Kristen Wiig

Kristen Wiig - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Kristen Wiig

Kristen Carroll Wiig (born August 22, 1973) is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. First breaking through as a performer with the Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings, Wiig achieved stardom in the late 2000s for her seven-season tenure on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live (SNL) from 2005 to 2012.

This profile of Kristen Wiig covers Early Life and Family Background, SNL and early film roles (2000–2010), Breakthrough (2011–2016), Later roles (2017–present) and Personal Life.

During her tenure at SNL, Wiig received four nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She also took on supporting roles in the comedy films Knocked Up (2007) and Paul (2011), and co-wrote and starred in Bridesmaids (2011), which was critically and commercially successful. The film earned her nominations for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

After leaving Saturday Night Live, Wiig appeared in the films The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), The Skeleton Twins (2014), The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), The Martian (2015), Ghostbusters (2016), Downsizing (2017), Mother! (2017), and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). She also voiced characters in the animated and live-action films Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), the How to Train Your Dragon (2010–2019), and Despicable Me (2010–present) franchises, Sausage Party (2016), and Masters of the Universe (2026). Wiig was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for her role in the comedy miniseries The Spoils of Babylon (2014) and for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her role in the comedy-drama series Palm Royale (2024). Time named Wiig as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in both 2012 and 2025.

Early Life and Family Background of Kristen Wiig

Kristen Carroll Wiig was born on August 22, 1973, in Canandaigua, New York, a suburb of Rochester. Her father is Jon Arne Joseph Wiig, who ran a lake marina in Western New York, and her mother, Laurie Day (née Johnston), is an artist. She has an older brother Erik. Her father has Norwegian and Irish ancestry, and her mother, English and Scottish. The name Wiig comes from the area of Vik in Sogn og Fjordane in Norway. Kristen's paternal grandfather, Gunnar Ove Wiig, emigrated from Norway to the United States as a child and grew up in Rochester, New York, where he was an accomplished broadcaster for the Rochester Red Wings baseball team, and later became an executive at WHEC radio, WHEC-TV, and WROC-TV.

Wiig moved with her family to Lancaster, Pennsylvania at the age of three, and attended Nitrauer Elementary School and Manheim Township Middle School until eighth grade. When she was 13, she and her family returned to Rochester where she attended Allendale Columbia School for ninth and tenth grades and graduated from Brighton High School.

Wiig attended Roanoke College, but soon returned to Rochester. She attended community college and embarked on a three-month outdoor-living program. She had no performing ambitions at the time. She then attended the University of Arizona, majoring in art. When she took an acting class to fulfill a course requirement, the teacher suggested she continue to act. She was hired by a plastic surgery clinic to draw postsurgery bodies, but the day before the job began, in a bookstore she spoke with a psychic who said she should be acting and writing in Los Angeles, so she decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.

SNL and early film roles (2000–2010) of Kristen Wiig

Wiig relocated to Los Angeles to act while working odd jobs to support herself. She performed with Empty Stage Comedy Theatre and The Groundlings. She felt improvisation was a better fit than acting, and being a part of the comedy group improved her skills. In 2003, she appeared in Spike TV's The Joe Schmo Show, a spoof of reality television, in which she portrayed Dr. Pat, a quack marriage counselor. She auditioned for Mad TV. While at The Groundlings, Wiig's manager encouraged her to submit an audition tape to Saturday Night Live. She played the Target Lady on part of her audition tape. She debuted on SNL shortly into season 31, on November 12, 2005. She survived an SNL budget cut and became a full cast member at the beginning of season 32 in 2006.

She was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on SNL (2009 to 2012). Wiig headlined the 2009 Christmas special SNL Presents: A Gilly Christmas, featuring new sketches with her character Gilly and highlights of older SNL clips. She was featured in Entertainment Weekly's list of 15 Great Performances for her various impersonations on SNL (December 2008) and in EW's list of the 25 Funniest Women in Hollywood (April 2009). She voiced Lola Bunny in the series The Looney Tunes Show from 2011 to 2014.

Wiig made her film debut in the 2006 Christmas film Unaccompanied Minors, and appeared in Judd Apatow's 2007 comedy Knocked Up as a passive-aggressive assistant. She also performed in Jake Kasdan's Walk Hard, another Apatow-produced film. Between 2008 and 2010, she had supporting roles in several studio comedies which had various degrees of success. She made a cameo appearance as Bear Trainer Girl in the 2008 comedy Semi-Pro, reuniting with SNL alum Will Ferrell. She played a yoga instructor in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and a self-involved surgeon in David Koepp's Ghost Town.

Wiig co-starred in Greg Mottola's 2009 coming-of-age dramedy Adventureland, voiced a beaver mom in the animated adventure film Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, played a roller derby competitor in Whip It (Drew Barrymore's directorial debut) and appeared as the wife of a flavoring-extracts company owner in Mike Judge's Extract. She had a brief role in Andrew Jarecki's 2010 drama All Good Things, starred opposite Will Forte and Ryan Phillippe in MacGruber, and voiced two big-budget animated films, Despicable Me and How to Train Your Dragon, that kicked off two highly profitable film franchises.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristen_Wiig), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.