Will Ferrell reflects on dressing in drag on ‘SNL’

Will Ferrell wouldn’t want to bring one of his “Saturday Night Live” characters into the modern era.
The “Step Brothers” star, 57, in an interview with The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast shared some regrets about his 1990s “SNL” sketches where he dressed as a woman to portray then-Attorney General Janet Reno. The podcast’s host suggested this character hits a “false note” today, and Ferrell seemed to agree.
“Yeah, that’s something I wouldn’t choose to do now,” he said.
Ferrell spoke on the podcast alongside Harper Steele, a former “SNL” writer. The two star in the new Netflix documentary “Will & Harper,” in which they take a road trip together after Steele reveals to Ferrell, her longtime friend, that she is a trans woman.
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Ferrell, an “SNL” cast member from 1995 to 2002, played Reno in numerous sketches, typically while wearing a dress. Speaking alongside Ferrell, Steele told the Times that these sketches would get a laugh because, “Hey, look at this guy in a dress, and that’s funny.”
“It’s absolutely not funny,” Steele said. “It’s absolutely a way that we should be able to live in the world.”
At the same time, Steele expressed support for actors being allowed to have a “sense of play,” adding, “I am purple-haired woke, but I do wonder if sometimes we take away the joy of playing when we take away some of the range that some performers, especially comedy performers, can do.”
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Without getting into specifics, Ferrell said he expects he would regret “a fair amount” of the comedy in his “SNL” episodes if he looked back on them today.
“I mean, in a way, the cast − you’re kind of given this assignment. So I’m going to blame the writers,” he joked.
Janet Reno, who died 2016, was more than 6 feet tall. In an interview with The Washington Post in 1998, Ferrell acknowledged, “If the attorney general were a man, would we be doing this sketch? Probably not. And let’s say if a Madeleine Albright, a short little, quote ‘normal’ woman was the attorney general, I don’t know if we … It’s weird. I hate to break it down into something as simple as the fact that she’s tall, but it’s almost as simple as that.”
Ferrell isn’t the only “SNL” alum who feels iffy looking back on some old material.
Earlier this year, Dana Carvey apologized to Sharon Stone on his podcast for a 1992 sketch where he played a man trying to convince her character to remove different articles of clothing in airport security.
Looking back on it, Carvey joked, “The comedy that we did in 1992 with Sharon Stone, we would be literally arrested now.”