The Saturday Night Live alum and mom of two is happily starring in American Auto, a new NBC sitcom about a quirky group of executives and employees of a major Detroit-based auto company trying to adjust to a rapidly shifting industry. Gasteyer plays Katherine Hasting, the new CEO from Big Pharma, who gets high marks for her bold leadership and business savvy, which is offset by her complete ignorance about cars. (The character doesn’t even drive!) The show, written and created by Justin Spitzer (Superstore and The Office), made its primetime debut on Dec. 13, 2021. “It’s a great, really fun cast that is smartly written, it moves quickly,” Gasteyer exclusively tells Parade.com about the show. “Hopefully, we’ll all be in real offices soon so that we can find it even more relatable.” The starring role comes after Gasteyer spent much of the past going on two years home with her family. “For me, it was enormous,” she says about the quality time she and her family spent in quarantine. “I got to spend an extra year with my daughter before she went to college. One thing they don’t tell you in drama school is that this is a really itinerant life, and I was gone a lot when she was little. I did three series that were not in New York so I spent a lot of time away from her. So, it was really lovely for me to be able to just be consistently home and to know that I wasn’t going to have to pick up and pull the anchor out of the blue to go do a job. We could plan a little bit.” She continues, “We were able to plan on American Auto, for example. When they picked it up, we knew it would be coming in July, so I knew I could organize my life and my family around that and that was lovely. And then to have my husband working from home was lovely because, again, we were connected around lunchtime and dinner time every day, which many people I know talk about that sweet aspect apart from the loss and sadness.” That pause was also a stark contrast to how Gasteyer has frequently worked, with the pedal to the medal (car pun intended). “I knew very early that writing was going to be a really big piece of what I ended up doing. Writing my own meal ticket is how I ended up working a lot—it definitely led to things,” she explains. (Case in point: She and fellow SNL veteran Rachel Dratch co-wrote a Christmas parody movie called A Clusterfunke Christmas that should come out later this year.) While pursuing a career in television or film comedy can be more than daunting, Gasteyer has some sage advice to share with girls and young women. “You are the person who has to determine your own positive signposts,” she says. “Anything that we do we can assess as not meaningful or meaningful. And believe me, the internet will tell you it’s not meaningful as fast as it will tell you it’s meaningful." “So, when you accomplish something that you put out in front of yourself,” Gasteyer says, “you have to tell yourself that it’s a positive signpost, that you’re going in the right direction.” Read on for Ana Gasteyer’s exclusive interview with Parade.com on comedy, family, American Auto, and life lessons from COVID-19.
Why were you interested in American Auto?
I was attracted to this show because I have always wanted to do a workplace comedy. I think NBC does it incredibly well and after years of success with it, knows the structure. Justin Spitzer is coming straight off of Superstore, but he also wrote for The Office for a long time. Frankly, I just loved the pilot, I thought it was smart, and that it was an NBC workplace comedy, but for 2021. It had moved forward with regard to social issues and things like that; which I really appreciated.
Does it remind you of The Office or any other shows?
Obviously, it has a tonal quality or a structural quality that’s similar. Each show takes a minute to develop its own tone. I know Michael Scott was the boss. It was a paper company in The Office, it was lower stakes; it was a small, American business. This is big, big business. Our show is really calling out corporate culture and making fun of the people who are making these huge decisions. They are accountable to their shareholders and they’re accountable to the board, but apart from that, they’re making huge decisions that impact real people every single day. It’s kind of interesting to look at a workplace comedy more from the standpoint of corporate culture and what goes on and who these people really are that are making these massive decisions that impact all of us all the time.
How did you approach your character?
She’s a female CEO so there’s a lot to have fun with there because I think she is really competent but I think she’s also really trying to prove herself in essentially what is still a man’s world. Even though I know the opportunities are increasing for women in the workplace, not that many exist at the level that she does in that Fortune 500. I think there’s only like 8 percent or something of female CEOs still at this point. So, she’s got a lot of confidence but a lot of secret fear. Also, she comes from big pharma so she has quite a bit of swagger that she has no problem exercising.
What are some of your earliest TV memories that still resonate with you today?
