Mare of Easttown star Jean Smart loved SNL 's 'Murdur Durdur' parody: 'It was hysterical!'
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and that's why it's no surprise Mare of Easttown star Jean Smart loved SNL's "Murdur Durdur" parody. Plus ... well, that was just one of SNL's best sketches in recent years!
When Smart connected with SNL star Bowen Yang for Variety's Actors on Actors series, Yang asked her if she had seen the show's Mare of Easttown-inspired sketch "Murdur Durdur," and her answer did not disappoint.
"Kate [Winslet] sent it to me," Smart said. "It was hysterical!"
As Mare of Easttown's buzz continued to rise in early May, SNL parodied the HBO Max thriller brilliantly with Kate McKinnon playing Winslet's role as a "grizzled lady detective" trying to solve the murder of a young woman in Delaware County, Pa., "very specific accent" and all. However no one attempted to parody Smart's role as the Fruit Ninja-loving, manhattan-chugging great-grandmother Helen, because why mess with perfection?
Yang also said that he felt the very specific "Delco" accent on display in "Murdur Durdur" and Mare of Easttown "to be - I'm not even joking, like beautiful. I find it to be a gorgeous oral posture. It's just a rich way of speaking."
Smart added that the "seed" of the Delco accent she had to perform on Mare of Easttown "was somewhere in my subconscious" because she planned to audition for the part of Bradley Cooper's mother in David O. Russell's film Silver Linings Playbook.
"It's the same accent, and so I had to get a dialect coach; I had two copies of the book," Smart said. "I got a hotel room the night before so I could practice and I could be right near where I had to go to get the tape down. And as I was walking out the door to go to the casting director's office, she called me and said, 'Oh, David cast it last night. It's OK.'"
At least Smart finally got to pay off all her hard accent prep work with Mare of Easttown - which ultimately gave us the beauty that is "Murdur Durdur."
Related content:
