Kristen Wiig would like you to know that she looks fabulous for 72 (“73 in August”). And it’s true—she could totally pass for a woman in her 30s. Sitting in New York’s Greenwich Hotel, Wiig is wearing a black minidress, a matching jacket, and flat Repetto boots that make her feet look “freakishly small.” Her hair is back to a reddish color after a stint on the dark side, and following two months in Los Angeles she has something resembling a tan. “Sometimes I tan a little,” she says, “but I’m not like tan.” Then she orders a glass of red wine.

I first met Wiig (provenance of name, Norway; upbringing of person, Rochester, New York) at a movie premiere in 2009. She was then four years into Saturday Night Live, and its undisputed star. We saw each other again at an SNL party, and she was the warmest person there. “A barbecue place, right?” she recalls. “Basically a barn.”

It was two years before Bridesmaids, which she cowrote (with Annie Mumolo) and starred in, and which made almost $300 million at the box office, prompting both a belated realization that “female” comedies could make money and an instant demand for a sequel. It was a proposal that Wiig, despite being offered the world, immediately rejected. “It wasn’t a hard decision,” she says. “We knew during the first one, this was it. We would have made a lot of money if there was a second one, but that’s not my goal in my creative life.”

Her pragmatism may stem somewhat from the fact that she was a full-fledged grown-up when stardom hit. Wiig studied art at a college in Tucson, and was about to take a job at a plastic surgeon’s office before “freaking out” and packing up to join the celebrated Groundlings improv company in L.A. She started on SNL in 2005 and instantly imprinted herself—or, rather, nuttier, older, slightly mutant versions of herself—on the public’s consciousness. “For five minutes you’re playing this crazy person who no one wants to be around,” she explains. “Crazy” could apply to just about any one of her cult characters, from Lillia (“Don’t make me sing”) to the Target Lady to Michele Bachmann. “It’s very rewarding and exhilarating because you get to step out of the bullshit.

“I think the universe did me a favor, getting into it when I did,” she continues. “If I had been younger, I would not have been ready. If I had gotten SNL 10 years earlier, it wouldn’t have been good.”

But it was good—very good. SNL, which farewelled Wiig last year to a serenade of “She’s a Rainbow” and a dance with Mick Jagger, clearly misses her terribly. On a recent episode hosted by Justin Timberlake, he was inducted into the “Five Timers Club” with a cocktail called the Kristen Wiig—which was, yes, a cocktail with a wig. Ask Wiig what this drink would be in actuality and the recipe is this: “A bucket of dreams. Oh, you mean like liquid? The base would be dry shampoo. Cacao bits. Two straws, just to hope someone splits it with you. And it’s served with lipstick on the rim already, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

Wiig misses the cast members as much as they miss her. “When I was on SNL, Saturday night was my favorite night,” she says. “Now that I’m not on the show, it makes me sad. I don’t cry, though. Well, there’s a lot of solitary weeping because I’m a sensitive actress.” She chuckles. “But it is really hard to watch. Because I know that when the sketch is over, everyone is running around, changing costumes, and at like 2 A.M., everyone’s hanging out at the party. It’s been one of the hardest things to let go of, it really has.”

But onward. In July, Wiig, whose onscreen characters often serve up a bit of melancholy with the humor, stars in Girl Most Likely as a playwright who fakes a suicide attempt to win back an ex-boyfriend but ends up in the custody of her gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening). Then it’s to the flip side, playing Ben Stiller’s beloved in the drama The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, out this Christmas. Also in December comes the long-gestating (and hugely anticipated) Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, with Will Ferrell. “I am so excited about that,” Wiig says. “I don’t know why this is happening to me.”

Anyone who watched Wiig and Ferrell’s hilarious riff when they presented at the Golden Globes does. The two have a manic magic together, the result of little preparation (“we knew we would have no idea what the films were”) and a lot of improvisation. “Right before we went on, Will was like, ‘This is either gonna go over great or it’s going to be a huge turd.’?” It was, of course, the former.

With all this success come mobility, choices, and, naturally, challenges. Wiig is still getting used to having people stare at her on the street. “When people first started recognizing me, they always gave me a second look because they didn’t really know what I looked like. For a long time it was my job to be an unattractive older woman or a creepy-looking child.” Now, thanks to the paparazzi, going to the deli to “buy Scotch tape in pajamas” is not an option. She laughs at a New York Post ”Page Six” item about a Wiig sighting at JFK airport in “massive (bleep)-me” Christian Louboutins. “I did have fuck-me boots on,” she says solemnly. “But I wasn’t dressed to the nines.”

