The Santa Clause 2 and 3
I got offered the role of Mother Nature in “The Santa Clause 2” while I was still on “Talk Soup.” Since “Talk Soup” shot every single day (we couldn’t do re-runs because of legal agreements with the shows we clipped), I had to find a way to get a couple weeks off to shoot my scenes for the movie. The solution was to pre-tape a bunch of shows and then bring in a few guest hosts while I was gone. Sarah Silverman was one of them; she said some hilarious things that are still in circulation on the web, if you’re a Youtube/Google master.
“The Santa Clause 2” shot in late winter in Vancouver, B.C., and the mountains around the city were covered in snow. I’m a snowboarder, and it would just kill me to go to work every morning and practically be able to see the snowboarders hitting the slopes up at Whistler/Blackcomb while I was off to work for 12 hours indoors. Luckily everyone on the movie was so nice and fun to work with, so it wasn’t like work at all. Tim Allen is a whirling dervish; he makes jokes on top of jokes on top of jokes, and it drove Michael Lembeck (the director) crazy, I think—but we all loved it and laughed until we cried all day long. It was a madhouse.
My dress was very elaborate for both movies—the corset was so tight and the skirt so complex that I couldn’t actually sit down. Instead, they made me a special seat—a bicycle seat mounted on top of a tripod—and they would jam it up under my skirt so I could sit down. It was insanely uncomfortable. And if I had to pee, get out of the way—it took two or three wardrobe people to get me in and out of that dress! At lunch I would try to find a way to lie down so that the “sun ray” headdress wouldn’t stab me in the face. And people had to keep a wide berth or risk severe eye injury—let’s just say I didn’t get a lot of hugs from adults on that movie!
Fortunately, the kids who played the elves loved Mother Nature, and I would get hugs from them all day long (they were too short to get poked by my headdress). They would get so excited and would run up and squeeze me and break off my branches or rip off my leaves. I would tell them, "We have to love Mother Nature gently!" And isn't that really so true?
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