In a recent episode of the sketch comedy Saturday Night Live, Melissa McCarthy delivered a near career-redefining performance as embattled White House press chief Sean Spicer.
In the days after, what surprised many was that the element most offensive to Spicer's boss, US President Donald Trump, was not the political satire itself, but the fact that his press chief was being played by a woman.
![Goldie Hawn and Amy Schumer play a mother and daughter in <i>Snatched</i>.](/web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/i/1/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gvumhz.png/1494684698859.jpg)
"It's ultimately about fear," says comedian Amy Schumer, tackling the thorny issue of why a woman, playing a man, would be so disturbing to one of the most powerful men in the world.
"Is it the fear of being emasculated? The fear of castration? The fear of being lectured by your mother? I don't know what it is. What I know is that it definitely doesn't slow us down."
![Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn in <i>Snatched</i>.](/web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/i/2/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gvumhz.png/1494684698859.jpg)
Schumer is sitting with Goldie Hawn, her co-star in the new film Snatched, in a suite at LA's fashionable Fairmont Miramar Hotel, where the afternoon sun, which dapples the room, seems to turn their blonde hair to gold.
Both are powerfully funny women, who have held vast audiences in the palm of their hands.
Hawn, 71, began her career in the late '60s with Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and went on to star in classic comedies such as Foul Play (1978), Private Benjamin (1980) and The First Wives Club (1996). Schumer was also born creatively on television, on Comedy Central, and kicked a big box office goal with Trainwreck (2015).
On the topic of speaking female truth to male power, Hawn believes there's a fragility that comes from tampering with the established norms of gender roles: the idea that women must inhabit a specific place.
![Goldie Hawn and Walter Matthau in a scene from <i>Cactus Flower</i>.](/web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/2/b/1/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gvumhz.png/1494684698859.jpg)
She recounts a moment from her Laugh-In days when a woman challenged her for playing "the ditzy blonde" at a time when the liberation of women was the front line of the culture war.
"And that was the fight, right? The fight with freedom and Gloria Steinem and all that," Hawn says. "My answer to her was, I don't understand because I already feel liberated, I am liberated, I'm liberated on the inside."
![Goldie Hawn in <i>Laugh In</i>.](/web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/2/d/m/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gvumhz.png/1494684698859.jpg)
Certain women, Hawn says, not just comedians but tough women generally, "cross that line, they are tough, they don't give a shit, they say what they want, and I think it offends a lot of men to see that because it says, I can't make that woman feel like I'm supposed to.
"There's some deficit that seems to happen, which is [that] it weakens their position as a man."
In Snatched, Hawn and Schumer play a mother and daughter who, while on a holiday to the Hawaiian islands, are accidentally kidnapped and must fight for their survival. It's equal parts comedy, caper and Mother Day's movie.
The first thing that strikes you is how perfectly they're cast. Not because they're both blonde comedians, but because, in her youth, Hawn was like Schumer, a bold new voice in comedy who dazzled with her brilliance and achieved that rare thing: being simultaneously brassy and feminine in a world where the natural order was to have one cancel out the other.
Their cinematic partnership began when Schumer cold-pitched the film to Hawn, then a total stranger, after they had both disembarked from the same flight.
"I'd already read the script and Goldie just happened to be on my flight and I was like, this is a sign," Schumer recalls.
"I kind of ran up to her and was like, 'Hi, there's a movie, and I'm Amy', and duh-duh-duh. And she was just very sweet and dealt with me how you'd deal with any crazy person who came up to you in an airport. I would have been frightened of me but she was very sweet.
"But then we officially met in London at this awards show and I properly introduced myself and we talked about the movie and we both decided, let's do everything in our power to make this movie together."
Weirdly, the studio wasn't sold on the pair playing mother and daughter.
"In the beginning the studio didn't see the two of us together, which I thought was pretty amazing," Hawn says.
Actually, it almost beggars belief, given that the pair – arguably the funniest women of their respective generations – have in many respects lived the same life. "Right," says Schumer. "Exactly," adds Hawn.
Snatched is very funny, but includes some serious moments. At the heart of the film is the very genuine, sometimes infuriating, but also at times very gentle relationship between mother and daughter. Tapping pathos in comedy doesn't suit every comedian, but Hawn and Schumer have both used it to great effect.
"There is a baseline for comedy and what sprouts out of it is perspective," says Hawn. "You can look at it funny, you can look at it tragically."
It's a proposition born out in her own performances. Hawn won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the 1969 film Cactus Flower, the plot of which revolves around her character's suicide attempt. As Judy Benjamin in Private Benjamin, for which she received a Best Actress nomination, Hawn plays a woman who runs away from a happy married life to join the army. In The First Wives Club she is Elise Elliot, whose marriage and career are collapsing.
"Judy Benjamin is a tragic figure, and it's such a funny movie, but it's about suffering," Hawn says. "And she has an art to her character as well. The same thing with First Wives Club. It was a very funny movie, but these characters were seriously unhappy."
Hawn's power, adds Schumer, is that "she will make you laugh, and then your heart is broken in the next second".
The mother-daughter relationship in Snatched was an easy source to tap for both Hawn and Schumer, who profess to having amazing relationships with their own mothers.
"I think it's the way your mum looks at you," says Schumer. "That gaze, where you see yourself reflected in her eyes, and there's just so much love. My mum just made me feel so funny and smart and special and beautiful, and it wasn't until years later that I found out she was lying.
"I'm joking, but it's kind of true. Her and my father were just like, 'you are amazing', and I was like, 'I am amazing', and by the time I realised that they were exaggerating, it was too late. My nervous system was already set up."
Hawn says there are many ways in which she feels bonded to her mother, but none more than through food.
