Maya Rudolph Gets Real About Growing Up With a Dad Who Couldn't Do Her Hair

Updated on 9/22/2018 at 1:30 PM

Maya Rudolph may be a known staple in the world of comedy today, but her road to success was filled with plenty of opposition and self-doubt. During a recent interview with the New York Times, the 46-year-old actress opened up about the frustrations she encountered while growing up mixed race and revealed how her hair became a recurring source of contention, even as she kick-started her Saturday Night Live career.

The daughter of Minnie Riperton, a black soul singer, and Richard Rudolph, a white songwriter and producer, Rudolph was used to having all eyes on her as a child. "When I was a kid, and people would come up to me or stare at me because of my mom, I didn't like it. I really didn't like it," she told the publication. "I used to think, 'Oh, they're staring at my hair, because it's so big and ugly,' because I didn't realize people were just staring at my mother, like, 'Wow, that's her daughter!' I didn't know; I was a kid. And kids always personalize things."

"So much of my childhood was dealing with my hair and being super embarrassed by it."

Maya's self-consciousness about her hair only heightened when she lost her mother to breast cancer, just two weeks before her seventh birthday. She revealed that her father didn't know how to style her hair, which she described as "super, super, superthick and supercurly," and she was "completely lost" trying to figure it out on her own while growing up in an wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood and attending a predominately white school. "So much of my childhood was dealing with my hair and being super embarrassed by it, mainly because I grew up being the only mixed kid," Rudolph said.

She got by with a little help from her late mother's sisters, who would occasionally visit California from Chicago and help with her hair's maintenance. "My neighbors used to say, 'We could hear you screaming across the street.' My aunties would come to town from Chicago and get the marcel iron out," she recalled.

As Rudolph entered adulthood, her hair remained a hot topic among onlookers. The actress mimicked a college student who approached her and said, "Your hair is so ethnic. Can I touch it?" She told the New York Times, "I actually have an aversion to that word, way more than people say they hate the word 'moist.' I hate the word 'ethnic' in that way. It's like they're talking about a print."

This same sentiment unfortunately continued as she garnered on-camera experience leading up to her SNL days. "Every time I'd work, they'd be like, 'I really don't — like, can I touch? — I really don't know what to do with your hair.' They would just say the most awful, disgusting things."

When Rudolph joined the SNL team — the fourth black woman to do so since the show began in 1975 — she had a hard time with getting her natural hair to fit under the wigs, so she spent a few hours each week changing its texture. She paid a visit to the hair department's blow-dry station, which was situated near the mens' dressing rooms in the studio. "Every Friday night, we'd hear some white guy walking down the hall going, 'Is something burning in here? What's burning?'" Rudolph recalled.

To read more of what Maya had to say about her childhood and her upcoming series, "Forever," read her entire New York Times profile here.