Laraine Newman on Scorsese Breakfasts, Mime Shame, and the Accidental Audition That Changed Everything

Laraine Newman did not know she was auditioning for Saturday Night Live. She was just doing a scene night at a little theater before the group even had a name yet, before it was the Groundlings, back when it was an improv workshop on Vermont run by a guy named Gary Austin. Lorne Michaels was in the audience. She didn’t know. She bombed her improv. Didn’t matter. He came back and hired her anyway. That’s the story, and it’s a better origin myth than most people manufacture on purpose.

Newman shows up on Multiple Talking Women, the cheerfully chaotic podcast hosted by Paula Gerkin, Felicity Bramble Bush, and Lana Brown, and the whole thing operates at a frequency somewhere between a real interview and a bit that got out of hand. The hosts spend the first several minutes pretending Newman is there to reupholster a VO booth. Newman plays along with complete commitment. It’s a reasonable preview of what she’s like: dry, specific, unbothered, and funnier than she’ll admit to being.

The Diner, the Movie, the Acquaintance

The Scorsese story is the one that lands hardest, partly because of how casually Newman drops it. She was going to breakfast at a place called Dukes in LA, family-style seating, and Martin Scorsese happened to be there with her boyfriend, along with Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones because that was apparently just what the diner was like. She got friendly enough with Scorsese that he invited her to an unedited cut of Mean Streets, no music yet, rough. She returned the favor by inviting him to a scene night. Her improv bombed completely. But he spotted Valerie Curtin, a cousin of Jane Curtin’s, and cast her in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. So Newman’s worst performance of her life was indirectly responsible for someone else’s career break. She remembers thinking, in sequence: I’m a failure, I’m not funny, I never was, who do I think I am.

I thought all those things. Yeah. I’m a failure. I’m not funny. I never was. Who do I think I am?

What’s interesting is that she says all of this without the therapeutic overlay that most performers bring to stories like this now. No pivot to the lesson learned, no reframe about resilience. She just goes boop boop boop boop boop and describes the internal spiral like it’s a known weather pattern. Then the hosts immediately relate it to their own amateur showcase failures, and Newman gently, precisely, declines to say they’re the same. She’s encouraging. She’s also honest.

Shame, Mime, and the SNL Teasing

The mime thing she does not love talking about. At 16, she saw Marcel Marceau perform at Royce Hall, went backstage, asked him directly if anyone in LA could teach her mime, and followed the recommendation to a teacher named Richmond Shepard who also taught improv. That improv training, routed through mime of all things, is what eventually led her to the Groundlings and then SNL. The cast found out about the mime background and the teasing was, in her word, just. She trails off. You get the picture.

When the people at SNL found out that I had done that, the teasing was just… you know.

She does demonstrate mime technique at the hosts’ request, lifting a coffee cup with the kind of anchored, muscle-memory specificity that makes everyone in the room fall quiet for a second. The cup is there until she puts it down. That’s the rule. It’s a small thing and somehow it’s the most clarifying moment in the episode about what decades of physical discipline actually looks like.

Raising Performers Without a Roadmap

Newman’s daughter Marin is a comedian. Her son Spike, who she mentions went to college with filmmaker and comedian Julio Torres, has collaborated with him across multiple projects. Newman’s parenting philosophy, as described here, amounted to: swap out Radio Disney for Maria Bamford and Patton Oswalt albums on the school run, model a work ethic, and otherwise stay out of the way. She did not tell her kids they were special. She exposed them to things.

No. I just exposed them to things like when I would drive them to grammar school, if I had to listen to Radio Disney one more time, I was going to blow my brains out.

The episode ends with Newman coaching the hosts through a cold read of an actual Saint Elsewhere scene that someone’s son pulled off the internet because the hosts do not know how to use computers. The scene is genuinely strange, involving estrogen in hamburgers and early puberty, and the acting notes Newman gives are real and specific and kind. Be in plays, she says, when asked for advice to anyone starting out. Get seen. And maybe, just maybe, learn to mime. The cup is still there if you need it.