Building your professional toolkit is not an overnight task. For actress/writer/comedienne Kerri Kenney-Silver, even though she continues to adapt with more dramatic work like “The Four Seasons,” she still holds true to what she learned when pursuing sketch comedy in college: Know how to do it all.
Speaking to IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking for the latest episode of “What No One Tells You,” Kenney-Silver said of her early years in comedy, “You are doing everything. You are the prop master. You are doing your own makeup. You’re slapping on wigs. You’ve got Ziplocs full of mustaches.”
The sketch group Kenney-Silver joined at New York University would go on to become the beloved comedy troupe The State, which also featured David Wain, Joe Lo Truglio, Thomas Lennon, Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, and Ken Marino. When they were just starting out in 1992, every aspect of their performances were self-curated. They would bring their own costumes and use lamps from their parents’ living room. Even their venture into video came because Wain learned how to work his father’s video camera.
“This was so beneficial to us in our careers in the following years because now as a showrunner and producer of my own shows,” said Kenney-Silver, “I am really able to understand when a department comes to me and says, ‘We’re not able to do this.’ I can shift quicker to what I think might be possible.”
This was particularly useful when Kenney-Silver and other members of The State went on to create the hit cop satire “Reno 911!” Because the show relied heavily on improv, she knew how to edit in her head rather than waste time letting things play out. Moreover, in understanding the machine around her, she can better serve her role as a performer.
“It helps you when you know about budget and why things are happening, why we can’t have this, so that we can instead have this,” Kenney-Silver said. “It’s better for the production. And also as an actor, it’s great to actually know what’s happening around you.”
Watch Kenney-Silver’s episode of “What No One Tells You” below.
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