She can relate
Most “Saturday Night Live” alums making their big-screen lead role debuts stick to the wacky -- think “Wayne’s World” or “Billy Madison.” But Maya Rudolph has always been different.
She and John Krasinski (of “The Office”) play Verona and Burt, an unconventional, expectant couple crisscrossing the continent in search of the perfect place to start their family in “Away We Go.”
It’s a quirky comedy but it’s also a heady drama by respected writers Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, directed by Oscar winner Sam Mendes. The film and Rudolph’s role are complex and emotionally demanding, but the relatively untested actress felt driven to pursue the project.
“There’s a part of me that believes I can do anything, which is why I put myself in these strange positions in the first place. ‘I can be a lead in a movie, no problem,’ ” Rudolph said by phone from New York. “And then I get there and I’m like, ‘Holy . . ., what was I thinking?’ There’s a lot of pressure that goes with this. There’s a lot of people waiting for me to get it right.”
Her confidence that she could not only land the part but carry it off was kept afloat by one key piece of information: “I heard that it was written with me in mind, but I didn’t know Dave and Vendela, so I couldn’t ask them. I managed to track them down and introduce myself in the Bay Area. It was pretty thrilling to see that these two incredible writers wrote this beautiful thing with you in mind.”
The actress instantly found parallels with the character, apart from her experience with pregnancy.
“There was something very different about Verona that I could relate to. It’s not that she’s off, it’s just that she does her own thing. When I saw in the description that she was mixed and has what she calls ‘problem hair,’ I thought, ‘Do they know me really well?’ ” said Rudolph, who has discussed in interviews the sometimes-alienating effects of growing up mixed-race and with only one parent (her mother, singer Minnie Riperton, died of cancer when Rudolph was 6).
“Verona doesn’t have parents anymore; in a lot of ways Burt is her reality. John felt that Burt doesn’t exist to other people without Verona. He’s almost like her imaginary friend or something; he only feels real because she thinks he’s real.”
That closed circuit between the two, an artistic depiction of a rare, real love, fascinated Rudolph.
“They were speaking their own language together,” she said, conjuring something like a kite tied to a tiny boat: “She really grounds him and in a lot of ways he buoys her.”
Rudolph, who with her partner, director Paul Thomas Anderson, is expecting her second child, counts among her many lucky charms in this production her pairing with Krasinski.
“We had a similar sense of humor, which is basically 100% goofball. We were both so completely invested in the same thing: making them as real to other people as they were to us,” she said.
“We took it really seriously -- the work. Everything else we did together was a complete nerdfest. I now know that I would do anything with him. If he said, ‘Hey, come with me to this building in this weird tunnel, it’ll be fun!’ I’d be, ‘I’ll be there.’ ”
One of the central questions Burt and Verona encounter, which most people probably consider when they discover they’re about to be parents, arises as Verona worries out loud to Burt about whether they’re screw-ups. Again, Rudolph could relate.
“At the end of college, I was trying to figure out what I was doing. I truly wanted to be on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and just didn’t know how to get there. They don’t have SNL College, or I would have applied. But I felt really lost in college,” she said, although she didn’t take Verona’s question as a bad sign for the character.
“It’s just being totally honest with someone who knows you so well. You can only say to a few people, ‘Am I a [screw-up]?’ and get an honest answer.”
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Where you’ve seen her
Among Maya Rudolph’s films are Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and the cult favorite “Idiocracy.” She’s in the Web hit “Prop 8: The Musical” and the sitcom “Kath & Kim,” but she is by far best known for her menagerie of personalities on “Saturday Night Live.” Among her favorite characters on the show: Nooni Schooner, the very sauced Donatella Versace, Jodi Dietz of “Bronx Beat” and Britannica of Gemini’s Twin. One of her favorite bits, though, could be done only once -- her nearly three-minute, intensely overwrought, mysteriously enunciated rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “I just loved performing that. The bummer is, you can’t really make a recurring sketch out of the national anthem.”