Kristen Wiig Tells Amy Poehler She Packed Up Her Car After a Dollar-a-Minute Psychic Told Her to Move to LA

Kristen Wiig packed up her car because a guy called Psychic Mike, charging a dollar a minute out of a spiritual bookstore in Tucson, held her ring and told her she should have been in LA a year ago. She went home, called her roommate, drugged her cat, and drove west without telling her parents. This is not a metaphor for creative courage. It actually happened. And somehow it is the most Kristen Wiig origin story imaginable: a little chaotic, a little woo, completely committed, and funnier in retrospect than it seemed at the time.

Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang operates on a simple and winning premise: two people who genuinely like each other, talking. No manufactured tension, no promotional pivot every four minutes. The Wiig episode is the show at its best because Wiig is, by her own admission, someone who avoids exactly this kind of thing. She is not a natural raconteur. She said so herself, and her husband confirmed it. What she is, instead, is a deeply funny person who thinks in images and keeps letting them slip out sideways, which turns out to be better than any polished story.

She Came In Fully Formed and She Knew It

Bill Hader opens the episode via Zoom, recruited to talk about Wiig behind her back, and he lands the sharpest observation of the whole hour before Wiig even shows up. He describes watching her at SNL table reads for seven years and never seeing the same thing twice, then tries to explain what made her so distinct. It was not that she worked harder or was more prepared. It was that she seemed to find everything genuinely funny and didn’t much care whether the room agreed.

She was just being goofy. But it didn’t seem disposable at the same time though. And that’s really hard. It was like wow that’s a thing I’m going to remember and that was fun. But she’s still just loose and having fun with it.

Wiig, when Poehler asks her about it directly, essentially confirms this without meaning to. Will Forte told her early on to stop writing for what she thought other people would find funny, and she took that advice so completely it became her whole operating system. Her answer to the confidence question is almost suspiciously clean.

I don’t see it as confidence. I think I just kind of I don’t know. I’m just talking.

Sure. That tracks for someone who showed up to SNL three shows into a season, watched Lance Armstrong’s episode from the floor on a Friday, and was on air by the following week. She describes the experience of arriving at 30 Rock and knowing nobody and nothing as being dropped into a very well-run emergency room where everyone has a part and you are just in everyone’s way. Poehler points out that there was also, separately, anthrax in the building. Just as a bonus.

The Salt Lake Intervention

Poehler has never watched Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Wiig considers this a correctable problem. The episode spends a surprising and delightful stretch with Wiig attempting to brief Poehler on the Jen Shaw FBI sprinter van scene, a piece of reality television so dense with plot that summarizing it live, on a podcast, without visual aids, while a fly circles the set, turns out to be nearly impossible. They watch a clip anyway. Nobody on the van removes their sunglasses the entire time.

And not one person took their sunglasses off the whole time. No, Amy. They can’t.

Wiig’s theory on why reality television is more relaxing than scripted work is genuinely thought through. With acting, she says, you’re watching someone who has studied a scene, shot a scene, edited it down to the best version. With reality it’s just: this just happened. These two people are talking and this lady said that thing. There’s effort in one and not the other, and after a day of effort, you want the thing without it. This is also the same person who cannot watch any film without noticing when the hair continuity is off, so the relaxation has its limits.

Inanimate Objects, Ghosts, and Getting Your House Ghostbusted Online

Late in the episode, the two of them discover they share an extremely specific tendency: feeling sorry for inanimate objects. Wiig’s version involves allergy pill packs, and one pill left alone on one side while the others have been together the whole time. Poehler rotates her stuffed animals so none of them spend too long facing the wall. Neither of them seems even slightly embarrassed about this. Both of them seem to recognize it as probably connected to something.

Well, that one’s been by itself for so long. And I feel like he thought that was cute, but I wonder if he was like, oh no.

Wiig believes in ghosts, past lives, and astral projection. She has had her house ghostbusted by someone online, a friend’s referral, and swears the house felt different afterward. Poehler respects ghosts and would prefer not to encounter any personally. On the spectrum of celebrity supernatural beliefs this is all fairly mild, but the specificity of the online ghostbuster, the friend in New Mexico, the asking for the number immediately, makes it funnier than any bit they could have written. Psychic Mike really did start a chain reaction.