The psychic encounter that launched Kristen Wiig’s comedy career: “I left the next day”

Posted On August 24, 2025August 24, 2025

When it comes to actors’ origin stories, Bridesmaids star Kristen Wiig’s is a cut above the rest. For starters, she never even considered acting until she got to university, and to this day, the idea of performing in front of anyone brings her out in a cold sweat.

In case you’re wondering how the hell someone like that can end up becoming one of the most popular Saturday Night Live stars of her generation and an A-list Hollywood comedy star, the answer is simple: a psychic told her she’d be a famous actor, and she believed them implicitly. Allow me to explain.

While attending the University of Arizona as an art student, New York native Wiig realised that she had to sign up for an elective class to fulfill her grade. Scrambling around for something that sounded fun (and not a ton of extra work), she chose an acting class. She later described it as a very basic ‘Acting 101’ affair, but to her surprise, she took to it like a duck to water. Still, her head nearly exploded when her tutor suggested she had the talent to continue honing her craft after graduation.

It wasn’t exactly the stuff of dreams – sketching post-surgery bodies in a clinic – but work was thin on the ground and at least her art degree wasn’t gathering dust. Even so, she couldn’t quite shake her teacher’s voice, nagging away in the back of her head. What if she was flogging a dead horse with art, and it was really acting she was supposed to be doing all along?

Wiig had this slightly odd but comforting ritual: she reckoned if you stood in front of a mirror and asked yourself something straight, the honest answer would come back at you. So one day she gave it a go, stared herself down, and asked what she should actually be doing with her life. To her surprise, the reply that tumbled out was simple enough: “Move to LA and try acting,” Wiig told NPR in 2024. “And I was shocked, kind of, that that was what I was feeling. But that’s what came out.”

This was a big deal for the young star-in-the-making – her subconscious was telling her to leave art behind and devote herself to acting. Still, she wanted a second opinion, so she did what any sensible person would in that situation: she visited a psychic. Incredibly, the day before she was due to start the job at the surgery clinic, her psychic confirmed that her future lay in Tinseltown. “I went home and I packed up all my stuff,” Wiig confirmed. “And I left the next day, and I drove to Los Angeles.”

Wiig didn’t even tell her parents that she’d decided to uproot her entire life to move to a new city to pursue a career she’d previously never thought about. As far as they were aware, their daughter was still living in Arizona, but in reality, she was working in an Anthropologie store in LA, while trying to book auditions on the side. 

However, as soon as Wiig got to LA, she felt impostor syndrome because she was surrounded at all times by “performers, writers, and filmmakers”, while she had “zero experience” with any of that. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she struggled to book acting jobs in her early days, until a fateful trip to watch the improv group The Groundlings altered her path yet again.

Watching improv comedy was a revelation for Wiig, and she quickly realised she was much more excited by it than traditional acting. “Watching people be on stage, acting without a script,” she gushed, “there was something in me that was like, ‘I want to do that. I know I can do that.’ For some reason, it was less scary to me than having words in front of me.” The rest, as they say, is history.

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