Aidy Bryant Reveals Why Coffee Was a Bad Idea on ‘SNL’
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It takes a lot of energy to power through a live, 90-minute comedy show that begins at 11:30 on a Saturday night. Especially after you’ve done a two-hour version of that same show just hours earlier at dress rehearsal. It’s even worse if you’ve pulled all-nighters during the week to get the show ready in the first place. Yet despite all that, Aidy Bryant never turned to coffee for extra pow during her tenure on Saturday Night Live.
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“I don’t drink coffee, and people always thought that was crazy because we had to stay up late,” Bryant revealed to the Hollywood Reporter this week. And she has at least two good reasons for not riding that caffeine dragon. During a live show, “the last thing you want is to one, be shaking, or two, have diarrhea. That is not a path for me to perform well. We’re getting to the real stuff here.”
What did L’il Baby Aidy do to rev up instead? Drink tea, for one, which for Bryant seems to be easier on both the nerves and the digestive system. A shower was also part of her pre-game ritual. “That seems very baseline, but that’s where my mind goes,” she says. “Before SNL, I would stretch, honestly, because you do random physical stuff. I got to the point where I was like, ‘I can’t keep raw-dogging this.’ You’re running around or changing underneath bleachers, you have to be safe.”
As she prepares to host Sunday’s Spirit Awards honoring the best in independent film, Bryant is calling on some of her old SNL cohorts for help, including writer and frequent sketch collaborator Fran Gillespie. She’s also checked out former castmates who’ve hosted the Spirit Awards for inspiration. “I’m looking to other SNL alums, I watched Andy Samberg,” Bryant says, adding, “Aubrey Plaza has done it amazingly.”
She’s still got a lot of those SNL friendships going, noting that those relationships aren’t as nonchalant as those you might have with someone who sits in the next cubicle. “Working at the show can come with so much pressure, so your friendships are forged in fire,” she says. “It’s not like these are your casual work pals that you grab coffee with — I’ve cried in front of most of them, or they’ve cried in front of me. So when projects like this come up, you think of people you can trust, not just in the good times but in the difficult times. And any of them could call me up and I would do anything for them.”
Anything, perhaps, except grabbing a cup of coffee.
