There’s a scene in this week’s Loot, Apple TV+’s sharp comedy series, that feels strangely out of time. If you were just stumbling upon the show for the first time, you’d find Maya Rudolph and Ana Gasteyer in a mode near-identical to their work together two decades ago on Saturday Night Live. They’re both embodying larger-than-life characters—in this case, out-of-touch billionaires gleefully acting out their new jobs as “business women”—as if there’s no camera or audience before them.

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For consistent viewers of the show, there’s a lot more to the bit—particularly when it comes to Rudolph’s work. For two seasons, she’s traced the journey of ridiculously wealthy divorcée Molly Wells, who has billions of dollars and an existential crisis on her hands—ultimately deciding to find purpose by reengaging with her charitable foundation. The role has allowed Rudolph to play the character’s most ridiculous and humane facets side-by-side, imbuing the show’s clever 1% satire with a surprisingly empathic streak. This goes especially for the second season, which has solidified Loot’s structure as a workplace comedy, and built toward Rudolph finding an ideal foil in Gasteyer—a fellow newly single billionaire who approaches her next act in, well, more radical fashion.

The shades Rudolph gets to play as Molly speaks to what she’s shown onscreen since her SNL breakout. She’s shined in independent films like Sam Mendes’s Away We Go, won Emmys for her voice work on Big Mouth and her triumphant SNL return as Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live. But in Loot, Rudolph gets a role to savor, one that allows her to go as broad and as nuanced as she likes, fine-tuning that balance with each episode. It platforms a pro in her prime. In conversation on this week’s Little Gold Men (read or listen below), such a showcase naturally prods some career reflection too.

Vanity Fair: This show feels like a prime example of what good sitcom-making is, by which I mean growing in its second season: the ensemble feels gelled, the sensibility feels more refined. Did you notice that too?

Maya Rudolph: Absolutely. There’s nothing more fun in the creation of a show than the second season, because you’re really ticking a lot of boxes, especially in the pilot, to introduce everyone. But in the same way that my character Molly is getting a chance to really invest in her relationships now and understand and know the people that make up the Wells Foundation, so is the audience. We get to take everybody and play and make all the fun combinations. I love nothing more than a workplace comedy because it’s just knowing people’s voices.

I would imagine that there’s a lot of calibration that comes with that too, and figuring out the exact right tone. You were starting with a pretty high concept. How did that impact your own performance going into the second season?

I think it was just a matter of finding the right tone for Molly. I knew where her heart was coming from. I knew she was a good person and had a good head on her shoulders, but was also capable of [being] completely out of touch. Those are really the places that I wanted to lean into the most, and I find them to be terribly fun to find a way to play together. But it’s hard. It’s hard to lean into that really arch comedy of being this woman who’s just truly been living in her own hemisphere with somebody who really cares about other people. But the combination of those two things is what gives the show the ability to be relatable. Selfishly, I just tried to find the fun in that balance because I love playing both things.

In some scenes you are the most ridiculous person in the room, and we love that. Then in others, you’re with Adam Scott playing your unhinged tech-billionaire ex-husband.

Well, I say this to his face and he knows that I feel this way—he is the best douchebag there is. He’s fantastic at it. God dammit. He’s so good. And I mean, I think we quote “Dane Cook, pay-per-view, 20 minutes” [from Step Brothers] constantly in my house. He’s the greatest.

As this airs, we are in the midst of your fabulous interplay with Ana Gasteyer, who is new to the show this season. You guys seem to be having a ton of fun together.

We do. I mean, I feel like it’s probably annoying for the people around us because we’re chirpy.

You have a scene where you’re literally chirpy, doing this sort of businesswoman-cosplay dance.

I mean, it does feel a bit written for us. [Laughs] It’s that lovely luxury of the writers knowing her voice and her capabilities and mine and us together. She just completely nailed just the high and low of this poor woman. There was a moment where she’s walking through her house and she realizes she’s walking through broken glass and she’s sort of surprised by it—I chortled so many times, so much snot came out of my nose every time she did it. She’s one of those performers that also just understands exactly what she’s talking about and what she’s ripping into. She’s so smart and she’s just so good at it. She nailed it.

You have this really fantastic cast, too, of actors who are a little bit newer to the scene than Adam or Ana. I love your stuff with Joel Kim Booster, who plays your right-hand man. Being the lead of a show with that mix, how do you experience that? I’d imagine some actors who are familiar with you may be just excited to work with you.

Well, Joel just revealed last month something about me that he’s been keeping very, very neatly hidden—about his having seen me on SNL from the old days. I was really touched to hear that I’d made it that far back into his consciousness. It keeps becoming a surprise for me to realize that I’m the eldest in the group most of the time. I think once you turn 50, you realize you think everyone’s the same age and they’re not. “We’re all in our 20s, right?” “No, you’re not.” But I feel that way. It can be odd for people to look at me as that person. I don’t totally recognize it. I’m not mad at owning it, and I’m getting better at it for sure. And it’s been very lovely to experience it in this way on the show, because I definitely am that person for most of the people in the cast.

