It’s hard enough to plan a weekend getaway with friends—and even harder when those friends are moms. That’s why longtime pals Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph have only been on two trips together.
One was a jaunt to Palm Springs, California, where Rudolph was bitten by a black widow spider and EMTs needed to be called. The other was a gals’ getaway to wine country in California’s Napa Valley that Poehler, Rudolph and a few other fellow female Saturday Night Livealums took for Rachel Dratch’s 50th birthday three years ago.
And the minute they all got on the plane together, “it was simply right back where we left it, the last time we were together,” says Rudolph, 46. By the end of their trip, they’d had so many laughs, running jokes and robust conversations, they started bouncing around the idea of making a movie about it. The result: this month’s new Netflix film Wine Country (in select theaters May 8; streaming May 10), directed by Poehler, 47.
Of course, before the movie could be shot, it had to be planned. “Truly,” says Poehler, “the hardest part of the movie was getting everybody scheduled, ’cause everyone was so busy.” Including, of course, Poehler and Rudolph.
Poehler is raising her two sons, Archie, 10, and Abel 8, with her ex-husband, actor Will Arnett. (They were married from 2003 to 2016.) Rudolph is a mom of four—daughters Pearl, 13, Lucille, 9, and Minnie, 5; and son Jack, 7—with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Phantom Thread, There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love. (They’ve been together for more than 17 years.)
“I feel like, once you have children who are in school, and their schedules…” how can you plan anything? Rudolph says. “It takes a lot to corral this particular group,” she adds, “and Amy was absolutely the perfect person to do it.”
Wine, Women & Weekends
Wine Country is an art-imitates-life story of a group of longtime girlfriends who, well, travel to Napa to celebrate their friend’s 50th birthday. In addition to Poehler, Rudolph and Dratch, it also stars Tina Fey, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell and the film’s co-writers, Emily Spivey and Liz Cackowski.
“It’s an adult comedy and an exploration of female friendship,” says Poehler, who then deadpans, “It’s like The Four Seasons [a 1981 Alan Alda/Carol Burnett comedy about couples on vacation] meets Apocalypse Now.”
Poehler plays a high-strung cruise director who over-plans the perfect trip; Rudolph is a busy mother who drinks too much wine to deal with her health and family anxieties. Gasteyer, a Saturday Night Live cast member from 1996 to 2002, portrays a successful entrepreneur focused on closing a big business deal in the course of the weekend. Dratch (SNL 1999–2006) was cast close to real life as the birthday gal, who in the movie begs for a low-key diversion from her advancing age. And Fey, who spring-boarded from nearly 10 years on SNL to the hit TV series 30 Rock, plays their brusque but lonely house-rental host, who pops in more often than expected. Veteran SNL writers Pell and Spivey round out the housemates.
The movie also features appearances by Jason Schwartzman and Greg Poehler, Amy’s younger brother (who currently stars in the Audience network’s romcom You Me Her).
“Creatively, it felt nice for this group to reunite,” says Rudolph of the gathering, “because this is kind of a reflection of where we are in our lives. We do wanna focus on our long-term friendships.”
Movies and TV shows like this—about real women in their 40s and 50s—“don’t necessarily fall under zeitgeisty, topical headlines,” says Poehler, but they’re the ones she’s most drawn to. “I am hungering, always, for women onscreen whom I recognize or relate to or identify with. And there are six very strong female protagonists in this movie who all have very interesting emotional lives and who aren’t fighting over a job or a guy.” Plus, she adds, the older you get, there’s just nothing like a long-term female friend “who has perspective, knows your growth and who can go in the deep end with you right away.”
They both agree that Wine Country celebrates that, making it an ideal film to watch with friends on the couch—and drinking wine. “Oh, my God, I thought of another Netflix pun for this movie!” shouts Rudolph. “Netflix and Swill!” Poehler gasps dramatically: “Go sell that right now for $100,000!”
Poehler and Rudolph are—as expected—incredibly, naturally funny. “I just got into comedy last year, and it’s goin’ OK,” jokes Poehler. “I was an investment banker, and I took a class!” The truth is that after meeting at SNL nearly 20 years ago, they’ve become so tuned in to each other, their rapport seems like a dance, with every line pointing the other toward the same goal: What will make someone laugh the most?
And their respect for the other’s comedic gifts is mutual. “Amy’s so incredibly intelligent that her level of what is funny is so layered and so delicious,” says Rudolph. “Amy is like one of those laser pointers that you can distract cats with—she’s that for what’s funny. I’m always kind of like, dancing around like a goofball…”
Poehler says she never had concerns about Rudolph not pulling though and coming up with something hilarious. “You see this in your Michael Jordans, your Tom Bradys, professional athletes at the top of their game—a looseness, a confidence,” she says, with the enthusiasm of a coach or a salesman. “On SNL, no matter what Maya was doing, you were never worried about her. Whatever nerves she had, she hid so well, and it’s because she’s such a champ, and that’s what champions do!” And that’s what comes from them both spending three decades professionally shaping their skills.
Comedy Routes
Poehler was raised in Burlington, Massachusetts, by her parents, Eileen and Bill, both teachers. After graduating Boston University, she moved to Chicago and began performing stand-up, met Tina Fey, then hooked up with the famed improv group Second City before co-founding the Upright Citizens Brigade. In 1996, she moved to New York City, co-founding the UCB Theatre there. She made it onto Saturday Night Live in 2001, where she stayed for seven seasons.
