Melissa McCarthy is taking 'notes' on Spicer until her 'SNL' return
LOS ANGELES — When Melissa McCarthy first spoofed Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live, the sketch immediately went viral. A week later she topped it, turning the press secretary’s podium into a motorized press-pummeling device.
Given that SNL is currently on hiatus until April 8, is she still plugged in to Spicer’s press conferences?
“I have yet to see today’s,” McCarthy told USA TODAY on Monday while promoting Nobodies, a new TV Land comedy series (premiering March 29) she and husband Ben Falcone executive produce with friends (and stars) Hugh Davidson, Larry Dorf, and Rachel Ramras. “I’ll see that later. Was it very clear and on point?” she deadpans.
Spicer's press conferences have become must-watch TV; ratings initially topped daily soaps like The Bold and the Beautiful and General Hospital. The New Yorker just did a deep dive. Vanity Fair called Monday's Spicer-led presser "mind-bending."
This week's headline-packed press conference saw Spicer continue to distance the White House from Russia as FBI Director James Comey confirmed an investigation in front of the House Intelligence Committee, and Spicer also claimed that Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign, "played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time" in Trump's campaign, spawning immediate mockery on Twitter.
McCarthy will return to SNL by May 13, when she's scheduled to host, and until then, “I’m just watching and observing,” she says. “I (hope) for everyone to have clarity and better things to say. And in the meantime, I just squirrel away notes.”
The pitch to have McCarthy don an oversized suit and pummel the press came from SNL’s co-head writer Kent Sublette, who began at the Groundlings, an L.A. improv group, with McCarthy and Falcone.
“It was his idea,” she says. “He called me when he knew I was in New York, so he gets all the credit for that. At first I thought, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he’s like, ‘I just think we have to have an outlet for how so many people are feeling.’ "
Falcone wasn't in New York yet, so he watched from Los Angeles. “I just felt like it was really funny and I was happy to be laughing about it,” he says. “And then people started telling me, 'Wow this is really blowing up,' or whatever the things that people say about the Internet."
Adds McCarthy: “It’s what SNL does so well. It’s political satire. It’s there to skewer and kind of be a watchdog in a playful way of what’s actually happening. It’s just that perhaps we have gone further in reality than we thought we ever would. So I’m glad that SNL still is there to lovingly poke the bear.”
