Kerri Kenney-Silver never thought she’d get a part like Anne on The Four Seasons. After more than two decades playing the disturbingly odd Deputy Trudy Wiegel on Reno 911!, the 55-year-old actress believed Hollywood saw her as little more than outrageous comic relief. But then Tina Fey gave her the gift of a lifetime by casting her opposite Steve Carell on Netflix’s latest hit series.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Kenney-Silver talks about finding the nuance in what could have been a stereotypical caricature of the jilted ex-wife. And she also discusses co-founding perhaps the most successful college sketch comedy group of all time with The State, the terrible career advice she gave her one-time co-star Ellen DeGeneres, and the bizarre longevity of Reno 911!
“I am just so proud of this,” Kenney-Silver tells me the day after The Four Seasons started streaming on Netflix. “I still can’t believe I’m on the show, to be honest with you,” she adds. “I still keep waiting for somebody to say, ‘Oh, this was a mistake, we’ve CGI’d you out and put in the real actress who’s going to be playing this part. Just to get to read for something that had the depth that this character and this show had felt like the win to me. So everything after that has been just dreamlike gravy.”
Kenney-Silver says she felt a “strange calm” come over her during the audition process. “The writing is so real that there’s no work to be done,” she explains. “All the emotion is in the words, and if you just show up and say the words, the work is done for you as long as you can be coming from a truthful place. And luckily, that day I was.”
In the previous shows she has helmed like 30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Girls5eva, Fey has perfected a joke-a-minute style that is deliberately missing from The Four Seasons. The show has a lot more heart than much of her previous work, which befits the aging Gen X cast, which also includes Saturday Night Live alum Will Forte and Oscar-nominated actor Colman Domingo.
“I knew that Tina was looking to do something different,” Kenney-Silver says of the more dramatic tone throughout, predicting that some viewers might be “shocked” by how dark the story gets at times, especially when it comes to being married in middle age.
Despite never having met Fey (or her co-creators Tracy Wigfiend and Lang Fisher) before they started filming, Kenney-Silver says she “felt a little too seen” by the raw moments of marital tension in the scripts. “When I got home after three months of shooting, I did pull out my iPad as my husband started to fall asleep, and I thought, ‘Oh no, are we doomed?’” she recalls.
Kenney-Silver got her start as the only female member of the overly “cocky”—her word—sketch group The State, which formed at NYU in the late-’80s and somehow landed an MTV show after graduation. Other notable members of the group include her Reno 911! co-creators and stars Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, Wet Hot American Summer director David Wain and writer/star Michael Showalter, along with successful comedy actors Ken Marino, Joe Lo Truglio, and Michael Ian Black.
When I make the false assumption that they never could have imagined nearly every member of the group would go on to have these decades-long careers as professional comedians, Kenney-Silver says, “The weird thing is, we did think it was going to happen.”
She explains, “From day one, everyone in the group said, ‘This is what I will be doing forever.’ And I mean, that’s really cute and aspirational, but that just doesn’t happen. So for everyone in the group to have the success that they have had in the lanes that they have chosen is really remarkable.”
But while she somehow may have seen a long career in comedy coming, Kenney-Silver says she did not know when she first created the character of Trudy Wiegel in the early 2000s that she would still be playing this seriously deranged sheriff’s deputy for nearly 25 years.
“I certainly would have picked a better fabric than the polyester that I ended up wearing,” she says of the tight-fitting police uniforms. “And I’m grateful that we didn’t have time to think about it, because really I don’t think we would have landed where we did. But it was a Hail Mary, spur of the moment, ‘Everybody, quick, grab a wig and think of something’ that somehow worked to our advantage. There was no work put into it, is what I’m saying, because we had no time.”
Reno 911! returned during the pandemic after a 10 year hiatus and the crew has since put out a series of streaming movies including The Hunt for QAnon and It’s a Wonderful Heist. “It’s just such a comfortable playground, and it’s cheap as hell,” Kenney-Silver explains, before crediting her co-star Niecy Nash for being the unlikely driving force behind its longevity. “She’ll go on a press line and say, ‘Reno‘s coming back!’ And we’re like, ‘It is? Grab your polyester!’”
“It’s just such a beautiful group of people, and it’s such a fun show to do, and the characters are so beloved that I will never say never!” she adds. “I mean, I’d be doing it if they were wheeling us in.”
But for now, Kenney-Silver is basking in the glory of being one of the main stars on Netflix’s #1 show.
“My wildest dreams have always been that I would get to do something that had drama as well,” she says. “But I thought, OK, you’ve been very lucky, let’s not get greedy. You’ve been coasting down the river of alt-comedy for all these years, it’s been very good to you. Just be happy with what you have. And I never in a million years imagined as a 55-year-old woman in Hollywood that someone would say, ‘Oh, and now you can have this.”
“And I’m grateful that it took this long,” Kenney-Silver continues, “because I have more confidence now that I could tackle something like this. And so now I feel greedy, and I just want more.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
