Maya Rudolph’s Parents Are Entertainment Legends, But “There Was No Direct Line” to Making It Big

When you think about it, everyone is someone’s nepo baby, including Saturday Night Live icon Maya Rudolph. However, as she shared on an episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast published Monday, it doesn’t really matter if you’re not going into the same industry your parents excelled in.

Rudolph, 51, is the daughter of successful songwriters and musicians Richard Rudolph and the late Minnie Riperton, best known for the single “Lovin’ You.”

“They were musicians,” she said, explaining that despite her parents’ success, she didn’t get a leg up. “They weren’t actors.”

“My trajectory was, I wanted to go to New York, and I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live.”

“That’s a huge undertaking,” she said. “I wasn’t like, ‘Oh my dad writes songs, that’s gonna make me a comedian.’ There was no direct line. I knew I had to get there myself.”

Rudolph was only six years old when Riperton died of breast cancer in 1979 at the age of 31. “So when I started doing SNL, people didn’t really know she was my mom, and they figured it out later,” Rudolph said. “So, look, when you’re a kid and your mom dies, you don’t want people to know that.”

“I’ll never get over how young she was,” she added.

Rudolph parlayed an early career with the legendary improv group The Groundlings into a seven-year stint on Saturday Night Live, from 2000 to 2007, starred in films like Bridesmaids, and is now leading Loot, the second season of which premieres in May on Apple TV+.

One place where Rudolph’s connections and friendships do come in handy, however, is in getting to have the best coworkers ever. She discussed working with old friends like Melissa McCarthy and Nat Faxon, as well as SNL castmates Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, for work that she described as “playing” and a “group sport” with teammates she knows and trusts.

“As much as I want to feel good, I wanna feel safe,” she said. “I think I got better at it after I had Pearl when I had my oldest daughter. I remember thinking how hard it was to be working away from home when I had a baby at home and how painful that was. If you’re doing something that doesn’t feel good. And so I remember teaching myself, when you go out in the world, make sure you’re happy with what you’re doing because you would rather be at home with her. It has to be worth it. And that’s not to say that it’s that easy to always accomplish, but it’s certainly the goal. And if you can do that, it makes a world of difference. Plus, we have the luxury of knowing so many fucking funny people.”