LOS ANGELES, Aug. 21 (UPI) – Comedian and actress Julia Sweeney recently spoke with UPI about her experience participating in the documentary We Are Pat, now streaming on Peacock. The film, directed by Rowan Haber, explores the LGBTQ community’s reaction to Sweeney’s iconic character ‘It’s Pat’ from Saturday Night Live.

The character of Pat was a recurring sketch on SNL, in which Sweeney played a person whose gender others could not determine. Haber’s documentary features interviews with gay, trans, and nonbinary individuals discussing Pat’s impact in the ’90s and later.

In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Sweeney shared her thoughts on how participating in the documentary has deepened her connection to the character. ‘It’s made me feel like I have a much deeper understanding of it, which makes me actually feel closer to Pat,’ Sweeney said. ‘I didn’t include the nonbinary world that much in my thinking about playing a character that was going to be a comic character.’

Sweeney’s character Pat was initially introduced as androgynous in the sketches from 1990-1993. The opportunity to connect with the LGBTQ community decades later has made Sweeney both proud of the early representation she created and aware that entertainment needs to make room for more LGBTQ voices. ‘If it were now, I wouldn’t come up with a character like Pat,’ Sweeney said. ‘I would think that’s not for me to come up with.’

Interview subjects in the documentary discussed being called Pat by bullies, including Abby McEnany, with whom Sweeney costarred on the show Work in Progress. LGBTQ comedians also reclaim Pat with new sketches, for which Sweeney joins the writers’ room. Haber’s goal in creating the documentary was not only to explore the impact of Pat but also to teach people how to discuss potentially controversial subjects cooperatively.

‘There are holistic lessons about how to talk about things even when you have different opinions, how to hear each other out and how to create meaning together,’ Haber said. ‘We’re excavating this thing, this cultural phenomenon of the ’90s, and we’re looking at it and examining it together in current times and trying to reassign a meaning to it together.’

The original SNL sketches were not mocking androgynous or nonbinary characters, but rather the people obsessed with and uncomfortable about finding out Pat’s gender. ‘My husband said, ‘If the world was enlightened, Pat wouldn’t be funny at all,’ Sweeney said. The documentary shows that the jokes were always at the expense of those who couldn’t accept Pat’s identity.

The character of Pat was based on an office coworker Sweeney had before working full-time in the entertainment industry. The joke about Pat’s gender only came at the end of the first sketch. ‘I just thought he had some mannerisms that were fun to copy,’ Sweeney said of the colleague whom she does not know if he recognized himself in Pat. ‘He’s now passed away.’

The documentary also explores the backstory of the character and the creation of the film It’s Pat: The Movie. Distributor Touchstone Pictures, a Walt Disney subsidiary, released the film in only 33 theaters, burying it. ‘Somebody new took over at Disney who didn’t like it,’ Sweeney explained. The studio released a 77-minute cut of the film, which is the only version available. Sweeney recalls editing a different cut with co-writer Jim Emerson, which was rejected. ‘Harvey Keitel was in it,’ Sweeney said. ‘He was actually really upset about getting cut out of it. It was really running into all kinds of problems.’

Unfortunately, Sweeney no longer has access to any of the material from the film. Even if Pat fans demand an extended cut of the film, the material from 1994 may be lost. ‘We kind of knew by then we were doing our cut that hardly anyone was going to see,’ Sweeney said.

Sweeney donned the Pat costume again for the documentary and thanks Haber for what has become a healing opportunity. ‘It really brings me back to that whole time of my life when that was such a big part of my life,’ Sweeney said. ‘Even though I loved Pat and was proud of it, because it was universally understood to be a bomb, I just felt like moving on.’

Haber discovered new things about Pat, too, and not just from Sweeney. ‘I learned that Kurt Cobain loved Pat which is so fun,’ he said. ‘K.D. Lang loves Pat, and Prince. I found out that Kate Berlant loves Pat. We didn’t get to interview her but she thinks Pat is hot so that’s cool.’

The documentary also allowed Sweeney to pass the torch to new Pats. The film shows other performers wearing Pat costumes for their sketches. Haber hopes the Pat movement continues. ‘I need to see people dressed up as Pat every day, otherwise it’s not successful to me,’ Haber said. ‘We’re bringing it back. I’m going to start making thongs that say Pat on them and hopefully people will wear them.’

Sweeney is happy that to explore Pat today requires adaptation because society is more enlightened about gender fluidity. It gives her hope that anti-trans, anti-nonbinary sentiment will fade too. ‘I guess you could say now we’re in the middle of a horrible backlash but that’s how it always is,’ Sweeney said. ‘I really look forward to 10 years from now when I believe people will be like, ‘Yeah, that’s not even a big deal.’