Paula Pell’s Hot Streak

Two weeks after the comedy writer and performer Paula Pell moved to the Hudson Valley, last month, along with her wife, four dogs, and a cat, she heard a crash out back. “Five minutes later, there is a bleeding man on our front porch in swim trunks,” she recalled recently. “Second fucking week, and this guy is bleeding all over our porch, saying, ‘I got disoriented on the trail.’ And he was so lying. He had broken into the guesthouse and cut himself.” Pell called the paramedics, and the guy was arrested. “But the beautiful thing about it is that then we met all the neighbors,” she went on. “They were all coming over, going, ‘I’m vaccinated! Can I hug you? Don’t be scared!’ ”

The move was already chaotic, coinciding with the première of “Girls5eva,” the hit Peacock sitcom about a Spice Girls-era pop group that reunites two decades after its prime. Pell plays the member least suited to middle-aged fame, a divorced lesbian dentist. In reality, Pell, at fifty-eight, is on a hot streak. After eighteen years writing for “Saturday Night Live,” where she had a hand in creating such characters as the Spartan cheerleaders and the omelette mascot played by Justin Timberlake, she’s been gaining recognition onscreen—often alongside her more famous “S.N.L.” colleagues, including Tina Fey, an executive producer of “Girls5eva,” and Amy Poehler, who directed her in “Wine Country.” “I’m so used to writing and then watching someone else do my funny,” she said, cradling a Chihuahua-dachshund mix named Ernie.

Pell wore a blue shift and hot-pink clogs, her silver hair in pigtails. Letting in a visitor, she apologized for the boxes, and the barking, and the lack of groceries. Her wife, Janine Brito, who is also a comedy writer (for the Ted Danson sitcom “Mr. Mayor”), stirred mac and cheese. The two met on Twitter and got together after Pell, depressed in West Hollywood after a divorce, took herself on a retreat to Joshua Tree. Brito was also depressed and in Joshua Tree. Pell sent her a direct message: “Would you like to be my friend on the playground? I’m really good at kickball, and I think boys are gross.” They’d been planning a big wedding when the pandemic hit, and they decided to hunker down in Asheville. “We got a motor home and thought it would be a real fun lesbian activity to bring all our animals to North Carolina, and it was a living nightmare,” Pell said. “Think of the most turbulence you have ever experienced in a plane and multiply it—that’s how it was the entire four days.”

They got married in November, at Asheville’s city hall. By then, their quiet pandemic plans had been upended; Pell had been called to New York to film “Girls5eva” and then to Los Angeles for “A.P. Bio,” on which she plays a tactless school administrator. (Her specialty is deadpan, winded, and guilelessly coarse.) Before “S.N.L.,” Pell had acted at theme parks, and now she’s become nostalgic for other things she did in her twenties, like playing piano and wearing Elizabeth Taylor Passion. “I even bought weed again!” she said. She pulled out three shoeboxes of photos. “This is a place I worked called Adventurers Club,” she said, holding a shot from the eighties. “It was at Pleasure Island, a nighttime complex at Disney World.” This was during a brief phase she called “going down Penis Avenue.” Next: “This was a Dutch boyfriend I had a massive crush on. He looked like a tall lesbian. Don’t tell him that.”

In 1995, she was acting in a “Murder, She Wrote” stage show at Universal Studios Florida, when someone at “S.N.L.” saw a pilot that she had appeared in. She was flown to New York; the show was looking for a female writer. “I said, ‘I don’t know how to use a computer. I’m not your man!’ ” Her acting life went dormant while she helped other people shine, as with Rachel Dratch and her signature character, Debbie Downer. Pell said, “It was based on people at our workplace who would come in with bad news: ‘Did you guys hear what happened in China?’ ” The pandemic, she observed, has been a boom time for Debbies: “They’re, like, ‘Did you guys hear about the variant?’ ” Womp-womp.

Fey had told Pell about “Girls5eva” when the show was in development, but she didn’t imagine she’d be in it. “Because I know that they always get on the phone with the agents, who are, like, ‘It has to be Melissa McCarthy, or someone that has a name.’ ” Now that she has a name, she’s embracing small-town anonymity. “We love meeting people here who are, like, ‘What do you do?’ And we’re, like, ‘We are both architects.’ ” She added, in a stage whisper, “ ‘Of laughter.’ ” ♦