate Kristen Wiig.

She’s been nominated for nearly a dozen Emmys for her work on shows like Big Mouth and The Good Place, has won five, and now stars as a billionaire divorcée in her new show, Loot. The second season of Loot is out now on Apple TV+, and Rudolph is one of our 2024 TIME100 honorees

In this conversation, we talked about the similarities between musicians and comedians, what it was like to be part of a cohort of so many incredible women on Saturday Night Live, and her band, Princess.

Tune in every Thursday, and join us as we continue to explore the minds that shape our world. You can listen to the full episode above, but here are a handful of excerpts from our conversation, which have been condensed and edited for clarity.

On the similarities between musicians and comedians:

From what I’ve been told, my mom was actually very funny. And my dad always says that if she hadn’t been a singer, she would have been a comedian. I don’t know if that’s true, but I find that to be very sweet.

My parents were really young and really cool and hip and, you know, they were babies when we were born and they were musicians, and all their friends were musicians and I felt like that spirit was very alive, that kind of funny, natural banter. I also find comedians and musicians to be cousins.

I think they’re both people who have an innate gift. I think it’s about timing, and I think it’s a language. I think comedy and music are both languages, and I can’t count how often you hear comedians wanting to be musicians and musicians quoting famous comedians… they’re really similar in a lot of ways. And it’s not something I know how to articulate. It’s just a feeling, and I feel like when I talk to musicians about it, they completely get it.

On what it was like to have a newborn while performing on SNL:

It was brutal. So ill conceived and brutal. You know, Anna Gasteyer had done it before. She had been pregnant on the show and I thought, ‘Oh, that looks okay to do, that doesn’t scare me as much as I thought it would.’ And I think in, in retrospect, doing something you already know how to do is much easier than learning something new while you’re pregnant or while you have a new baby.

So I just kind of went along and I didn’t really know how I would feel once I had her. So I took some maternity leave, it was only like three and a half months, and I only came back that early because Steve Martin was hosting and Prince was the musical guest. And so I flew across country and came back. That is truly why I broke my maternity leave….

But it was really hard because, you know, the good girl in me, the hard worker, and the person who really wanted to make the most of my time there would stay up late and write the sketches. But when I got home at 8 o’clock in the morning from writing night, my baby had just gotten up. You know, it was crazy.

Once I stopped doing it, I realized how hard it was, and why a lot of people just don’t do it. It’s really hard, but some of us did it, and I don’t know how. You don’t hear of a ton of women just having newborns and working on that show, its not that easy.

On her friendships with the other women of SNL:

I think we’ve all realized that we all went through something very enormous together. And when you have a bond like that with people, they just know you in a different way. I mean, we joke sometimes saying it’s like we were all in the trenches together. We were all in the comedy army together. And it’s really hard to explain that to another person, that language, that skill set that we all have, that trauma of live television. I’m sure the PTSD that has run through us over the years, we can all relate to each other.

We were together 24/7 a lot of the time. I mean, we were up all night writing together. You know, Amy always talks about coming into mine and my friend Emily Spivey’s office and just laying on the floor, because you need a place that feels safe to decompress or cry or do whatever. Rachel and I were talking recently about the musical guest dressing room after they had their sound check, we would go in their room and it was a social place to sit around and say like, I’m having a day or a week or whatever.

We naturally gravitated toward that sort of support system, and it’s carried on. It’s been, I think, a byproduct of sharing something incredible with people. And not to say that men aren’t welcome too, but the the natural nurturing element of women, and this desire to support each other and to be there for each other has just always kind of been a part of it.

And I think as we’ve all matured and grown up a little bit, we all see the value in those friendships, and they’re just not like anything else.

Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.