Willy, Kate McKinnon explains, is an exceptionally funny name for a pet iguana. “It’s a funny name, because iguanas do have two penises. I denied him that, he was Willy, singular,” she tells Big Issue. “We eventually sent him away to a reptile rescue organisation in Boca Raton, Florida, which is where people from New York retire to. So, it was fitting.”
In an office near London Bridge, the former Saturday Night Live (SNL) star is listing her childhood pets. No fluffy dog for McKinnon, who doted on insects, lizards and fish – “everything you can imagine” – including a tank of hissing Madagascar cockroaches. Unnamed, because “one roach starts to look the same as all the other roaches”.
“I never had a bird though,” she adds, wistfully. I tell her that it’s not too late. As the roaches indicate, McKinnon was a bit of an oddball – “a weirdo”, in her own words. The misfit tween dressed in flannel top and bottom, rocked a perm styled by her mother in the bathtub, and was obsessed with doing “weird voices”.
Luckily, she managed to make that last bit her job. Over 10 years on SNL, the New Yorker transformed into dozens of characters, including Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber and Ellen DeGeneres. She was nominated for 10 Primetime Emmy Awards for her work on the series, winning two.
In 2023, she starred in the Barbie movie as Weird Barbie – an outsider doll who introduces herself with the jaunty declaration: “I can do the splits. I have a funky haircut and I smell like basement.”
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Suffice to say, the 40-year-old has had a busy decade. But she’s been working on her debut novel throughout it all. The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science was released last month. The 256-page book – dictated, the front cover says, by ‘G Edwina Candlestank’ to Kate McKinnon – is already a #1 New York Times bestseller.
This madcap adventure tells the story of Gertrude, Eugenia and Dee-Dee Porch, three sisters who do not belong in the repressive turn-of-the-century city of Antiquarium.
“They get kicked out of etiquette school and get taken in by the infamous mad scientist Millicent Quibb,” McKinnon explains. “She takes them on quite the adventure to save the town.”
Under the tutelage of Quibb, the girls must defeat a Kyrgalops, a vicious puppy-chomping worm. Growing up has clearly not robbed McKinnon of her fascination with the natural world.
“I mean, come on, you’ve seen animals,” she laughs. “Nature is so bizarre. There is a particular parasite of isopod I believe, that takes over the tongue of a fish and lives in its mouth as its tongue. It’s like, the most viscerally horrifying and cool thing I’ve ever read.”
Amid the silliness – and homicidal invertebrates – the book has a serious message. Weirdness, Kate McKinnon admits, can be a very lonely feeling. Millicent Quibb is part of the comedian’s “private mission to give a wink and a nod” to young people who might feel different.
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“I thought I was fine, like I thought I was cool, and my interests were cool,” she recalls. “But people in my class were telling me, in their actions and words, that I was not a part of the gang. I think that every single 12-year-old on the planet feels that way, even if they’re the most popular girl in school. I would venture to guess that there are always feelings of being different, somehow, in a way that is kept private or not. I find that a universal experience.”
Difference, she says, ought to be celebrated. It’s a powerful message – and a timely one.
McKinnon is here to talk about her book, and the US election is not on the agenda. But by virtue of her Emmy-winning sketch portrayals of Hillary Clinton, the comedian is undeniably associated with American politics. After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, millions of viewers watched McKinnon (dressed as Clinton) hold back tears as she covered Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on SNL. At the time, she urged the audience: “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”
The 2016-2020 Trump administration rolled back protections for minorities, including queer communities and people of colour. But difference, Millicent Quibb urges readers, should be celebrated, not squashed. It might be a kids’ book, but it’s a message that certain adults could do with hearing. Besides: normal is dull. There’s a reason that Weird Barbie was a cult hit with fans of last year’s Mattel blockbuster movie.
Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie in 2023’s blockbuster Barbie movie. Image: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy
“Not often do you get a character with ‘weird’ in the name. I just thought that that was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” McKinnon enthuses.
“That Greta [Gerwig] thought to write a character who was like, the messed-up version of what everyone else was. That’s what I like to perform.”
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The best thing you can do, the comedian adds, is be yourself. Particularly if you’re a kid or a teenager.
“It’s a ubiquitous aphorism… but it’s harder than it sounds, to be yourself,” she says. “It takes a lifetime, if ever, to be able to have the courage to move beyond cultural messaging and really self-actualise. And there’s always more to be done.”
In short, don’t change who you are just to fit in. Unless that involves buying a pet iguana. In which case, maybe think twice. Recall the cautionary tale of Willy.
“We had a contentious relationship,” McKinnon says.
“It became abundantly clear that iguanas are meant to live in the jungle and not in a teenager’s bedroom.”
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