Isn't That Rich?

From SNL to the silver screen to awards show stages, Maya Rudolph always brings the magic. Her latest trick? Turning an out-of-touch billionaire into TV's most endearing character.

- JESSICA PRESSLER

The more Maya Rudolph learns about the superwealthy, the less she understands. "Like, who are these people?" she says, sitting in the dining room at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills on a Friday morning. Meaning not the people around us, who-although they're sitting on Louis XVI chairs and ordering from a menu that includes a $92 Dover sole-are most likely ordinary rich people, not the island-owning type of stratospherically wealthy people Rudolph has become more aware of working on Loot, the series she produces and stars in for Apple TV+.

"Everything feels like a secret," she goes on, telling me about a friend of hers who was recently invited to some kind of ideas conference, "one of those things where they all go to some ranch somewhere and talk about things." Her friend told her he was leaving the next day. "Where are you going?" she asked. "And he said, 'I don't know," Rudolph says. Her eyes, which are brown and round and already very large, like Bambi's, widen further. "I was like, 'What?!? Are they going to send you in, like, a Wonder Woman clear helicopter?"

That's probably what Molly Wells, the character she plays on Loot, would do. The ex-wife of a cheating tech mogul whose $87 billion divorce settlement has made her the "third-richest woman in the world," Wells is partial to excess and whimsy, which is one of the reasons Rudolph loves playing her. "Something I realized about myself fairly recently is I love magic," she says. "And that kind of infinite wealth, it's like magic. You can do anything, go anywhere. You can buy an island. Anything can happen, which I find so fun."