Believe Her · Lemonada Media

Listen Now: Julia Gets Wise with Jane Curtin

November 12, 2025·1 hr·5 clips

Julia Louis-Dreyfus describes watching the debut of Saturday Night Live at 14 and feeling for the first time that she had found her people.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus opens the season premiere by narrating the night in October 1975 when she was 14 and watched the debut of Saturday Night Live, describing it as finding her people — particularly the funny women Curtin, Gilda Radner, and Lorraine Newman. She argues that great art doesn't change your life but reflects it, citing Shakespeare. Curtin, now 78, begins by saying she feels about 48 and that the best part of her age is simply not caring about career positioning anymore. She uses the metaphor of old glass settling toward the bottom of antique window panes to describe feeling settled in herself. The two women discuss how Julia watched SNL's premiere from Washington DC and felt the same recognition Julia described, establishing an instant emotional connection. Curtin recounts her discovery that Mondays and Tuesdays at SNL were useless for her — she had no connections to the writing staff, unlike cast members who came from the Groundlings or Second City — so she stopped attending and focused entirely on cold-reading scripts at Wednesday table reads with full commitment. This built trust with writers who then gave her material. She contrasts her approach with Lorne Michaels' explicit desire for cast members to compete with each other, which she found counterproductive; she, Radner, and Newman chose cooperation instead and proved it worked. On sexism, Curtin describes being shocked by the contempt for women she found at SNL because her previous experience at The Proposition improv group in Cambridge had been genuinely egalitarian. She expected her peer group to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and was disillusioned. She says the misogyny didn't destroy her confidence because she had built it from nothing — she stumbled into improv on a whim with no training, raised her hand to audition, and had to keep convincing everyone she belonged. Curtin describes Gilda Radner coming to her apartment to observe her marriage to Patrick Lindstrom as a foreign model of respect without games. She recounts meeting Gene Wilder and realizing Gilda wanted a father figure, not the kind of equal partnership Curtin had, and says whatever dynamic Gilda and Gene had, it ultimately worked for them. Curtin's account of how she met Patrick Lindstrom — through a mutual friend named Gail who hung up on both of them to force the setup — is told as a comic story ending with their talking through dinner at the Plaza and staying out until the restaurant kicked them out. Kate and Allie is described as a deliberate retreat from SNL's celebrity hype back to accessible, earth-level characters; Curtin says she moved from being on a plane above normal people to playing characters people wanted to help. The SNL schedule is contrasted with Kate and Allie's civilized hours — arriving at 8 am, finishing by noon, picking up her daughter for dinner. She recounts running out of the Ed Sullivan Theater in hot rollers to wave at Reagan and Gorbachev during their 1987 motorcade. Third Rock from the Sun is remembered as a show where everyone was genuinely having fun, with John Lithgow cited as exemplary. The conversation closes with Curtin mentioning that her husband Patrick died in April of COPD and three aggressive cancers, that the last months were a long slog, and that she was glad to have been his caregiver.

As heard by us

A warm, grounded look at how early SNL shaped a generation of women in comedy.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus talks with Jane Curtin about the night Saturday Night Live debuted, and the opening memory of turning on the TV on October 11, 1975 has a real charge to it.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want SNL origin stories with a woman's-eye view.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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