HUDSON VALLEY, NY.- Breastchester, the rustic upstate New York residence that is home to the “Girls5eva” star Paula Pell, is a two-hour drive from Manhattan, at the end of a long stretch of road where occasional yoga studios and art galleries eventually give way to a tranquil countryside. It is secluded, but its proprietor is hardly in need of companionship.
Pell’s coterie here includes her wife, Janine Brito, a comedy writer-actor who gave their mini-estate its body-positive nickname. Then there is the congregation of rescue dogs that had overtaken the living room of the main house one recent Friday morning, all scratching and barking for attention. Eloise and Verbena, Pell’s horses, were in a stable on a hill above the house.
“There’s two old mares up there and one old mare down here,” Pell said theatrically, running a hand through her long silver locks.
Pell has been known to nurse stunned birds back to health. She volunteered at a nearby sanctuary, where she took care of neglected pets and farm animals. “I was called the pig whisperer,” she said. “I have pictures of me sleeping on the pigs. I’d lay there and sing to them.”
Her love of animals is integral to her personality, as much a part of Pell as the brassy, oblivious characters she dreamed up on “Saturday Night Live,” where she spent 18 years as a writer, and which she continues to play in movies and on TV.
“Humans, always, will be imperfect,” Pell said. “They will still say I love you when they don’t. Animals, to me, are the only ones that when they love you, you totally believe it.”
Animals also remind her that all creatures, however many legs they walk on, deserve second chances. That’s the lesson of “Girls5eva,” the comedy series about members of a girl band — now all grown up — trying to recapture fame and success decades after their heyday. (The show itself was facing cancellation at Peacock, but its third season was released Thursday on Netflix; Seasons 1 and 2 will be available on both services.)
That is also a lesson exemplified by Pell, who at 60 has become the comedy star she always dreamed of being: a beloved scene-stealer and deliverer of acidic one-liners, for whom a writing career proved to be a necessary detour of self-discovery.
As Pell explained in a conversation at her kitchen table, breaking into comedy as a writer while she yearned to be an actor sometimes felt “like I’m at the party, but I’m catering it.”
After a run of increasingly prominent comedy roles, Pell came to a realization about acting. “This is the easiest thing,” she said. “Writing is harder. Don’t tell actors.”
While Pell nibbled at a fruit plate and a can of “lesbian Pringles from the health-food store,” she and Brito teased each other affectionately about their 20-year age difference and the gender stereotypes they felt they did or didn’t embody.
“She is the more masculine-presenting lesbian,” Pell said of Brito, “and I’m a little more girlie, with my lipsticks and my hair. But I’m kind of the secret butch. She’ll come running out, like, ‘Oh my God. There’s a spider, kill it.’” Pell pretended to fearlessly roll up her sleeves.
That confidence has benefited Pell in small, quirky parts on shows like “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation,” and a lead role on “Girls5eva,” in which she plays Gloria, the most world-weary and unflappable member of an ensemble that includes Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Busy Philipps.
“Paula is just one of those people who makes you hope that goodness will prevail in life,” said Lorne Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of “SNL.” Michaels hired Pell to write for the show in 1995, when it was trying to transition away from its dude-bro reputation and boost female cast members such as Molly Shannon and Cheri Oteri.
Pell grew up in Joliet, Illinois, and Orlando, Florida, having been — in her own words — “born at 50.” As a teenager, she had gotten accustomed to playing deep-voiced, mature characters in school productions, like Mother Abbess in “The Sound of Music.”
When “SNL” recruited her, Pell was performing in theme-park shows and at SAK, the Orlando comedy theater whose alumni include Wayne Brady. Being hired as a writer, she said, was both thrilling and confusing for someone whose background had been largely in acting.
“It felt like I had been studying to be an opera singer,” Pell said. “And then the Met called and said, ‘We want you to be the musical director.’ It was an incredible offer, but it was the other thing.”
At “SNL,” Pell created memorable characters like Debbie Downer but still yearned to be in front of audiences. She would write musical numbers for the cast and while they were being rehearsed, she said, “I’d eat egg sandwiches in a dark hallway, just putting a cork in my feelings, because I wanted to be part of the choir.”
In New York, Pell dated a woman who she would later marry and has since divorced. Pell wasn’t open about her sexuality, at “SNL” or anywhere else.
“She’d want to hold hands, and I’d be like, ‘Just not right now,’” Pell said. “Or when we got married it was, like, ‘Don’t call me your wife.’”
“SNL,” she added, “wasn’t a homophobic place. Nobody was making me feel that way. It was my own fear of judgment.”
Tina Fey, the “Mean Girls” mastermind and an executive producer of “Girls5eva,” joined the “SNL” writing staff in 1997, two years after Pell, and was one of the first people who Pell came out to there.
