Ana Gasteyer has her first Tony Award nomination, and she is taking a moment to savor it. The 59-year-old performer was nominated for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Schmigadoon!, recognition that lands after more than 25 years of work across comedy, television and theater.
The timing gives the nomination extra weight. The Tony Awards are set for Sunday at Radio City Music Hall in New York, putting Gasteyer in the middle of Broadway’s biggest night just as voters have singled out the work she did as Mildred on Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre in Schmigadoon! It is the kind of career-marker that can arrive only after a long run, and for Gasteyer it comes after a path that has already taken her from Northwestern University to Los Angeles and Saturday Night Live.
Gasteyer said the moment felt like a reminder that the years added up to something. She has described herself as doing a job that brings together the things she loves most: comedy, musical theater and staying home in New York. She also said she loves the discipline and rigor of theater, where the work does not end after one performance but starts again the next night.
That sense of arrival carries a small contradiction. Gasteyer has said she was a proper voice major at Northwestern and sang her way in, but she dropped out of music within a year after meeting the comedy people, and that changed her life. She later joined The Groundlings in Los Angeles, was cast on Saturday Night Live from there and stayed on the show for six years before leaving when she was pregnant with her daughter, Frances. The route to this nomination was not straight, even if she says now that she was on the right path.
Schmigadoon! gave her a role built for that mix of instincts. Gasteyer said working on it was a joy machine, praised Paula Pell as one of her favorite comedians, and called the chance to write and work with her a gift from the universe. In 2025, she and Will Ferrell also brought back Bobbi and Marty for Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary celebration, another reminder that the comedy world that changed her plans never really left her. Sunday will decide whether the nomination turns into a win, but the larger answer is already clear: after 25 years, Gasteyer is being recognized for the lane she chose when the music major became a comedian.
