'Shrill,' 'SNL' star Aidy Bryant on finding her confidence on stage in Chicago
CHICAGO - With the new Hulu series "Shrill," which premiered earlier this month, Aidy Bryant is one of the few "Saturday Night Live" cast members to star on her own show while also maintaining her role on the NBC late-night comedy.
Based on the 2016 nonfiction book of essays "Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman" by Lindy West, the series follows the professional and personal trajectory of a fat woman in her 20s living in Portland, who gradually begins to come into her own. Blending comedy and drama, her story is rooted by the presence of her best friend and roommate (a breakout performance by Lolly Adefope) and her less-than-satisfying romance with a likeable loser (played by Luka Jones).
If you're alert to them, there are Chicago connections throughout the show. Bryant herself is an alumnus of Columbia College Chicago and the local sketch and improv scene - she was performing at Second City when she was hired on "SNL."
Fellow "SNL" alum Julia Sweeney, who lives in Wilmette, Ill., plays her well-intentioned if exasperating mother, and Evanston, Ill., native Samantha Irby (author of the books "Meaty" and "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life") is a writer on the show.
Annie works at an alt weekly, just as West did in real life, and she has an antagonistic relationship with her editor. West's editor at the time was Chicago native Dan Savage (played mercilessly here by John Cameron Mitchell).
(West tells Vanity Fair the character in the show is "really not Dan" but he does have "these notions about fat people that he thinks are kind of progressive in this weird way, and she is correcting him. That's true to my relationship with Dan.")
Bryant was in Chicago recently with her husband Conner O'Malley (a Chicago native and veteran of the local comedy scene), and she stopped by the Chicago Tribune to