The first real family tradition we had was gathering around the television for Carol Burnett on Saturday nights. I remember it very well from the ‘70s.
How important is it for you to be a role model for the next generation?
I remember when I was on SNL, a girl wrote me and said, “I’m Indian so my parents said there’s no work for me.” The reality is you can’t control who’s going to cast you or why, but that’s why I always say write, write, write, write, write because at least you’re controlling your own narrative around it. Certainly, with things like YouTube and TikTok, there are outlets that we didn’t have when we were little if you want to put your mind to it.
What type of work were you finding at the very start of your career?
I started booking voiceover jobs on radio commercials. To me, I may as well have won an Oscar for how meaningful that felt to me because I knew I was doing work that actors do and I was being paid, I was cashing a paycheck that was a professional paycheck. Again, it’s just what are those positive signposts. Walking out of an audition and getting feedback that you didn’t get the job but the casting director really liked you. You have to listen to the second part of that. A casting director who likes you, if you’ve proven yourself over and over again, they’re doing their job, too, and they want to be represented by the talent that’s good when they take it to the creatives.
What kind of feedback are you getting on American Auto?
People are loving it. It’s very smart, it’s very topical, it’s fast-moving. I think it’s very representative. My husband works in advertising so I think for him and his colleagues it’s really resonating in a fun way because he recognizes the kind of hemming and hawing that happens at the corporate level. Justin does such a nice job of hand-wringing on behalf of doing the right thing but then at the end of the day just doing what’s better for the company and the bottom line. I think there’s a lot of comedy to be mined there and it’s been really fun to sort of play that ambivalence of I think I want to do the right thing but actually no, I just want to get paid and get home. It definitely lampoons the cynical nature of American corporate culture. I don’t think it’s a cynical show, I actually think it’s pretty upbeat. All workplace comedies at the end of the day are sort of about making peace with situations that we’re not comfortable with. You’re thrown into a situation with people that you wouldn’t choose, necessarily, and you have to make it work. There’s a sense of collaboration that comes through in every episode, and I love that. I love that it really starts to become about the cast. Last night I was following Twitter actually during my favorite episode, 106. I was following the Twitter chat and it’s nice because people are starting to really refer to us as our character names, which is to me is a sign that people are becoming familiar and comfortable, these characters are starting to feel like someone they’ve known for a while.
How do you relate to your American Auto character?
Listen, I’m not very much like Katherine but there are things about her I really admire. What I admire about CEOs is this kind of confidence in their decisions. They’re moving fast and they have to commit hard, even if it’s the wrong decision, they do it. There’s something sort of great about that. I also love the blind faith she has to put in the people who work for her. She’s the CEO of an automotive company, she doesn’t know anything about cars and she doesn’t drive. But to her, that’s not really what’s important. What’s important is how she manages the stock price and manages the public image and the parts that she understands. It’s fun to just have her go into situations where she has to trust the people around her, and the show really deals with that. She would be screwed if she fired these people because she needs to know the knowledge that they have.
How did the cast of your show bond?
One thing about bit ensemble shows is the hours are very long and you get to know each other real fast on a 14-hour day. We were consistently doing that week after week for 10 episodes in a row. Because we had been tested together we could go to dinner together, we could do things together on the weekends, which was really nice. It’s also a really sweet group of people. There were a bunch of new babies during the time that we were together hanging out with them; so, all of this bonded us in a big way.
Can you share a favorite memory from Saturday Night Live?
I would never be able to pick one. As the years go by, I’m more and more grateful that I had the opportunity to be on that show. It was six years of just incredible training, no other way to put it. Connections to amazing writers, witnessing high-pressure decisions. Besides just the massive opportunities that it gave me it just changed the way that I look at the world in the best possible way.
Are you still friends with your SNL co-stars?
Ana Gasteyer: Many. Particularly the women I have stayed very close to. I think there was a unique bond coming through that institution at a time when there weren’t that many female voices. Yeah, we spend a lot of time together, actually. It’s a strange sorority to be a part of; I’m really proud of it. Next, Resident Alien’s Sara Tomko Reveals the Crazy Way She Prepped to Become Nurse Asta Twelvetrees