Being a celebrated woman can be its own adventure, especially when it comes to dating. “Some guys are more comfortable with it than others,” says Wiig. “I think it has to do with how I react to things and how comfortable they are with the weird reality of being with someone who’s in the public eye. You just have to have the conversation about it.”

Wiig, who describes her personal life as a “closed door,” says, “Once you open it, you can’t close it again, and you don’t want things in your life to be affected by the unpredictability and craziness of this business, because there’s no control over what happens.” Her ideal: “Having a constant. Something reliable. When people find that, they’re very lucky.”

Yet she is making her own luck—following her gut and being loosely prolific, from directing a short film she wrote, writing another script, drawing (her typical girl sketch has jaunty That Girl hair, even though she fancies growing hers “down to my ass—like Crystal Gayle”), and guest-starring in the new season of Arrested Development.

Which means, of course, more red carpets. When Wiig first started doing press, she would often hear the refrain, “Oh, you’re a normal person! You’re not wearing turtlenecks and sweatshirts with Christmas trees on them.” She laughs. “But I do…in the winter.” She rattles off her favorite designers: “Lanvin, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Céline, Alexander McQueen. Oh, Rick Owens! Those Rick Owens dresses are insane. Victoria Beckham!” Wiig takes another sip of wine. “But could you say at the end of this article that I was topless the entire time?”

© 2013 Laura Brown, HARPER’S BAZAAR.

Kristen Wiig 
Co-writer, Bridesmaids (with Annie Mumolo)

“Bridesmaids was our first screenplay. I knew how scripts worked, but I didn’t know what should generally happen on page 30, or in three acts, so we bought one of Syd Field’s books on screenwriting. When Annie and I turned in our original draft, she was seven months pregnant — and then she was seven months pregnant again when we shot the movie. We joked that when her babies came out, their first words were going to be ‘Judd’ [Apatow, who produced the movie] and ‘rewrite.’ There are a lot of sad moments in the film, which we really wanted. In the end, the story is the most important thing. It’s story first and funny second.”

© 2012 THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER.

Only a decade after it’s humble beginnings on Howard Street in New York’s Soho neighborhood, the influential, fashion-forward boutique Opening Ceremony now has outposts in L.A. and Tokyo (and eight-level department store, no less), its own private label and a legion of celebrity fans. To get the birthday party started, owners Humberto Leon and Carol Lim enlisted friend and loyal customer Kristen Wiig to don one of their top fall looks. “She’s a comedy icon and a true original,” says Leon of their unofficial style ambassador, whom they met four years ago through mutual pal Jason Schwartzman. “In addition to being funny, Kristen’s smart and gorgeous – the exact combo we strive for in our designs at Opening Ceremony.” Here, Wiig returns the compliments.

What recent finds have you come across at Opening Ceremony? It’s all so unique. Each piece feels like my personal, one-of-a-kind treasure. I just bought a striking peacock-shaped Pamela Love ring that I wear every day. I also love my sweater from one of the collaborations with Chloë Sevigny – it’s black cotton-cashmere with leather ruffles on the sleeves.

How has the store made a mark on your style over the years? We each strive to have an individual look, and the clothes I get from Opening Ceremony really allow me to express myself. They’re just so different from what other stores carry. Plus, it’s my absolute go-to place for great skinny and high-waist pants.

What’s your fashion motto? [Laughs] My motto is “Don’t ever have a motto!”

© 2012 Grace Lee, IN STYLE.

Wiig came to New York from Southern California in autumn 2005 to join the cast of Saturday Night Live, bringing with her a handful of impressions (Drew Barrymore, Björk, Jessica Simpson), a few characters she’d developed while with the influential Los Angeles improvisation group The Groundlings, and a secret fear that she’d soon be run out of town on a rail. “I remember being so scared,” she says, “that after I was done with those characters—if they made it on the show—that I wouldn’t have any other ideas.”

Yeah, that is not what happened.

Last year, Wiig obliterated prevailing wisdom in Hollywood—that women can’t front a blockbuster comedy—with Bridesmaids, the low-budget, bawdy female-buddy movie she cowrote (with Annie Mumalo) and starred in and which went on to bank $288 million worldwide. Since then, she’s become A-list fare, landing the female lead in upcoming features opposite both Ben Stiller (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and Robert DeNiro (The Comedian); her latest, the indie Imogene, should hit the festival circuit this fall. Her personal life is also enjoying a boon: In recent months, Wiig has embarked on what appears to be a deeply fulfilling romance with Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti.

