Leslie Jones shuffled into the “glam room” of her Beverly Hills house, wearing a bathrobe and Ugg slippers. Awaiting her was a hair stylist, in orange glasses and a KN95, and a makeup artist, who was on the phone, asking a colleague which products to use. Jones sat down at a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. A Bob Marley ashtray rested on a cart of nail-polish bottles, opposite a wig closet. “I need to roll one,” Jones said.
“I set up this room because, even before the pandemic, me and my hairdresser and makeup artists were always in a hotel room or somebody’s living room or something, getting ready,” she went on. “For Black people, that’s how we’ve always gotten our hair done—in the kitchen. My mom would make the kitchen table her shop, and I was, like, ‘Mom, the kitchen smells like burned hair.’ ”
“Are we going to work at the same time?” asked the hair stylist. The makeup artist’s shoes had the words “pray” and “wait” on them.
“Y’all new, so let me tell you how this goes,” Jones said. Her regular team was off. “This is different from getting ready for ‘S.N.L.,’ where somebody behind you is getting dressed like a full frog.”
Jones, who left “Saturday Night Live” two years ago, was prepping for a day hosting the reboot of the game show “Supermarket Sweep”—a timed race through a grocery store—which first aired in the sixties. Teams of two tear through the aisles, filling up their carts, and answer trivia questions about consumer goods.
Jones was a fan of the program in its eighties incarnation. “Watching the show was very relaxing to me because I could answer the questions,” she said. “When you watch ‘Jeopardy,’ you can’t answer none of that shit. But you ask somebody names of toilet paper—fuck it, I’ll name all that shit.” She heard about a casting call for contestants back then, and decided to try out. She was working at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, and she recruited a co-worker as her teammate. “On the weekend, I would take her to the grocery store,” she said. “I trained her.” But they never made it on the show. Jones went on, “Everybody likes the show now, because it brings back shopping. Especially with the pandemic, it’s, like, ‘Are we ever going to have a Black Friday again? A swap meet?’ ”
“We call this the Hawk,” she said, peering at the updo the hair stylist was building.
Jones explained that, after she became well known, she couldn’t shop for groceries anymore. “I miss it so fucking much,” she said. “Whenever I get a chance to go in a grocery store, which is not often, it’s like you took me to a club.” She described being in a Whole Foods and noticing somebody staring at her. “I’m from Compton, so the first thing I think is, What the fuck! I ain’t stealing nothing!” she said. “And then I go, ‘Oh, shit! I’m Leslie Jones.’ ”
(She mused on other grocery stores. Erewhon: “Their hot bar is bomb, but it’s a whole bunch of motherfucking men with hair buns buying vitamins.”)
Her stylist appeared in the doorway and asked Jones what she wanted to wear to the studio. For the hosting gig, they’d perfected a look of sports coats and sneakers. “I’ve been doing a Monty Hall type thing,” Jones said, referring to the longtime host of “Let’s Make a Deal.” “I got a different jacket for every show.”
She’s not fussy about clothes. “I don’t give a fuck about what I look like. I like to get the joke told,” she said. “That’s one thing they didn’t realize at ‘S.N.L.’ until too late. That I’m not just a goofball. That I can actually do other emotions and be fucking still funny.” She went on, “Lucille Ball was beautiful. She didn’t give a fuck about being beautiful. She went the length that she needed to go to get the fucking joke across.” Jones said that, if she had to, she’d fall back on her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice: “I’ll be a good damn detective.”
She explained why hosting a game show appealed to her more than impersonating a politician on “S.N.L.” did. “I smoke too much weed to be other people,” she said. “I don’t remember that shit. But I do remember who I am.”
In 2016, after she appeared in the all-female “Ghostbusters” reboot, she was viciously harassed on Twitter, and the company’s C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, invited her in to talk about Internet hate. “Now I want to talk to Jeff Bezos,” she said. “But with him I will be, like, ‘I need to know where your brain is.’ ”
She examined her face and hair in the mirror: “Y’all really did a good job for something I’m just going to sweat off.” ♦
