Julia Sweeney addresses legacy of her controversial SNL character Pat

Julia Sweeney has addressed some of the backlash she’s faced for her character on Saturday Night Live (SNL), Pat.

The 65-year-old actor reflected on playing Pat from 1990 to 1994 during Wednesday’s episode of The View, leading up to SNL 50: The Anniversary Special. Pat was an androgynous fictional character, created by Sweeny, who had black curly hair, thick glasses, and wore a western-style blue shirt. In 1994, Sweeney was also in a feature film, It’s Pat.

During The View, Sweeney addressed some of the backlash she received from the transgender and non-binary community when she was playing Pat, since the character’s gender was never revealed.

“There was some criticism of it, but Pat isn’t trans or non-binary,” the actor explained. “Pat is a man or woman, you just don’t know which Pat is. That is the joke.”

However, Sweeney said that she understood “the criticism and took it to heart a lot.” She clarified that when she and her colleagues “were writing all the sketches,” they weren’t mocking Pat.

“We were really making fun of the other people [in the sketches] not being able to handle the fact that they couldn’t tell,” she explained, referring to how Pat was a man or a woman. “The laughs all came from that. But then, of course, when you’re defending your joke, as we know, you’ve already lost them.”

When asked how she felt about Pat, despite the controversy surrounding the character now, Sweeney said she felt “very positive about it.”

“There’s a documentary that got made, and it’s gonna come out this next year. And there’s a lot of trans comedy writers in LA that were inspired by Pat, that loved Pat,” she said. “I’ve been interviewed for three years for this documentary, and it was like my therapy for me. It’s like, ‘Yeah, Pat! That was a good idea!’”

Sweeney previously reflected on how Pat’s unspecified gender was the basis of jokes in SNL. During an interview with People in July, she confessed that her friends even criticized her character, including the writer of Transparent, Joey Soloway, who identifies as transgender.

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“There were some people in particular, Jill Soloway — who actually is a friend and who’s now Joey Soloway — saying that Pat was derogatory towards nonbinary people and that it was really an upsetting thing as a person of indeterminate gender herself or themselves to even see Pat,” she explained.

She went on to acknowledge how the backlash from her friend “just broke [her] heart.”

“I felt that I carefully wrote all the jokes to be about the people’s uncomfortableness with Pat, not Pat being uncomfortable with Pat’s self,” she added. “To me, it was an empowering nonbinary thing — and that it was perceived that way was very upsetting.”

She also shared how she met with 10 transgender comedy writers to discuss Pat and ways to reinvent the character. According to Sweeney, the writers “loved Pat,” which was a really “transformative” thing for the comedian to see.

“Now I feel like, Oh, no. It was good and it was important, and now all these trans people that I met, this group of 10, all told me how important it was for me to have done that,” she concluded. “So now I feel, okay, that was okay.”

On February 16, NBC’s longest-running late-night sketch show, SNL, will celebrate its 50th anniversary, with a three-hour special, beginning at 8 p.m. EST.

The celebrities in the special include a mix of original cast members such as Laraine Newman, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Amy Poehler, Eddie Murphy, Fred Armisen, Molly Shannon, Kristen Wiig, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Maya Rudolph, Pete Davison, Tracy Morgan, and Tina Fey.

The special will also feature celebrities who have previously graced the stage as guest hosts, including Adam Driver, Ayo Edebiri, Bad Bunny, Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, Kim Kardashian, Martin Short, Miley Cyrus, and Paul McCartney,