nostalgicphile replied to your post:Imagine if either Gillian or David hosted SNL, and...
Please share two or three of the 50 thousand other things??
Oh, man. Where do I start.
Well, even just in an SNL context. One thing I want is for Gillian to host (she’s due) and David to be in the audience asking obnoxious questions. And either she has to tersely brush him off, or he’s wearing a fake mustache or something and pretending to be someone else, or pretending to be an X-Files fan (that is a cliche but a reliable one), or, the possibilities are endless. Heck, he could switch out wigs and be a creepy fan of XF, Hannibal, The Fall and her BBC stuff respectively (you know, the Hannibal guy would ask something murdery; the BBC guy you could do some PBS-ish riff about tote bags or something; I don’t know what I’d do for the Fall one, hmm). Or one scenario I have imagined to the last detail in my head considered is, the whole gag is that it’s finally Gillian’s time to host and she’s all doing her thing in the monologue and then David pops onstage and tries to mansplain hosting to her and tell her how it’s done (since he’s done it a couple times) and she gets mad and they get in a big (fake) argument/power struggle about it. This would work much better now that the notion of them not getting along has gone from “actual circumstance that makes everyone sad and uncomfortable” to “hilarious joke that we get the giggles over on a talk show.”
I’m not going to go too deeply into the well of SNL possibilities because I could nerd out all day long. I will say that I DON’T want her/them on the now-apparently-recurring sketch where three people are relating their abduction experiences and for two of them it was beautiful and mysterious and then Kate McKinnon’s is hilariously gross. One, the second installment of that was disappointing and I wish it had been left at just the first one because it was perfect. Two, they are basically out of premises already (they did alien abduction and near-death experience). Three, logically Gillian (or Gillian and David) would go in the straight-man slot where Aidy Bryant is now and that would be boring. Basically, it would be all about Kate McKinnon being hilarious, which is great of course (and generally my favorite thing on SNL these days) but would not be exciting from a GA (or GA/DD) standpoint.
On the other hand, i would like to see Gillian do the Girlfriends Talk Show sketch with Aidy and Cecily. She could be a mean girl. Or a baby nerd. Or really anything. That would be an example of something that I feel like would let her get funny but not be like, a straight impression or require her to kind of imitate someone else’s character. That’s just one thought. I would also be down to have her parody any/the general vibe of her BBC period stuff. I feel like she has done enough of that stuff that she would nail the fuck out of a spoof of it.
OK, enough SNL. I once posted about stuff I would love to see DD and GA do together outside of XF. All of that still stands -- to sum up, my suggestions were basically: gritty drama where they are in an unhealthy/dysfunctional relationship of some kind; modern romcom where they have minor normal-people problems and some kind of familiar relationship like maybe exes; something where they play siblings.
Basically, what I CRAVE to see them do together is something that has a realism and verité kind of quality. I want them messy, swearing, un-made-up; I want improvised start-and-stop dialogue; I want romantic complications; I want addiction and other difficulty; I want realistic hurt feelings; I want personal failings. I want to see them break out of the XF, as Gillian has taken to tactfully putting it, “formal” model, which not only encompasses CC’s dialogue but also the general mythic-level kind of “hero quest” vibe of that show (which, to clarify, I LOVE, but I want to see them do something that isn’t that). I am DYING to see them do that. When Gillian has a new role, the less campy it is and the more normal-modern-day-human her styling is (and the less they have her playing a stonefaced alpha boss type, which I’m officially tired of yo), the more excited I get. Any kind of precious indie thing that they were in, I would be ecstatic about. (Please no Wes Anderson. Not that kind of indie.) And/or, I kind of want David to write/direct something and cast her in it because I would be fascinated to see what kind of stuff he writes for her/what he sees as her strengths or the kind of character she would be good at playing. So let’s do all of that.
And like, I would certainly TAKE a sex scene...I’m not saying I WOULDN’T... 👀 👀 👀 but, really I just want to see them act the fuck out of something together that isn’t Mulder and Scully. Just to see how they would do that. As I said in the older post, I think it would be really hard for them (to access their non-XF acting toolkits with each other) and that would be interesting for meeeeeeee.
Anyway, to get back to the original point of this: It’s not that I DON’T want them to do an I Love Lucy thing, but I don’t personally have a big interest in that show and the general vibe of it is not something I am a particularly huge fan of (confession: I was never a huge lover of that shoot she did that included the Lucy stuff; now it’s everywhere again and I’m like, of all the photoshoots...), so even though I LOVE that she/David/CC are always referencing them as Ricky and Lucy (and I’m dying over “He’s funny, and I’m an idiot”), I like the IDEA of them teaming up to do something push-and-pull/snappy/sparky/funny more than I would be excited about a literal tribute. Also I don’t want David attempting to do a Cuban accent, heh.