Rainbow Crew is an ongoing interview series that celebrates the best LGBTQ+ representation on screen. Each instalment showcases talent working on both sides of the camera, including queer creatives and allies to the community.

Next up, we're talking to Girls5Eva star and Saturday Night Live alum, Paula Pell.

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By all rights, Paula Pell is an icon... just perhaps one that may have passed you by. One of the writers in what many consider a golden era for the long-running Saturday Night Live sketch series, the now 59-year-old spent 18 years creating comedy that would launch the careers of stars including Kristen Wiig, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Hader, Ted Lasso's Jason Sudeikis, Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Andy Samberg, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

Now, after a string of bit parts including an iconic one-episode turn as Ron Swanson's mother in Parks and Recreation, Paula is portraying an all-singing, all-dancing queer character in comedy Girls5Eva. It's a role that is somewhat reflective of her real life.

On the show, much like reality, Paula's character Gloria is getting given the chance to live out her dreams in a girl group (with numerous catchy songs to go with it). Her real-life wife, Janine Brito – herself an accomplished writer and producer – plays her on-screen on/off wife, Caroline.

The opportunity to portray an older gay character coming into her own is something that isn't lost on the star.

Speaking to Digital Spy, Paula tells us about the importance of playing Gloria, how she helped bring queer comedy to the forefront of her work, and how Girls5Eva – because forever's too short – is paving the way for a new kind of representation.

paula pell as gloria, girls5eva
Peacock//NBC Universal

Gloria has such a unique queer story that hasn't seen of much yet on screen. How much input did you have with that?

It was so amazing to not only just be asked by one of my oldest friends to do something with people that I'm a huge fan of, but also to sing together and do comedy and be under that brilliant thumb of Tina/Robert/Little Stranger. All of those guys just have such a high standard of writing, so I knew it was going to be a great show.

Meredith Scardino [Girls5Eva creator] is amazing, and when I found out that I get to play a queer person, and I get to play a person who's been through divorce, which I have, it was really great.

I've laughed many times and said 'Isn't it great that the oldest one here is making out with her younger ex-wife and trying to get back with her and everything and having all these scenes about love pretty much since the series began?'

I'm the main one that's been having a lot of romance! I'm like the only one that's made out with people. We were just laughing at the visibility of a person my age and a comedy character to actually have a little genuine content in it.

I think we're going into a phase now, thankfully, because I grew up in a lot of closeted times, is just to have gay storylines that aren't all about the gay. It's about their gay experience, but it's written on the same plane. It's not like this separate thing.

There was always the separate thing and sometimes when I see storylines of two women on a show where you can see that they're doing it to kind of add diversity, but they don't ever dive into their relationship at all. They're like, 'Well, we'll do that but they like kiss by just kissing each other's cheek'. It's like, 'Come on, guys. Just act like a normal couple!'

"I hear people of different queer experiences saying 'I love that you exist in that show'"

So it's just been fun to tell the story of age, being a woman, being queer, going through divorce, going through all these things, and then also having a chance late in life to rekindle a career that you loved but you didn't feel like you deserved in some way.

In the flashbacks of Gloria, it's clear she was just always living in terror that she was going to be outed or have to tell her friends and be rejected. So it was probably kind of a relief to just become a dentist! These five year olds are not going to ask me what's up! I love when I hear people of different ages and different queer experiences saying 'I love that you exist in that show and that character exists'.

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Do you think gay representation can sometimes be considered "a young person's game" on TV?

I had a funny experience with that when I was at Saturday Night Live writing around this. I was there for almost 20 years. I probably wrote stuff before I came out but I just didn't acknowledge it. But once I came out then I was really excited about writing some stuff for my community.

I wrote something that had a reference to a Melissa Etheridge concert or an Indigo Girls concert and somebody on the early internet – it was a queer woman – she came at that sketch so hard about the references and was like, 'Maybe perhaps they could hire not just white straight cis men that write these sketches. Maybe they would use a genuine gay reference'.

I don't usually respond to shit because you just get trapped deeper in it, but I responded to it.

She was like, 'If it was a real queer person, they would have said Tegan and Sara' and they gave an employee review of how it should have been. I just said 'Well, I'm an old d**e who wrote this sketch, and I have cassette tapes of Indigo Girls still in my car, so get the hell over it'.

I was so frustrated because people come at you so hard on the internet sometimes without knowing what's going on. I understand the go-to always in these comedy shows was that they were assuming these young straight white men were writing everything, but that's just not always true, and it's not true now for sure.

busy philipps as summer, renée elise goldsberry as wickie, sara bareilles as dawn, paula pell as gloria, girls5eva
Peacock//NBC Universal

You were on SNL 18 years, what was it like going from sort of behind the scenes to coming out to performing pieces yourself? And how was your sort of career trajectory affected?

All I had ever done before I went to SNL was be an actor. I got my theatre degree, I was doing regional theatre after college, and then I started performing for the theme parks in Florida because I went back home where my parents were in Orlando.