Not overly inclined toward personal revelation—”I am shyer than most people think”—the 38-year-old Wiig states it plain nonetheless: “I will say that I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” she says, “and I feel very lucky right now.” Why? “Where I am now. Who he is. Those are the two big ones.”

© 2012 Chris Connelly, MARIE CLAIRE.

“Going to the Oscars was a major highlight this year,” says the 38-year-old New Yorker. “To hear my name and Annie’s [Mumolo, her writing partner] announced, after five years of writing and working on the film – it was surreal. Professionally, the reception of this film has allowed me opportunities I could only dream of and I am incredibly grateful. It all feels like one big highlight.”

But it’s the reaction of people on the street that’s touched Kristen the most. “People have told me that the film made them laugh and cry, and that the friendships really resonate with them,” she says. “For me there is no better compliment than that.”

© 2012 James Williams, GLAMOUR.

The same thing seems to have happened with the film Bridesmaids. It’s her first starring role, and she is fantastic — vulnerable, explosive and hilarious. Kristen, 38, was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance. Her first screenplay — insightful, brave, groundbreaking and also hilarious. Kristen and her wonderful partner Annie Mumolo are nominated for an Academy Award.

She never thought she was making a statement about women in comedy. Of course women in comedy have always been brilliant. Look at her old SNL castmates Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and Tina Fey. And that is just the women on one show!

For her, it was just about making a movie she could be proud of, and she labored over it tirelessly for half a decade. I guess coming fast out of the gate requires years of hard work that nobody but me gets to see. I am the lucky one.

© 2012 Judd Apatow, TIME.

By now, Perry’s path to phenom-hood is well known. Perry grew up in Santa Barbara, the second of three children born to evangelical ministers. She spent most of her early years shielded by her parents from the wayward influences of secular culture (i.e., no MTV, no Madonna, no deviled eggs), but soon discovered them on her own, got into music, and started singing and performing. She went to Nashville with her mother at 15, recorded the aforementioned singer-songwritery gospel album for a Christian imprint that went bust, then got signed and dropped by two other labels before dying her blonde hair dark, trading in her T-shirts and jeans for cleavage-y candy-colored mini-dresses, and arriving at the winky Kool-Aid sex-bomb incarnation of Katy Perry with which we’ve all now become familiar—the one who shrewdly parlayed the unexpected success of songs like “I Kissed a Girl” and “Ur So Gay” into a career that might now be best described as an exploding cottage industry awash in bubbles and glitter.

Perry’s songs are fun, upbeat, and frothy—a little teen-girl wacky, a little cartoon cute, a little Harajuku rebellious—but they’re also shot through with a razor-sharp wit. She has little time for longing or dwelling or vulnerability for its own sake; there is no quest for a love and happiness that might never come, no search for salvation from loneliness and melancholy in a cruel, chaotic world. Instead, she prefers to play—with hooks, with words, with her own sexuality—so much so that it’s easy to get lost ricocheting amongst all of the puns and double entendres. (Sample lyric from “Peacock”: “Come on baby let me see / What you hiding underneath / Are you brave enough to let me see your peacock . . .  / I wanna see your peacock, cock, cock.”) But as easy, breezy, and infectious as Perry’s songs can be, beneath the surface lurks a sea of mixed emotions, jumbled motives, and contradictory impulses complicated enough to fill a Carole King record. Perhaps what is most striking about Perry is her holistic hyper-awareness of pop stardom itself as a state where the aural and the visual work in concert to create the bright light of the star, and where swiping a hook from Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” and wearing a custom-made bra that shoots whipped cream out of your nipple areas—both of which Perry does in the video for “California Gurls”—are shrewd gestures made even more evocative when done together with conviction.

In January, a sixth single off Teenage Dream, “The One That Got Away,” reached the top spot on the Billboard pop charts, capping a banner year for Perry—albeit one that has not been without its ebbs: In December, her husband of 15 months, the British actor and comedian Russell Brand, filed for divorce. Nevertheless, Perry has soldiered on, wrapping her “California Dreams” tour, and preparing for the release this month of Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection, an expanded version of the album featuring an array of bonus tracks and extras.

Back home in Los Angeles, where she was fresh off a plane from South East Asia after playing the final two shows of her tour, the 27-year-old Perry spoke to Saturday Night Live and Bridesmaids star (and newly Oscar-nominated screenwriter) Kristen Wiig about coming to terms with her religious upbringing, the new challenges she faces, and why, despite the occasional crisis of faith, she has never stopped believing.

KRISTEN WIIG: Is this Katy Perry?

KATY PERRY: Kind of . . . [laughs] What’s up, chicken butt? Are you in the middle of some craziness at work?

