I really, honestly love this lady. Rachel Dratch, former cast member of Saturday Night Live, current mother, and forever awesome person, is just amazing. She’s always so funny in everything she does, and it makes me sad that she sort of just disappeared after SNL. Sure, she was on some episodes of 30 Rock, and she’ll be playing the role of Copyright Office Clerk in a movie later this year, but she should have more. She should have her own television show and star in funny movies just like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but she doesn’t. Why not?
Well, according to Rachel herself, it’s because she’s a troll:
“Saturday Night Live” alum Rachel Dratch, best known for her role as “Debbie Downer” has had a few surprises – bad and good – in her life after ‘SNL.’
One of those surprises is how she is perceived by Hollywood. In her new memoir, “Girl Walks into a Bar: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle,” Dratch writes, “If you saw me walking down the street, you wouldn’t point at me and recoil, but by Hollywood’s standards, I’m a troll, ogre, woodland creature, or manly lesbian.”
On “CBS This Morning,” Thursday, Dratch said she felt like she had to address the issue in the book.
“I don’t think that about myself, but this is like what I was seen as in the whole Hollywood scene,” Dratch said. “In real life, I’m gorgeous, beautiful.”
Dratch said she wasn’t offered many parts, and spent many days watching “Dr. Phil.” But when she was called by her agent, she was often told she could play something akin to a 55-year-old obese lesbian.
“I was getting a lot of stuff like that,” Dratch said. “And there’s not a lot of call for that in Hollywood. There weren’t a lot of those jobs coming. But, you know, after you’re done with ‘SNL’ you think, movies, and then it was a little plateau there. So I was spending a lot of frittering away a lot of time, so that’s when I decided to start writing. I didn’t know it was going to be a book. I started writing these stories up. I didn’t know where it was going.”
Ugh. Hollywood sucks.
There are women in the world who are shorter than 5’8″ and that weigh more than 110 pounds. There are women who don’t surgically enhance their appearance and there are women who just happened to be born outside of Hollywood’s super specific standards of beauty. And a lot of those women have more talent than the supermodel types that tend to flood the film industry.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally possible to be completely gorgeous and talented at the same time. Ladies like Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence fit that description. Rachel’s fellow SNL alum, Tina Fey, is absolutely stunning and one the the funniest women working today. If that’s the case, awesome. But there are so many mediocre actresses (hey, Megan Fox) who manage to get consistent work while delightful actresses like Rachel Dratch are meant to pop up in a cameo every couple years as Funny Weird Girl Number Three. And that is the opposite of awesome.
I was going to try to fit the fact that SNL has had tons of fat dudes in the cast but never a fat lady or – and this is has been more noticeable in recent years – many female cast members who aren’t considered conventionally pretty. Am I identifying too hard with this?
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