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God Said Ha!
Julia Sweeney's official web site


home > clips > Not Pat, Just Julia Sweeney

Not Pat, Just Julia Sweeney

As editor of my student newspaper in college, I got to meet and interview my fair share of famous folks. This lady was my favorite. Julia Sweeney was on Saturday Night Live for several seasons, and her character "Pat" was what she was most famous for. But the "Pat" movie bombed, and little did I know when I did this interview that Julia was undergoing some intense struggle in her personal life. She has since went public with her story, in an almost dangerously personal monologue called "God Said Ha!" that is now being filmed as a major motion picture.

I had always thought Julia opened up to me, telling me about her relationship with Quentin Tarantino and all, but she was hiding much more than I could imagine. I still like this article, but it loses something in the face of what we know about Julia now. I still like, though, her story about being chosen for SNL, and her scathing remarks about Steven Segal, the worst SNL guest host ever. This story got picked up by several wire services and won me two national journalism awards.


Show's over.

Backstage, the wig is coming off. The body-suit that fills in Julia Sweeney's curves and creates Pat's androgynous illusion is back in its travel-case. The eyebrows are gone...so too are the horn-rimmed glasses, the atrocious western-style shirt, the sexually ambiguous khaki slacks.

And Julia Sweeney says, "That's it."

Barring some "really great reason for me to do it again," she says, Pat, the character Sweeney made a hit on Saturday Night Live, made his/her swan song at JSU last Wednesday. And Julia isn't the least bit sorry to see him/her go. "As far as I'm concerned, this is the last time I'm doing Pat," she says.

And why should she? The less-than-successful full-length feature film based on the character certainly wasn't an incentive to continue, though it will be on video soon. And it's not like Julia needs Pat to make her career a success...after all, she's in "Pulp Fiction," one of the year's hottest films. She just finished another film with Saturday Night Live alum Al Franken. She has a working relationship (at the very least) with director Quentin Tarantino. She's working on a pilot for a TV series. She's a widely recognized improv comedienne.

And with Pat in the bag, she's got the time to devote to each of her other activities.

We may have seen the last of Pat, but certainly not of Julia Sweeney.

From the beginning Julia knew she wanted to be in the movies, just maybe not in front of the camera.

She grew up in Spokane, Washington, a Catholic town full of Catholic families. That upbringing will turn up in her pilot for TV, as a matter of fact (a comedy about a bishop's office). She got a degree in economics, of all things, and headed to Hollywood to work on the business side of the film industry.

As an accountant for Columbia Pictures, Julia saw the cut-throat side of Hollywood. From her experience, she says, development and negotiations of motion pictures is every bit as trying as the film "The Player" suggests. In the office, Julia began to realize there was an actress inside.

She joined The Groundlings, an improv group in Los Angeles, and began her acting career. It was there she first impressed Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels."People always go, 'How did you feel that moment when you found out you were on Saturday Night Live?' And by the time I found out I got on SNL, I was sick of the process."

Julia says people would come back stage before the show at The Groundlings and say "guess who's here?" and it got old. Very old.

"For six months, every week, an increasingly higher-up person would come to The Groundlings to see which of us were worthy to see Lorne Michaels. I was like...oh, another show where I have to worry whether I'm doing well or not. And then Lorne came, and I felt like I was clearly the choice from that show," says Julia. "And I still had to go to New York and do a 40-minute audition."

Julia still had to wait another few weeks before she knew for sure the job on SNL was hers. She remembers when she finally got the affirmation. "I was like, 'LOOK, I'M JUST GONNA TELL YOU SOMETHING...I DON'T WANT TO BE ON SATURDAY NI--what? Oh, okay!"

Though many of the cast members made their way through the stand-up ranks, Julia did no stand-up comedy. And the fact that she was an improv artist made her transition to live TV...well...non-existent.

"There's no transition. It's really the same. I mean, we're doing sketched and you have to know your lines...but there's no better training than improv to be on Saturday Night Live," she says. "In fact, the stand-up people have a much harder time making the transition."

That was 1990. Julia was Lorne Michaels' choice, and she developed a good relationship with him from the start. "Lorne was my champion at the show," she says. But everyone's image of Michaels as a sort of foster parent to cast members is not quite the case. "Lorne is very not-hands-on...not very involved."

Though Sweeney only hinted about some SNL guest hosts like Chevy Chase ("not my favorite") and Steve Martin ("an unfunny man" behind the scenes), she was very vocal about her least favorite person to work with. "Steven Segal. He does not have a sense of humor. He kept wanting us to only do sketches about the environment. And we would all say, 'Yeah, there are a lot of problems with the environment...but it needs to be funny.'"

She did say Alec Baldwin was the easiest, and maybe the most fun to work with. "He'll do anything," she said. "He's like the ideal cast person for SNL."

As for the other cast members, she says one of the more frequent questions she's asked is "Is it competitive with the actors at SNL?" She says competitiveness on the set isn't really helpful, and that they maintained a basically good relationship with each other. "It's not a situation where you compete with each other. You put up stuff, and the boss decides what to use."

Sweeney stayed with the show for four seasons, with the Pat character taking the forefront as a fan favorite. This year, she decided to strike out on her own.

Enter Quentin Tarantino. At the time the Pat movie was at 20th Century Fox, and that studio was trying to get Tarantino to direct "Speed." When it came time for rewrites on the Pat script, Julia suggested Tarantino. "They really couldn't say no," she says. "They wanted to do a slapstick movie, and we wanted it to be more of a romantic comedy. Quentin and I were talking and I said, 'Why don't you do it?'

"We put the studio in this huge quandry. I came in and said, 'Quentin will do a rewrite' ... and they were looking for somebody to come up with jokes. But they agreed to it."

Her relationship with Tarantino developed during the rewrite. "I was pretty much with him during the whole rewrite. He worked on it for a couple of weeks and we had like five nights when we worked on it together."

The movie, "It's Pat," is finished, but there are only 33 prints in existence. Sweeney says the movie, which was eventually handled by Disney, will see a video release.

As for her future, Julia is looking forward to some time off. She still does The Groundlings every Thursday night, and left Jacksonville last Thursday for an early flight.

Hollywood, you know. Business. Something about an HBO comedy special.

A comedy special that won't, she says, include Pat.

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