WIIG: No, we don’t have a show this week. I’m at home.. What’s going on with you? Are you in L.A.?

PERRY: Yeah. I just got off of a flight from the Philippines about two hours ago. I’m being hung by my ankles right now—I need to do something to keep myself up.

WIIG: Were you singing and dancing around in little shorts?

© 2012 Kristen Wiig, INTERVIEW.

In both films, Hamm and Wiig play sex-happy, ill-fated partners dealing with the changes in their relationship as they grow older. And, though Hamm is less of an ass in “Friends With Kids” than he is in “Bridesmaids,” he comes out looking like the bad guy to a certain extent in both of the movies. It becomes clear while watching the and Wiig act opposite one another that the ability to portray that kind of descent into the bad parts of a relationship onscreen comes from a close friendship offscreen.

IFC had the chance to catch up with Hamm while he was promoting “Friends With Kids” and talk about his working association with Wiig. When the two previously mentioned ill-fated onscreen relationships were mentioned to Hamm, he burst out laughing. “Yeah, I love that one,” he said, meaning Wiig. “She’s a good girl, and so much fun to be opposite. But sometimes when things don’t work out is more fun.”

Though it seems as though the two actors have known one another for ages, it turns out that they only got to know each other after Hamm hosted “Saturday Night Live” back in 2008. Though Hamm admitted he and Wiig might have met before through mutual friends like Paul Rudd, it wasn’t until the “Man Men” star’s first “SNL” gig that the two of them really hit it off.

“We just clicked together on the first time I hosted, and we did a bunch of sketches together and then as I came back and hosted the show a couple more times, I don’t know, for whatever reason our energies just kind of flowed in the right way,” he said. “She’s so goddamn talented and it’s always fun to be in a scene with her, so when she asked me to do ‘Bridesmaids,’ I was like, ‘I will do whatever you want.’”

It was their rapport onscreen that convinced Hamm that Wiig was the right person to play his wife Missy in “Friends With Kids.” She tends to play outrageous characters in films and on “Saturday Night Live” that border on caricatures, so Hamm felt it was about time for her to act in a story that felt “real.”

“Not to say that she doesn’t do that, but just sad and a little more downbeat than she’s done,” he explained. “So when we cast her in this film, we were like, ‘I know you can do this. You’re going to be great.’”

And she is great in “Friends With Kids.” In one scene around a dinner table in the film, Wiig breaks down in a way that fans have never really had a chance to see before. But Wiig has obviously had the opportunity to show off her more serious side in films like “Extract,” “Whip It!” and, of course, in “Bridesmaids.”

Hamm couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful he thought Wiig’s performance and writing were in “Bridesmaids.” Her friend and onscreen costar gushed about how that performance is very similar in tone to the one she pulls off in “Friends With Kids.”

“I think that her work in ‘Bridesmaids’ was so fantastic and real and sad. As heightened and crazy as some of the scenes are in there, for me the most effective parts of that film and I think the reason why it really, really resonated with a larger audience was the fact that it was a story about a girl and a friendship with another girl,” he said. “The scene at the end when Kristen goes and finds Maya and they have that really heart-breaking talk about just, ‘I’m going to miss you and I love you,’ that stuff was the real kind of emotional core that the film was built on and she knocked it out of the park.”

And don’t expect their collaborations to stop anytime soon. Hamm just returned to “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend and it likely won’t be his last surprise appearance on the show.

“It was fun. It was really nice,” he said. “I was surprised that they asked, but very happy and it was great to see all those guys again and it was a fun show.”

© 2012 Terri Schwartz, IFC.com.

When comedy’s reigning godfather, Judd Apatow, was casting for the role of Katherine Heigl’s passive-aggressive female boss in Knocked Up, he called on Kristen Wiig. “We improvised on film for a few hours, and everything she did tore down the house,” he says. “I had never seen anything like it. And it wasn’t that people liked her because they knew who she was. It was just something that connected from the first line out of her mouth.”

Wiig’s universe has tilted on its axis since then. After the box-office hijack that was last summer’s Apatow-produced Bridesmaids (close to $300 million in grosses and counting), which Wiig co-wrote and starred in, everyone knows who she is. She’s like a stealth bomber who had been lobbing her comic grenades weekly on Saturday Night Live to a dedicated core of fans, then suddenly exploded in a blaze that lit up the whole sky.

