Natasha Leggero Begged to Be Kicked Off ‘Stars on Mars’
The other two “space travelers” doomed to this week’s bottom three on Stars on Mars begged for their reality-show lives, not wanting to leave the bleak Australian set that passes for the red planet. But a third celeb destined for possible elimination, comedian Natasha Leggero, had a different approach. “Please, please, please let me leave Mars,” she begged Ronda Rousey, Lance Armstrong and the rest of her cosmic mission team. “To be honest, I’ve already called my Uber.”
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While getting zinged by other comedians can take its toll on your ego, a celebrity roast is cake compared to the trials of a survival-style reality show. “I don’t know if it was clear how physically challenging it was for a lot of us,” the 4-foot-11 Leggero tells me.“The backpack weighed 60 pounds, and the front part of the face where it latches? You couldn’t breathe very easily. It was extremely uncomfortable and kind of scary. To be honest, I did not enjoy it.”
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Australia isn’t Mars, but it sounds nearly as treacherous. “The city we were in, they would tell us, ‘Make sure to never walk backward! You could fall into a landmine!” she says. “There were blasted opal mines everywhere (which help simulate the barren Mars landscape). That was pretty challenging.”
Despite the physical rigors, shows like Stars on Mars would be pretty boring if professional athletes like Marshawn Lynch were the only ones competing. Funny voices like first-voted-off Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Leggero were essential for entertainment. “They were afraid (the athletes) would only work out,” she says. (Indeed, Rousey spends half the show sweating it out on an elliptical machine.) “The producers needed some people smoking cigarettes on the sideline, comedian-style.”
But it’s not necessarily easy being funny, comedian-style or otherwise, on “Mars.” “I get into this outfit, and it was just really hard for me to be myself because I’m in this heavy mountain of equipment with armbands and wristbands and knee pads and two headpieces,” she says. “I could not overcome it.”
The laughs were easier during Leggero’s first rides in the reality rodeo. She previously starred in two reality spoofs — Joe Schmo, and the hilarious firefighter dating show, Burning Love.
“So I had only done them from the comedy angle,” she says. There is, of course, an alternate universe in which Stars on Mars could have been a full-on comedy. “A lot of it was just straight-up funny to me,” she tells me. “I know that isn't the show they wanted, but there was such a show underneath the show happening that they could have made.”
Was there anything about the Stars on Mars experience that Leggero would put into her next reality spoof? “Something that a lot of people did ask me is if we really shot this on Mars,” she says. “That's a little concerning for humanity.”
