Jenny Slate is currently on top of the world thanks to her Oscar-nominated hit “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” which she stars in and co-wrote alongside Dean Fleischer Camp and Nick Paley. But while the comedian is enjoying the film’s success, he hasn’t forgotten the failures that led him to write it. In a new interview The independentSlate spoke about the painful experience of being let go from “Saturday Night Live” after one season in 2009 and the solace he found in putting his own creative projects first.
“I felt grief when I left SNL,” she said. “But it also made me duplicate my own voice as a stand-up comedian, because that’s all I had left.”
Duplicating his own voice led him to create Marcel the Shell. The adorable stop-motion character quickly made his way through a trilogy of short films and an accompanying series of children’s books, paving the way for the hit A24 film. Slate admits that producing a character like Marcel during his SNL tenure could have kept him around, and he’s glad things turned out the way they did.
“I think most people would agree that trying to change something that is accepted only causes suffering,” he said. “Luckily, I wasn’t thinking about Marcel when I was on SNL because I don’t think we would have ever made this movie if I had done that. And then it wouldn’t have belonged to me. It would have belonged to NBC.”
Slate continues to work on several non-mollusk projects, but appreciates that Marcel exists largely outside of the stresses of the real world. He explained that the character’s gentle, escapist nature offers him a much-needed mental break from working on more current projects.
“While it’s really important as a person and as a human being to figure out where you stand and why you want to fight, it’s also wonderful as an artist to step out completely,” he says. “The beauty of Marcel lies in the fact that something in me can let me go and solve things.”
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