Fey described Pell as “a source of warmth and humanity” at “SNL” and said she could understand why Pell felt hesitant to share this side of herself with her colleagues at that time.
“Compared to a regular workplace, it’s like, is it a little bit harder to come out here?” Fey said. “Will this become fodder for jokes the moment I say it? In a place with no boundaries, is this a harder step to take?”
Pell let her guard down further in 2001, when she worked on a satirical commercial for a fake drug designed to pacify parents of gay children. (The tagline went: “Because it’s your problem, not theirs.”)
Pell said that some “SNL” producers were concerned the segment would offend gay viewers. “I finally just said to all the producers, ‘Well, I’m gay, and I’m telling you now this is the most gay-positive thing that’s ever been written on the show,’” she recalled.
After leaving “SNL” in 2013, Pell wrote “Sisters,” the bawdy 2015 comedy that starred Fey and Amy Poehler. She was also a creator of the streaming shows “Hudson Valley Ballers” and “Mapleworth Murders.”
Pell performed a spot-on homage to Elaine Stritch in a “Documentary Now!” episode that parodied the making of the “Company” cast recording. She also played a high-school secretary in the Peacock series “A.P. Bio” and one of the spirited revelers in “Wine Country,” the 2019 Netflix comedy (directed by Poehler) inspired by a trip she and her “SNL” gal pals had taken.
“I have a very lengthy video of me, knockers out, with a wicker cornucopia as a hat, singing a whole ‘Sunset Boulevard’ number,” Pell said. “When we did ‘Wine Country,’ I was like, ‘If you want me to be topless, I’ll be topless.’ I got a call from my agents, going, ‘Uh, we just got a nudity clause — are you cool with this?’ I’m like, ‘I’m the one who suggested it.’”
When Fey and the “Girls5eva” creator Meredith Scardino approached Pell about the show in 2020, she was not that interested; at the time, she and Brito were riding out the pandemic in Asheville, North Carolina. But Pell said she was won over after learning who her co-stars would be and reading the pilot script, which she felt offered a truthful and poignant depiction of adult female friendship.
On the show, Pell has been able to bring more of her real-life attributes and frailties to Gloria: When Pell was about to undergo knee replacement surgery (on a knee that she’d already had replaced), her character was given a similar ailment at the start of Season 2.
Other upcoming storylines — including Gloria’s need to take care of injured animals during a van tour with the band — were informed by Brito, who wrote for the show this season. (Brito also wrote the spreadsheet file that Gloria keeps to detail her sexual conquests, a list replete with suggestive monikers like “Short Peg Bundy” and “Cornfed Xena.”)
Spend enough time in Pell’s company — like, say, an hour and a half — and she will eventually tell you the most intimate, blush-inducing details of how she and Brito began courting and dating in the months after Pell’s divorce.
Her longtime friends and colleagues have come to appreciate her endearing candor. Goldsberry, who also worked with Pell on “Sisters” and “Documentary Now!,” said, “There is no knowing Paula reasonably well — you know her intimately if you know her at all. She is 100% authentically, always herself, and there is absolutely nothing that she holds back.”
With comedians, Goldsberry said, “Their gold is their pain. Their gold is their fears. Their gold is their insecurities. And they heal people by mining all of that stuff. So it wouldn’t make sense that she would ever hide it. That’s her power.”
Not every anecdote about Pell’s generosity of spirit turns out to be entirely true. Michaels said he vaguely remembered a tale from several years ago when Pell “saw a bird — I want to say a sparrow, but it’s probably something else — it was flapping around, and she thought it was in trouble and she gave it mouth-to-mouth.”
Unsurprisingly, Pell said that some of these details had been embellished over time: The injured bird was a blackbird or wren, stunned by the cold, that she wrapped in her coat until it warmed up. “Then I heard it moving and I opened it and it flew away,” she said. (She and Michaels agreed, however, that the incident had taken place during an avian flu panic.)
In her time outside of “Girls5eva,” Pell makes occasional return visits to “SNL,” helping to write for guest hosts like Kate McKinnon (Pell also appeared in a music video on that episode, singing about a tampon farm). She and Brito are also writing the screenplay for a Netflix comedy film that will star Kim Kardashian.
Although Pell could not share additional details about that project, she did talk about a broader sensibility she strives for in her work, on shows like “Girls5eva” and in her own writing, that balances humor with an undercurrent of tender human emotion.
“My niece calls it ‘heart itch,’” she said. “I was like, did she make up heart itch? I’ve always used it because I love when she says it.” But when Pell did a search of the term online, she found some results suggesting that it could be a symptom of heart failure. “I’m like, maybe I shouldn’t be using that?” she said. “It makes it a little tragic.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
