Abby Elliott had been holding out for a role like Sugar on a show like The Bear. Despite four mostly successful seasons on Saturday Night Live—she is still the youngest woman ever hired and the only second-generation cast member, following in her father, Chris Elliott’s, footsteps—the comedian and actress struggled to find her footing in Hollywood in the 10 years since she was cut loose from the show.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Elliott opens up about The Bear’s intense connection with viewers and what it was like to be thrust into the cutthroat world of SNL so young—something she says she’s still working through in therapy. She also reveals the Chicago-based actress she wants to see play Carmy and Sugar’s mother in Season 2 of The Bear, and confirms that Jon Bernthal really is that charismatic in person.
“I think people just really needed this show right now,” Elliott says of The Bear, which has become an unlikely phenomenon in an overly crowded TV landscape. “It’s really exciting to be a part of something that has touched so many people,” she adds, noting that it’s the first time she’s been “part of a project that people have really responded to in this sort of way.”
When I ask if she had been waiting for an opportunity like this one, Elliott replies, “Yeah, absolutely,” adding that it was also the first job she took after giving birth to her daughter in 2020. “I was already in this vulnerable state of having her during COVID, so I just really wanted to do something real and grounded.”
Since her character, Sugar, exists mostly outside of the restaurant at the center of the show, Elliott says she “of course” experienced FOMO about some of the more thrilling scenes at The Beef. “Until I saw the pilot I didn’t fully understand what was happening back there,” she says of the chaotic kitchen scenes. “Which I think was good, because Sugar really doesn’t get it. This is this shitty beef restaurant that killed her brother. And I think in the last episode, when we’re all having the family dinner, it’s the first moment of, ‘OK, I see what you’re trying to do.’”
In that episode, Sugar is at the table for a family meal, but it’s unclear whether or not her brother has informed her about—spoiler alert!—how much cash they just found sealed within the cans of crushed tomatoes. “I think he hasn’t opened up to her about that yet,” she says, “in true Carmy fashion.”
In a way, the first season of The Bear serves as an extended prologue for Season 2. It isn’t until the final moments of the finale that we learn the meaning behind the show’s title and realize how much potential the series really has. Among the characters mentioned but never seen in the first season is Carmy and Sugar’s mother—and Elliott knows exactly who should play her.
While they were shooting in Chicago, Elliott and Chris Witaske, the hilarious actor who plays Sugar’s husband, Pete, wandered into actress (and former SNL cast member) Joan Cusack’s famous boutique on the city’s North Side.
Elliott actually did an impression of Cusack both in her SNL audition and then later on the show, and decided to shyly approach her. “She is very much living in her own world,” she says of Cusack. “She does not want to be an actress, really, anymore, but I think that her playing my mother—wouldn’t that be cool?”
Years before every comedian was posting videos of their celebrity impressions on Instagram and TikTok, Elliott was filming videos of herself as Angelina Jolie, Kirsten Dunst, or any number of other stars from the mid-2000s. At the time, she had dropped out of college and moved across the country to L.A. to break into the comedy world, and started taking improv classes at The Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade, two of the main talent sources for SNL.
“I was just kind of doing it for fun and then I was like, ‘Maybe this could be something,’” Elliot recalls. She decided to submit a tape with every impression she could think of, and then got the call to audition in person for Lorne Michaels and the rest of the SNL team in New York. She flew back to L.A. that night after the audition, and by the time she landed, her phone was blowing up with people who already knew she’d been offered the gig.
“I think it was announced the next day, but Lorne had actually called my dad to ask permission,” she reveals. “I think he said something like, ‘I know she’s young, we’ll cultivate her talent.’ And my dad was like, ‘OK… yeah, that’s great.’”
Chris Elliott famously had a bad experience during his one year in the cast, which came a decade after he turned down a chance to be on SNL so that he could stay at Late Night with David Letterman. When I spoke to him for The Daily Beast a few years ago, he confirmed that he only took the gig the second time it was offered because he was “desperate” for a job and only later realized it was the “totally wrong thing for me to do.”
“I knew that he was in a different place in his career when he went to SNL,” Elliott says of her father. “He had already had his own sitcom and his own blockbuster movie. So he was a little more of a personality and a household name. And it was just a very different thing for me. This was literally the only opportunity I had. It doesn’t pay much, but… yeah, I had to take it. I was 21. I mean, in a lot of ways, it was my college experience.”
Elliott ended up staying at the show for about four years, starting in the fall of 2008, just after Tina Fey’s epic run as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler’s triumphant exit. “It was hard, it was really rough,” she says. “I thought that I was really tough and could take it all. And now I’m dealing with it in therapy, but it was kind of this thing of, can I take another week of not being in sketches? I think now, having a family, I’ve learned to detach emotionally from certain things, but I didn’t know any better then. So I was really putting myself through it and really putting pressure on myself.”
Elliott says she was confident on air because she “had to be,” but behind the scenes, she “just couldn’t handle it.” She was running on little sleep, drinking too much, and constantly worrying that the other writers and cast members thought she was only there because of her dad. “That was hard,” she admits. “The nepotism stuff I tried to ignore.”
During her time on the show, her father would occasionally help out with sketches she was writing. When she would then bring those sketches to other writers at the show and they would dismiss them out of hand, she couldn’t help but blurt out, “But my dad wrote this!”
While Elliott says she was “ready” to leave the show after four seasons, it was not her decision.
“My characters, for whatever reason, just never hit, and I don’t think that anyone really trusted me to do a big character on the show,” she says. When she found out she had been cut from the cast a couple weeks before the Season 38 premiere, Elliott says, “I think I just ate pizza and drank wine in bed for a week and did not get up. And then I went to Italy and ate more pizza.”
Her final episode of the show—unbeknownst to her at the time—ended with Kristen Wiig’s emotional sendoff, complete with a Mick Jagger serenade and a Lorne Michaels slow dance. “I love Kristen, she’s amazing, but that kind of summed up my time there—her sendoff and my last episode,” Elliott says with a laugh. “She deserved it and she was amazing on that show and a friend to me, so it wasn’t that I was jealous. But it was like, OK, I’m definitely the underdog here. And that’s OK. I figured out how to be comfortable with that after the fact.”
And yet, when I wonder aloud if her daughter could be the third generation of Elliotts to join the SNL cast in a couple of decades, she quickly replies, “Ugh, I hope not, for her sake.”
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