I can’t really tell how old anybody is anymore, so I feel like I’ll make references to things—we all have the same pop culture references, right? No. You don’t know what Shasta Cola is or stuff like that. You poor, poor thing. You missed out on some good shit. My daughter’s 10 and she said, “Mommy, I really wish I’d been alive in the ‘90s. I feel like I really missed out.” I thought it was so crazy to hear that, like, “The ‘90s, like, ew, what? Really?” But then I realized, oh, she’s totally right. I wanted to be in the ‘70s in that way. I mean, I was a baby, I was a little kid, but I get it.

You couldn’t be online, let alone weren’t online.

Thank God. I mean, God, how boring would I be? [Laughs] Thank God I didn’t have any of that stuff. I really needed an outlet badly. I needed to get in people’s faces and perform things live and annoy people with the sounds coming out of my mouth for a very long time. It really helped me develop as a person.

I know you had performer parents, but where do you think that impulse came from, to get in people’s faces?

It’s funny, we talk about it all the time too—it’s like, thank God I wasn’t raised in Footloose territory. I was raised in a very creative household. The idea of being a performer or being creative was not foreign. As a matter of fact, it was celebrated. And I think what was so incredible about that kind of an upbringing is that you hear later when people are adults, maybe they didn’t get the support that they needed at home. I got the most support to be the weirdest, the loudest, the craziest, trying things on—all that stuff. I was just so incredibly supported and loved and seen. I do think that comes absolutely from my parents being artists and being raised by creative people. There’s no question in my mind how much that influenced me.

My favorite movie of yours is Away We Go, and I was thinking about that movie in connection to Loot—because it’s a really rich, dramatic role. It was the first movie you did right after SNL, right?

Yeah, it was. I love that movie, and I feel the same way about it because it was such an exciting opportunity to get to flex that muscle. I remember after it came out, people were saying, “I think people will be really surprised to see you in this way.” And I remember thinking, “Wait, I always saw myself as doing this and Saturday Night Live and all of it. I never saw myself as any one thing.” I can classify myself as a comedian, but I know starting out, I just thought acting was acting. I didn’t really think of it as one particular thing. Coming out of a place like Saturday Night Live where people see you as a straight comedian, it was such an unbelievable opportunity to do something that I completely understood. It was the kind of movie that I loved and the kind of story that I wanted to see. To get the opportunity to be a part of that was extraordinary for me because we didn’t always get those opportunities

I had just had my first child and I had such similar experiences. I’d never really read a script where the character was mixed, and that’s not what the movie was about because that’s so similar to my life. It’s like, “Yes, I’m mixed race, but that’s not the headline—and I also have good days and bad days and have a baby and have a boyfriend.” All these things that just make you a person…. I wish making every movie was like that. It was really, really one of those special ones.

Coming out of that, did you feel a certain longing to just be in the indie film world from there?

Oh, yeah. I kind of thought that’s where I was going to end up. Before anything, I just thought, “That’s my speed. Those are my people. That’s where I’m going to be.” I never assumed differently. I was surprised that people were surprised to see me in the space, but I think that’s because coming out of Saturday Night Live, people really saw me as one thing. I think it’s changing and it’s evolving, but it’s still very slow. It’s difficult for people to see you as what they don’t know you as, and it’s very comforting for people to see you as what they do know. I have no interest in that in life, and so I don’t naturally follow that. And I’m sure that is sort of wild and really crazy for some people.

I’ve never really wanted to experience a particular kind of material that was just going to be, for lack of a better word, straightforward. I don’t present straightforward. I don’t know what straightforward is for me and how that would manifest and maybe I will one day…. I never thought I’d be playing a vice presidential candidate on Saturday Night Live because when I worked there, there weren’t any that looked like me. The world is fascinating in that respect, but it’s nice to think about a project like [Away We Go]. You can’t really create your career exactly the way you want it to be because you don’t always get the parts you want and you don’t always get the opportunities you want. But to think about where I wanted it to go and where it’s gone is very interesting—and some of the stuff I’d like to get back to.

I’m biased because I grew up watching Saturday Night Live in your era, but your cast has always felt like a uniquely tight-knit group. And there’s a meaningful lineage there to me, thinking about your time from there to Bridesmaids to even just seeing Ana on Loot. There’s always a continuation.

Yes. Even just hearing you say you grew up watching us—I grew up watching them. The people that originated the show were our idols, and we were able to then bring that with us—carry that with us into the work that we were doing and with a deep reverence, but also just an understanding of this lineage, what we were a part of.

I think I’m having an epiphany as we speak: It might be the missing puzzle piece of all these years when people have asked, “Why was this group of women so solid when you were there?” I was like, “I don’t know, lightning in a bottle?” We were raised differently, but we were all really good students, good daughters, good, strong, hard workers. But we all had this similar sensibility of growing up with the knowledge of what the show was, and having that respect and regard for the old guard and then being a part of the lineage of it, and being part of history. It all kind of just happened at that time.

This interview has been edited and condensed.