“So much of it was luck and friends and just what were your friends doing,” says Poehler, who only moved to Chicago because her roommate had moved there. “It’s so wild when you’re young—these decisions—that if you knew the importance of them, you would be paralyzed. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
Following her successful stint on SNL, she received nine Emmy nominations for her work on TV’s critically acclaimed comedy series Parks and Recreation, six for her starring role as small-town bureaucrat Leslie Knope and three for writing and producing. She also appeared in movies including Baby Mama, Blades of Gloryand Sisters and was the voice of Joy in Pixar’s animated Inside Out. In 2014, her memoir, Yes Please, became a best-seller.
Raised with her older brother, Marc, in Los Angeles, Rudolph is the daughter of composer Richard Rudolph and singer Minnie Riperton, whose 1975 hit “Lovin’ You” ended with Riperton sweetly crooning, “Maya, Maya.” As a kid, Rudolph was enamored with people onstage—almost any stage. She’d see someone singing and would want to do that; then she’d see a movie and want to do that.
“But I always wanted to be on Saturday Night Live specifically—like, very, veryspecifically,” she says. So right after college at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she explored her passions in both music and comedy. She went on tour playing keyboards and backing vocals for the alternative ’90s band the Rentals, though she never saw a music career in the cards. “Because I’ve never taken myself seriously as a musician, I’ve always been, like, a musician-adjacent,” she says. “Just do it for fun.”
After college, she also joined the Los Angeles–based improv group the Groundlings, which eventually led to her dream job—a spot on the SNL roster in 2000, where she stayed for seven seasons. Rudolph also found her way onto the big screen in films including Idiocracy, Away We Go, Friends With Kids and 2011’s mega-hit Bridesmaids.
Both women say their time on SNL was both profoundly influential and intense. “You get this crazy skill—quick decision-making, standing up for yourself and seeing things through quickly,” says Poehler, whose memorable roles included Hillary Clinton, a hyperactive 10-year-old named Kaitlin, Britney Spears, Kelly Ripa, Dolly Parton and “Weekend Update” host. “It was like a comedy emergency room. You learn really, really quickly how to stop the bleeding and save a life, and work together really fast.”
Rudolph, who was known for her SNL impressions of Beyoncé, Barbra Streisand, Charo, Gayle King and Paris Hilton, and for singing a hilariously off-kilter national anthem, compares her time on the show to battle. “We just all kind of learned the same commands, in the same comedy army,” she says. “I don’t think I could do it today!”
These days, Poehler develops projects and cultivates talent through her Paper Kite production company, including the NBC DIY TV series Making It (which she hosts with Nick Offerman), the Netflix comedy-drama series Russian Doll and the upcoming animated family comedy Duncanville with Rashida Jones, about a 15-year-old boy and his anxious mother, coming later this year on Fox. Rudolph is currently starring in the Amazon Prime afterlife series Forever with Fred Armisenand has an animated Fox TV series, Bless the Harts, in the pipeline, about a group of Southerners reaching for the American dream, for which she re-partners with Bridesmaids’ Kristen Wiig.
Dreaming of Paris
Poehler and Rudolph joke that if they could choose their dream roles, they’d star in a Jason Bourne–type film, where a “cushy” day of filming would require walking across the street in Paris. Then the director would say, “‘Get on the train’ and you get on the train, and they’re like, ‘That’s a wrap’ and you just go to dinner.” Yeah, adds Rudolph with a nod, “we’re looking for something with no script. Nothing to memorize.” Poehler bats back, “Done by 5. In Paris.” Finishes Rudolph, “And you get at least eight hours of sleep every night. I think at this point, the goals are getting to dinner, nice and early, and getting to bed.”
All joking aside, they would like to branch out a bit. “I don’t like the pressure of being funny when you don’t wanna be,” says Rudolph. And her dramatic work on Forever—about a married couple who discover they’ve ended up together, well, forever—is proving she can indeed do more. Poehler thinks it’s a shame that viewers seem to expect the least out of people they see in comedy first, as if they can’t do anything else. “It’s like, why? Aren’t they human, with feelings?” She’d absolutely take a super-serious role, she says, as age has brought out a depth and a desire in her to broaden beyond the laughs. Then she can’t help but add, “A lot of people don’t know that I started out doing sketch with Daniel Day-Lewis. One sketch—a five-month sketch. I sketched him.”
In their downtime, they hang with their families—and their kids now hang out with each other. They even brought their children to Napa with them while they were filming Wine Country. And at a recent sleepover at Poehler’s, the boys were reminiscing about their own fun experience on the shoot.
But as difficult as it is balancing those work and family schedules, Rudolph says their children have really focused them on what’s important. “I kind of shed a little of the extraneous stuff,” she says of becoming a mother, “combined with the idea that I only wanted to spend my time away from my kids doing something that makes me happy, and being with people that lift me up.” People like their female friends—the women they’ve known so long, who speak their language, who they’d love to spend the whole weekend with, if they could find the time.
“It really has become a necessity for all of us,” says Rudolph of their friend trips. Poehler nods, “We’re due for one, I think.” Yeah, says Rudolph, “we’re due for another lady trip.” After all, they may need some material for a sequel.
Fine Wine
Poehler and Rudolph shared a few of their favorite pairings.
Amount consumed in the making of Wine Country
Poehler: “Ten thousand feet of wine.”
Favorite wine
Poehler: “I like white wine. Like a Grüner.”
Rudolph: “As I age, I’ve gone off the red, because I wasn’t feeling so great. Now I’m kinda liking it again—but it has to be the right red, Amy!”
Poehler: “Yeah, gurl, you deserve it!”
Rudolph: “A good pinot noir.”
Who’s the bigger wine connoisseur?
Rudolph: “When you say ‘Grüner’ I’m always impressed.”
Poehler: “I know one word, yeah. Grüner.”
Favorite time to drink wine
Rudolph: “Wine-thirty?”
Poehler: “Middle of a hot day, when I’m outside.”
Rudolph: “On a beach. In direct sunlight.”