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NEW YORK -- See the struggling young actress on her way to an audition.
It's an audition for a new sketch-comedy series, and she's never done sketch comedy before. They told her: Bring in your best five characters. But she doesn't have any characters.
"So when I got there, I just did people I know." Guess what? She got the job. "I'm the luckiest person alive."
On the other hand, Mad TV was pretty lucky to land Nicole Sullivan, and the good fortune extends to viewers catching up to her on Fox Broadcasting's answer to Saturday Night Live, now in its second season, airing Saturdays at 11 p.m.
The breakout member of Mad TV's eight-player ensemble, Sullivan approaches her job not like a sketch-comedy performer with a background in improv clubs, but as an actress who, now 26, performed on- and off-Broadway in her native Manhattan, attended London's British American Dramatic Academy, and majored in theatre at Northwestern University.
On Mad TV, she has impersonated Alicia Silverstone, Drew Barrymore, Mia Farrow, and Kathie Lee Gifford plugging her movie No Sweat ("the REAL story about what happened in those garment factories").
Sullivan's original characters include nose-ringed, sullen Amy, one of the co-anchors of "Gen-X News," and, even better, the "Vancome Lady," scheduled to be back for a sketch on this week's show.
CATTY COSMETICS WOMEN
First seen in a department store selling cosmetics - hence the twist on "Lancome" - she thrives on withholding assistance with a hiss of phony regret that sounds something like "shaaaaaaaah."
"I came up with her on the way to my audition," Sullivan says. "She's real passive-aggressive, says rude things while smiling, just like this boss I used to have, and like the women behind the makeup counter at Skokie Mall when I went to Northwestern. Makeup women always make you feel stupid."
She's just making an observation, yet you can't help but laugh.
Something about Sullivan, she makes you laugh. With a blend of New York edge and gosh-darn niceness, she speaks in quick little bursts, her doll-face is seldom at rest as she nods affirmingly, knits her brow, scrunches her mouth, rolls her enormous eyes, all to help her make her point. A point that, more often than not, comes out funny.
Was she always funny?
"I don't think I was," she hedges. "I'm still not sure I am. But I have a good sense of humor."
Distinction noted.
But how does Sullivan, lacking all the standard prerequisites to be a TV sketch-comedy star, explain her standout appeal? "Approachability" is her theory.
"If you have approachability," she says, "people will root for you."
She says all the right things about wanting to stay on Mad TV as long as she can, about loving her fellow castmembers ("they're so talented"), then winsomely adds, "I love television, I really do. I know that sounds dorky.
"I have a great job! I can pay my rent now! Although - oops - I haven't, and it's the third."
She rolls those eyes.
"In my mind, I'm still the loser-girl who was temping in a basement a year and a half ago, with $20 in the bank. Now I still have $20 in the bank ... but I have a lot of nice clothes!"
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