"My mother, if we had three things in the cupboard, she could make dinner," she says, laughing. "I have the same thing. And I sit there and watch them eat, just like my mother used to watch me. [Hawn's three children are actors Oliver Hudson, Kate Hudson and Wyatt Russell.]
"There are areas of our lives that we take on like our mothers, and we inhabit them," Hawn says, noting that in her "abrupt" voice – the one she uses when saying to the kids, "that's enough!" – she can hear her mother.
"And if I heard myself say that once, I heard me say it a million times with the kids, because that's the way she did it. And I think 'Oh my god, I sound just like my mother'."
For both women, there has been tremendous empowerment through comedy; Schumer's stand-up career was, she says, like a science experiment: "It was like I've tested these jokes, I know where the laughs are," she says.
More powerful, Schumer adds, is the gentle and personal comedy of an individual like Hawn. In Snatched, for example, she says there are countless moments which pivot on something very subtle in Hawn's delivery.
"You can mostly any time look over at her, and if she's doing something, like looking at her phone or whatever, her glasses will be like this, or there will be like one crumb on her face," Schumer says. "There's just something.
"That kind of power, where just with your hands, you can do anything, and I think that's just a gift that maybe five people ever had."
And the funniest moments, Schumer says, are the most natural ones. "It's the organic stuff, what happens in the moment of the show when they can tell you're off-script, that's the stuff you want to see.
"That's what makes people laugh and I think when people see this movie, they'll see those moments and be like, that was just a real moment."
The film represents a return to cinema for Hawn after a 15-year absence.
She has spent much of her off-screen years building The Hawn Foundation, which promotes mindfulness among school children. .
Life, she says, is a day-by-day experience and the only downside of success is that for many people it takes away permission for them to fail. "There's so much more out there, and you have to be able to fail.
"The fear of failure is so huge that the more successful you become, the more fear you begin to have. The greatest service you can do is to rip that thing out of the brain. Because fear is a bad thing, it doesn't allow you to say yes enough."
Growing old is tough in Hollywood, she says, unless you're Meryl Streep.
"Meryl Streep can work forever, you know, because that's her bent, and she can be young and old, and she's always going to be amazing," Hawn says. "But it's not what I did in my life. So it depends on what you want to do with your life, and personally, I love life. Love it. Like I want to eat it."
Age is also a matter of perspective, offers Schumer, particularly in a business where everyone is old relative to anyone who is new. "I'm 35, and so that's very young and it's very old," she says.
Every age, Hawn adds, is perfect. What matters is what you want to achieve with your life. "I don't want to sit and worry about myself getting old and worry that I am not getting movies, or roles are getting worse.
"I just have to transcend this foolishness and know that now is the time to crack the whip. Just live your life, love your friends, do your work, get real, be real, have a good life and do something good for the world."
Snatched opens on May 11
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS ON SCREEN
MOMMIE DEAREST
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The cinematic expose of Joan Crawford's maternal failings mined the ugly truth behind those matching outfits in a camp melodrama starring Faye Dunaway possessed by a pair of demonic eyebrows.
TERMS OF ENDEARMENT
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/m/p/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493377936245.png)
Shirley Maclaine stars as an over-protective mother so highly strung that she pinches her baby awake to make sure she's still breathing. Their adult relationship proves so fraught, it takes a terminal illness to smooth the waters.
MAMMA MIA
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/c/n/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493376430649.png)
As drop-out hippie Donna, Meryl Streep must account for her freewheeling youth when daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) decides to invite three of her mother's ex-lovers to her wedding in a bid to find out whose DNA she's inherited. In the ensuing kerfuffle Donna is convinced that "somebody up there has got it in for me – I bet it's my mother."
HAIRSPRAY
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/c/r/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493376467512.png)
John Travolta as the over-eating enabler Edna Turnblad manages to rise above his ridiculous hairband to convey a poignant protectiveness as daughter Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) discovers that the world doesn't always play fair.
ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/d/c/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493376559001.png)
The mother-daughter balance is upended as sensible Saffie (Julia Sawalha) endures the outrageous behaviour – and outfits – of her perennially adolescent mother Edina (Jennifer Saunders). Some mothers might blanch at being told they look like "a bloated citrus fruit", but it'll take more than that to make Edina sober up.
THE GRADUATE
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/d/p/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493376646346.png)
Mrs Robinson (Ann Bancroft) propels generational sexual competition to new heights as a young Benn Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) finds himself torn between mother and daughter in the film that set tongues wagging in the swinging '60s.
THE ADDAMS FAMILY
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/d/e/l/k/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1465270333891.png)
Gothic excess runs in the family as young Wednesday Addams apes mum Morticia in head-to-toe black and oddball habits (who needs a pet rabbit when there are spiders to play with?). Wednesday's child is indeed full of woe, and her doting mother couldn't be more proud.
CARRIE
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/e/r/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493376868673.png)
Who could blame Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) for acting weird with a mother like Margaret (Piper Laurie)? Religious fanaticism unleashes supernatural terrors during a high-school prom that tips the bucket on the bullies.
SIX FEET UNDER
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/h/3/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493377170678.png)
The delightfully daffy Ruth Fisher (Francis Conroy) heads up a dysfunctional family of undertakers cast adrift when patriarch Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) joins the dearly departed. When daughter Claire (Lauren Ambrose) goes off the rails, you can see what Ruth means about motherhood being "the loneliest thing in the world".
THE RETURNED
![Sophie Lowe in The Returned.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170514054024im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/v/6/m/s/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1493377945596.png)
Lena Winsip (Sophie Lowe) was already behind the eight ball, but when her more-adored twin sister returns from the dead, tensions between her and mother Claire are similarly resurrected. "Your favourite daughter is back from the dead. Why not throw a goddamn party?"
LINDY PERCIVAL