![]() ![]() And perhaps it’s the way her huge eyes arrest me, but I keep expecting the face covering to jump off her head. MacNeill is wearing loose pants in a Japanese print and a bright-yellow T-shirt that confesses, “I wish I could but I really don’t want to.” The mask is that disposable blue kind. It has a desk, a kitchenette, and a bathroom-the kind of place that’s probably just on the line of legal for a Toronto bachelor apartment. We’re sitting in the spartan surroundings of a production office that feels like a makeshift interrogation room. on August 17, 2020, she’s wearing a mask. “That seems,” she says before scrunching up her nose, “that seems early . . . ” (Slight shrug.) “Is that what you do now?” Even the way MacNeill pops out her dialogue-abrupt, emphatic-is enough to explain why Toronto Life named her the show’s “breakout star” and the New York Times designated her the “wild, physical one.”īut, right now, at 5 p.m. For almost the entire three minutes, MacNeill is in a tiny kitchen, contorting her limbs into various poses and states of undress-including supine and sushi-covered-in response to the text “send nudes.” Her initial reaction is a cascade of emotion wrapped in a feat of physicality: a coy smile reconfigures into a furrowed brow that explodes into bulging eyeballs before she literally ducks, as if the command had been lobbed at her head. ![]() Maybe that’s why “Send Nudes” is my favourite sketch from her popular CBC comedy, Baroness von Sketch Show (the series she co-executive produced, the one she co-wrote with three other women, and the one that concluded after its fifth and final season, last December). She has, as her British colleagues kept telling me, “funny bones.” MacNeill is a performer who does so much with her face, her voice, her body that, even on a regular day-when we couldn’t both die from sharing the same room-the fewer barriers between her and the audience, the better. T he worst time to interview Meredith MacNeill is during a pandemic. ![]()
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