Julia Sweeney

[upbeat music] Julia Sweeney is a writer, a performer, and an actor whose career has taken a path that very few people could have predicted.

She first came to fame as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, where she created one of the most memorable and complicated characters of that era.

She has also appeared in the Hulu series Shrill, the Showtime series Work in Progress, the Starz series American Gods, and had a recurring role on Frasier.

Her performance work has broadened through a series of one-woman shows where she has shared her crises, contradictions, and questions, and created an utterly original form of storytelling that blends wit and humor with intelligence and inquiry.

Her work has been performed on stages across the country, adapted into books and films, and has helped redefine how personal narrative is performed.

Julia Sweeney, welcome to Design Matters.

[laughs] Thanks for having me.

Julia, is it true you wanted to be a nun growing up simply because you like their outfits?

Well, that's partly a joke.

[laughs]

I actually like their lifestyle as well.

[laughs]

Oh, interesting.

So you like that whole celibate, praying to God kind of-

Well, not the celibate part.

[laughs]

Um, but I was, went to gr- all girls Catholic school, and the nuns were absolutely the feminists in my particular environment.

They were women who had chosen not to marry, to devote themselves to education.

They all lived together in this convent.

And this particular convent for my high school seemed very-- I just wanted to move in.

That seemed like a much better future than the future of having lots of kids, although I think that's a perfectly wonderful future for someone now.

But at the time, they were the feminists, and I still see many of the nuns that way.

I really do admire the nun lifestyle.

[laughs] You've described growing up in Spokane as something like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Uh, you were the oldest of five children in a devout, tight-knit Catholic household.