Not that the preternaturally modest Wiig would ever willingly concede as much. “People assume your life changes more than it does,” she says. Then, when pushed, “If anything, people see me differently, and yes, there are opportunities.” Opportunities that include spreading her wings as a dramatic actress, in the upcoming Sean Penn–directed The Comedian, in which she stars as a retirement-home worker opposite Robert De Niro’s washed-up funnyman. “They bond over the fact they both have holes,” she says.

Wiig’s offstage diffidence is as marked as the all-out zaniness with which she throws herself into her characters in the sketches she writes and performs for SNL. (“For someone who’s very, very talented, she at times carries herself like an underdog,” says Apatow.) The thread is the way she pulls mumbling, underconfident women to the center of her comedy. “Her sense of humor can go to an almost bizarre level,” says Maya Rudolph, her former SNL colleague and her castmate in both Bridesmaids and this month’s ensemble comedy Friends with Kids. “But it’s combined with something quiet and slightly uncomfortable. She plays small, awkward moments so well.”

The layers that go into her performances, however extreme, are a key to Wiig’s ability to pack interest into even the lightest moment. “There’s a high-octane whimsy, an effortless imagination, and a seamlessness between what you look through to the joy or tragedy underneath,” says Penn. “She has the kind of mystery you generally associate with an actress and not so much with a comedienne.” Wiig starts out on an impression—of Michele Bachmann, for example (now sadly out of range)—by just listening to the voice, and avoids making fun of her subjects. “I try to make up my own version of a person,” she says. She’s out there without being kooky, and she understands that emotion—the surprise, winning ingredient of Bridesmaids—only makes the humor funnier.

Wiig landed at SNL at a time when the show had an unprecedented roster of female talent, including Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, and Rudolph (soon to return from maternity leave), but, says her costar Seth Meyers, “I don’t know if anyone ever showed up better equipped for the show than Kristen did. She was immediately great at it, and it’s a very hard job to be great at. Her characters were broad but built out of incredibly subtle observations.”

Thirty-eight-year-old Wiig grew up in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, came to comedy by accident, and took time to launch her career while honing her skills with the Groundlings improv group in Los Angeles, years in which she worked all manner of part-time jobs that no doubt fed into her repertoire of outrageously ordinary people and situations. The worst? “I answered phones in a law office,” she remembers. “This is going to make me sound so stupid, but the phone system was so confusing, I literally couldn’t figure it out. Someone explained it to me. . . . ‘OK-well-you-press-this-and-you-put-them-on-hold-and-you-have-to-trans­fer-them-through-this-thing-and-then-you-have-to-press-these-two-buttons-and-press-0-0. . . .’ ” She lasted a day.

Working at SNL, where she’s been for seven years, is by all accounts like diving into a pool, swimming underwater, and not coming up for air for eight months. “It’s a six-and-a-half-day week,” Wiig says, by the time you count the live show, the after-party, and the after-after party. “This year I’ve been an after-after sort of girl. Sometimes I need to blow off steam and go dance really hard.” The Saturday after she squeezes the Vogue shoot into her workweek, she will get home from the show at 2:00 a.m. to be picked up at 4:00 for a 6:00 a.m. flight to L.A., where she will immediately go into hair and makeup to appear at the Golden Globes, where she has been nominated as Best Actress in a Comedy for Bridesmaids. “I’m going to need a lot of under-eye work,” she deadpans. “Concealer.”

You’d never know it from the bad sweaters and slip-on shoes she wears as her SNL characters, but Wiig, who is waif-thin and pretty, is a fashion hound off-screen. She admires the idiosyncratic style of Alexa Chung and Chloë Sevigny and loves Alexander McQueen, Nina Ricci, Isabel Marant, and changing up her look. “Lately it’s been a seventies vibe with high-waisted pants and the blouses tucked in. Now I’m much more of a sneakers, sweatshirt, leather jacket. . . .” As for the Globes, she hasn’t decided what to wear yet. “I’m going for forties-sexy with a little bit of rock ’n’ roll and kind of a little ghostly,” she says cryptically. “I always say I want to look haunted.” (She ends up wearing a suitably spectral floaty and flesh-colored Bill Blass dress.)

Wiig is cagey about how long she will be staying at SNL now that her light has so definitively burst out from under its bushel. She is working on several scripts, including one with her Bridesmaids co-writer Annie Mumolo that she says won’t be a sequel. She would like to direct. And she’s feeling less afraid these days to take creative risks. “When you go out of your comfort zone and it works there’s nothing more satisfying.” Expectations of her are infinite. “I don’t go to a dinner party where people don’t refer to her as a genius,” says Penn. “She’s a writer, she can invent characters and stories, and she has a touch that translates. It’s her game to play.”

© 2012 Eve MacSweeney, VOGUE.