I performed for close to four years in Disney World, but the later night shows at Pleasure Island I used to do comedy stuff and do these amazing shows and all these venues there. That's all I ever did.

It was like, 'That's my career and I'm kind of struggling a little bit but I'm paying my bills'. I was having a good happy time in my 20s and then, you know, right around 30, I got a call because I had done a pilot with a bunch of Orlando people that were super talented and Lorne Michaels wanted to meet me and I went there.

Once I did that, I put my acting hat away. They kindly said, 'We aren't hiring you for the cast. We're hiring you as part of the writing staff and you have to facilitate success for the cast.'

It's about you and your writing, not you and your performing – because they had just seen me perform on this tape but I wrote the material. So I put it away.

I was so excited to be there, so excited to learn to be a writer because I didn't call myself one even though I'd written a lot in my life. I just didn't think I was a television writer. I didn't have any experience in that. So once I did that, really for almost all of those years, I just put it away it was just locked up, and occasionally I would do a line in the show or be in the monologue asking a question.

As my friends got famous from that show and started doing their own shows and their own production companies, then they would be like, 'Hey, do you want to play this weirdo?'

They started kind of slowly pulling me back into it by giving me opportunities, but also I really believe – I mean I always say I was born 50. I was a matron, I was a 13-year-old playing, like, the Mother Superior in Sound of Music! But I was young, I had a young face so I couldn't really get cast in those things. So it was kind of perfect because by the time I aged into the parts I probably was very capable of doing I was done with the hiding from it. I aged in with my hair, I didn't have to spray my hair grey anymore.

So now it's just absolutely a dream to be able to perform with friends and for friends and have that. Lorne Michaels is very much a loyal, familial person. His lighting designer was there until his 90s, until he passed. He loves to have people that were there back then and really know the history of it. So I felt like he passed that on as we leave there and do shows and everyone kind of has known each other for a long time.

janine brito as caroline, paula pell as gloria, girls5eva
Peacock//NBC Universal

As a queer woman in comedy, how have you seen the industry change throughout the years, especially on something like SNL?

I feel like anything that was underserved, any experience that was underserved in comedy in terms of the content, I always think of it as like being a plus-size person – a person that holds gravity as I what I like to call us – I feel like things are either written from the outside or from the inside.

"There's an extra enjoyment for the queer community if it's written by someone that really knows that humour."

You can tell when you watch something if it was written from the inside and from the experience, whether or not somebody wrote it, and then someone else helped them, hone it to be more authentic, it has to have that knowledge and depth of what that experience is.

I think with queer humour, back in the day when we started transitioning into having more queer content on SNL, I think the fear was by some people that just didn't get it yet. They weren't doing it in an anti-gay way, but they were fearful of it.

They were fearful that gay content, queer content, would be somehow offensive just by being queer content. I would say to them, like, 'There's a lot of gay people that watch the show, a lot of LGBTQ people would freaking love to watch a sketch that is so directly written for them with references'.

It's almost like a little secret – the audience loves it, but then there's an extra enjoyment for the queer community if it's written by someone that really knows that humour.

It was really fun to watch that evolve before I left, and I felt like my best friend James Anderson, who wrote there for 20 years and wrote everything Kristen Wiig ever did, an amazing, brilliant writer. He's gay and we were roommates in college.

When I look back, so many things he wrote even early on, that were such big hits that people didn't quite get, then I see it playing in a gay bar. I'm just like, of course people consume things in how they relate to it, and so it was always a joy to see that evolve in all of comedy in sitcoms and everything.

busy philipps as summer, renée elise goldsberry as wickie, sara bareilles as dawn, paula pell as gloria, girls5eva
Peacock//NBC Universal

Is there a distinct queer pop-culture moment that stands out to you as important or personally formative?

I think one of my big things is the sketch I wrote for Elliot Page years ago, before Elliot Page was out on any level, and it was about my experience being young and going to a Melissa Etheridge concert, and the Indigo Girls.

I was trying to be kind of closeted and trying out being straight after my first girlfriend and I broke up painfully, and I was kind of thinking of having a baby. I would come home from those kind of experiences and just be so jacked up, like it was just so many women in tank tops! All that kind of joy to do that.

It just felt like I wrote my truth for the first time, which was really fun.

Girls5Eva season two launches June 6 at Peacock on Sky in the UK and is available now on Peacock in the US.

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Tilly Pearce

Freelance writer, Digital Spy
Tilly is Gold-Standard NCTJ accredited journalist with eight years of experience in entertainment journalism. 

She has been heard giving her insight on the latest TV stories on BBC Radio across the country and on BBC News. 

Previously working with The Sun Online, Yahoo, Metro.co.uk and Independent IE amongst others, she joined the Digital Spy team from 2021-2023 as Deputy TV Editor (Maternity cover). 

With a speciality in TV drama and true crime, Tilly has been praised for her exclusive content with A-list stars ranging from Sir David Attenborough to the lawyers behind Making A Murderer

She’s happy to report her mum now takes her seriously as a journalist as she got to interview George Clooney once.