When Molly Shannon played Mary Katherine Gallagher on "Saturday Night Live" in the late '90s, she hurt herself. A lot.
So complete was her dedication to the armpit-sniffing, monologuing Catholic schoolgirl she'd willingly throw herself into a pile of metal chairs. She'd wake up the next day and wonder where the cuts and bruises had come from.
"Isn't that weird?" says Shannon, 56, sounding genuinely mystified, in a recent video chat from her Los Angeles backyard. "I looked at it like punk rock. I was reckless, and because of what I went through, I just didn't care about anything."
Shannon is obliquely referring to the deaths of her mother, younger sister and cousin in a car accident when she was 4. Her father, who had been driving under the influence, survived but was horribly injured. She hasn't talked much publicly about the accident or its aftermath — it's not easy fodder for a late-night TV appearance — but it cast a long shadow over her childhood in Shaker Heights, Ohio.
"I was very heartbroken and very sad and just trying to hold it all together as a kid," says Shannon, who has two teenage children with her husband, artist Fritz Chesnut. "There's no way you could feel that type of deep pain about your mother and your sister being dead, so you just hold it all in, and it comes up later in life."
Shannon has gravitated to characters whose wholesomeness is often suffused with something darker and more complicated — instantly familiar everywomen with deep reserves of sadness and anxiety. While she's no longer crash-landing on dinner tables in the name of art — "I'm a mother and I want to be physically able to walk," she says — her commitment to her characters remains unwavering.
Last month, she appeared in two scene-stealing TV roles tailored to her brand of cheerful chaos. In HBO's buzzy summer satire, "The White Lotus," written and directed by her friend and frequent collaborator Mike White, Shannon appears as a society matriarch who intervenes in her son's disastrous honeymoon. And she returns as Pat Dubek, a grieving widow-turned-daytime talk show host, in the long-delayed second season of HBO Max's "The Other Two," created by former "SNL" head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider.
A forthcoming memoir, "Hello, Molly!," will delve into Shannon's family life and her lovingly complicated relationship with her late father, who came out late in life. After the accident, she and her sister went to live with their aunt while their father recuperated.
