And while we, personally, would not be able to utter the phrase “not even A Night At The Roxbury popular” about our own work without doing immense psychic damage to ourselves—even though, Christ, it’s probably true—Meadows has come to terms with the film’s status over the years. Speaking to The Daily Beast‘s The Last Laugh podcast this week, the comedy veteran noted that, “The thing I learned from it was to not get caught up in worrying about the success or failure or something. Just because it wasn’t a success didn’t mean that it wasn’t a good movie. The movie is probably 90 percent what we wanted it to be.”
(A bit of historical context: The Ladies Man reportedly brought in $13.7 million at the box office in 2000, which was, indeed, significantly less than Roxbury‘s $30 million in 1998. It did make significantly more than some more serious SNL flops like Stuart Saves His Family and It’s Pat, in the grand, depressing pantheon of Saturday Night Live movies, but there are a pretty huge number of things—streaming charity marathons, tiny island nations, especially industrious magpies—that have brought in more money than It’s Pat.)
In the interview, Meadows—who’s currently starring in CBS’s new sitcom DMV, and had a recent, very fun turn in Peacemaker—talks about hiding the Ladies Man voice for years from his SNL colleagues, having never really sought out the pressure of a recurring character despite ultimately serving for 10 years on the series. “I thought of it as something that if people found out about, I would get arrested,” Meadows joked about the voice and character of Leon Phelps. “So it was like a deep, secretive thing that I kept hidden.”
