Jillian Bell has a bad habit of talking herself out of acting jobs. She was supposed to play a much bigger role in Adam Sandler’s Murder Mystery 2 and almost starred in one of Netflix’s biggest hit shows. So when it came time to make her directorial debut Summer of 69 (now streaming on Hulu), she decided to stay (almost entirely) behind the camera.
In her return to The Last Laugh podcast, Bell talks about casting SNL’s Chloe Fineman as a stripper fairy godmother-type character opposite newcomer Sam Morelos in her surprisingly sweet teen sex comedy. She also gets into her own complicated history with SNL 15 years after she spent one season at the show as a writer who desperately wanted to be in the cast. Plus, Bell reveals what it was like to reprise one of her first TV roles in the series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm and tells a deeply embarrassing story about the first and only time she met Justin Timberlake.
“I genuinely love directing and now it’s all I want to do,” Bell tells me when we speak the day before her new movie was set to start streaming. “I do get the sense that I’m giving birth to a very weird baby that’s all about 69’ing. So it’s an odd feeling, but I am really proud of what we made.”
Summer of 69 is a classic John Hughes-inspired teen comedy that centers on a high school senior girl named Abby who enlists a local stripper to teach her everything she doesn’t know about sex, including what she believes to be the favorite position of her crush. The title is an obvious allusion to Bryan Adams’ mid-80s jam “Summer of ’69,” which does not play during the film—though not for lack of trying.
Bell reveals that Adams was “down” to grant her the rights to use his song in the opening credits, but “at the last minute” his co-writer Jim Vallance shut it down, insisting that the lyrics are only about the year and not the sexual position.
It’s the rare teen movie that is both from the point of view of a young woman and made by a female director—something Bell doesn’t take for granted. While she was making it, she would ask herself what she wished she had known about sex when she was 18. She points to a scene where Fineman’s character Santa Monica explains that when she was growing up she thought the only goal of sex was to give the man pleasure.
“It’s actually even more fun for the man if you’re having a good time as well, so you don’t just have to concentrate on the end goal for him,” Bell says, paraphrasing her point. “I’ve heard from a lot of women who are like, ‘I’m 35 and I found that out three years ago.’ So it’s really nice that younger generations might hear that and go, oh wow, I deserve to have pleasure, too.”
In addition to Fineman, Bell populated the film with SNL alums like recent cast member Alex Moffat as the strip club DJ and legendary sketch writer Paula Pell as the club’s den mother of sorts. Bell, who started taking improv classes at just eight years old, only ever dreamed about being cast on that show until she was hired as a writer in Season 35, when she was just 25 years old.
“I was there at my favorite television show,” she says now, describing the “surreal” experience. But because she really wanted to perform, she says she held back some of her best material in the hopes she would be added to the cast—as happened for stars like Jason Sudeikis, Leslie Jones, and Bowen Yang over the years. She was devastated when she was not asked to come back for a second season, despite later finding out that several cast members actually spoke up on her behalf to Lorne Michaels.
“That’s the only dream I ever had at that time,” Bell says. “SNL was the only goal I had. Now, in hindsight, I don’t think I was meant to stay there. I think I was meant to go on this other path.”
The irony now is that after striving to be on camera 15 years ago, Bell now feels more comfortable, and more inspired, behind the camera as a director. Since talking herself into a smaller role than she was offered in the Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston sequel Murder Mystery 2, she has made a handful of appearance in projects made by friends like Amy Schumer (Kinda Pregnant) and Charlie Day (Fool’s Paradise), but has deliberately avoided the types of acting roles that might actually have made her a household name.
Most notably? She reveals for the first time during our conversation that she turned down the title role in the hit Netflix series Emily in Paris.
“I was supposed to be Emily,” she says of the part that ended up going to Lily Collins. “And I convinced them, I was like, you don’t want me. I just was like, I’ll watch this. There’s gonna be someone great in it, and I can see who they are, and they’re gonna be so good in it and look really cool in all the clothes. But it’s not me. So I very much talked myself out of that one.”
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