Heidi Garner, a cast member of Saturday Night Live since 2017, discussed her life as an actress at a recent Mount Saint Mary College performance.
Saturday Night Live cast member Heidi Gardner brought her comedic talents to Mount Saint Mary College recently, discussing the ins and outs of her life on television.
Hosted by the Student Government Association (SGA) and Mount Activities Programming Board (MAP), the performance offered students, faculty, and staff a unique opportunity to experience Gardner’s wit and humor firsthand.
Gardner, known for her memorable characters and impressions on SNL, has been a prominent figure in comedy since joining the cast in 2017. She also co-starred in the critically acclaimed Apple TV+ series Shrinking as the character Grace.
In addition, Gardner is a prolific voice actor. One of her most notable roles is the catlike superhero Cooch in the series SuperMansion, on which she was also a writer. Gardner has also lent her skills to shows like American Dad!, Close Enough, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and she voiced the jester-like Harley Quinn in the podcast series Batman: The Audio Adventures.
For Gardner, performing for a live audience is all about one thing: “The main goal is to bring joy,” she said. “What I like to take from the audience is that collective energy and joy, and just let it fuel me for the rest of the show.”
Her Mount performance delved into everything from her day-to-day life to what it’s like working on Saturday Night Live. She’s extremely grateful, she explained, to be a member of the show’s cast.
“I’m really lucky in that I have an atypical job that honestly still feels like being in high school or college because of the way it’s set up,” Gardner said. “We’re in our dressing rooms all the time with a 15-member cast, so it kind of feels like the hallway at school, or like college dorms. But there’s something about the stakes of the job being kind of high where sometimes I’m like, ‘oh, I wish I had a nine to five’ because I think about it so much. It’s such a rollercoaster.”
Gardner pointed out that her favorite kind of acting is “doing anything that’s really physical.” For example, “Last year I did one [sketch on SNL] with Kristen Wiig where we were like ’60s secretaries and she fell through a desk, and I fell through the wall. That was fun.”
When asked about her favorite roles outside of SNL and Shrinking, Gardiner noted her work on the show Crank Yankers, which features audio of prank phone calls set to visuals of puppets acting out the scenario.
“I was such a prank phone caller when I was a kid, like they shut down our phone line,” Gardiner admitted. “It was really cool to get asked to do that show because I was getting paid to do something I got in trouble for.”