Actor begins post-SNL life

By Jennifer Umaña
Daily Forty-Niner

As a young boy, long-time "Saturday Night Live" regular Tim Meadows posed as a girl in order to be among the first picked for baseball teams.

Meadows, who had an afro at the time, was staying with his aunts who lived on a different side of Detroit. The boys in the neighborhood did not know that he was actually a boy.

"These boys all thought I was a little girl," he said. "The thing was I could really play baseball well. You know when you pick teams when you're a little kidóif you're a girl who can baseball really well you get picked really quick because they want to put a girl on their team and they want to get the best girl."

"So they thought I was a girl the whole summer," Meadows continued. "I'd be like --Yeah, hi, Tina.' I just did it because I wanted to play baseball and I didn't want to be the last one picked all the time."

Meadows, who was born in Highland Park, Michigan and grew up in Detroit, is a man now and the only afro he sports is as the character Leon Phelps in the new movie "The Ladies Man," scheduled to be released Friday. The character first appeared on "Saturday Night Live" in 1997. Meadows, who had been a show regular since 1992, left the show after last season.

Meadows, casted in the new sitcom, "The Michael Richards Show," recently sat down in a crowded hotel room in West Hollywood with about 10 reporters to reveal some thoughts on life, Leon, and the pursuit of happiness ...

His departure from "SNL":

I thought about leaving the show when Sandler left. I didn't want to leave New York ... They wanted to fire everyone during that year. They wanted me to come back as a writer and I didn't want to do that because that was like a demotion. So I just figured I would try to get a job somewhere else. And then they brought me back. Ever since then I felt right.

At the beginning of last season I was really tired from doing the movie and doing the show. I just felt like this is it for me. I just can't be writing three-minute sketches.

Roles for blacks on "SNL":

...as an African-American actor working on a predominately white show, you get a lot of Johnnie Cochran roles and those things kind of fall to you naturally because of the color of your skin.  But you also have to give them what they want. Yeah, I was a black actor on the show and Johnnie Cochran came, but I had to learn how to do Johnnie Cochran ... I had to learn how to be funny at it. If you can't do that then you get fired. It made me become a better writer because I wasn't being written for. That happens to the women on
On his movie being an "SNL" movie:

... people go into this movie expecting to hate it expecting it to be a boring "Saturday Night Live" movie. And then they come out genuinely liking the movie. I almost think that its better than having them going in thinking it's going to be a good movie and finding out it's a good movie. I like being an underdog.
On his nude scene:

That is me running away in that wide shot, yes ...  the close-up was a butt double. In hindsight, I wish I would've written the scene in a room in the daytime. Not outside at night in Toronto. It was raining. It was an apartment building and the people that lived in the apartment building were all outside watching the scene as we were finishing it. And I started thinking: What did I get myself into? This was a bad idea.

On Leon's success with women:

Our thought (as writers) was that it was unexplainable, basically. It is something that you sort of have to accept as a viewer of the movie ... If Leon is a real dudeóI say dude a lotóif Leon is a real guy ... then it really wouldn't make sense. He wouldn't score like that. He wouldn't have the lifestyle that he has. He'd be a drunk. He'd have liver disease and he'd be, you know, dead.
On the inspiration for Leon:

(Leon is based on men he saw in Detroit)...these guys were very successful with women. And I didn't understand it...how these guys drove around in a Riviera, that was, like, being redone and you think it was going to be painted but it never would be painted. But these guys would always have women and women liked them. And for me as a teenager, I could not understand it.