“Girls all over the world used to tell me that they had never seen a Jewish girl like me on TV before they saw me on ‘Blossom’,” Bialik writes in Variety. “Many said they knew I was Jewish and it made them proud to be. That was so touching to me, and it still is.”
“I wonder how those girls felt when they saw an actress playing me with a comically prosthetic nose.”
The SNL alum who performed the bit, Melanie Hutsell, has been quick to express her regrets.
In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, Hutsell said, “When we were preparing to do that sketch all those years ago, I was absolutely horrified that they wanted me to wear a prosthetic nose to play Mayim Bialik’s character, Blossom. I knew it was wrong.”
Hutsell explained in the statement that her refusal to go through with the sketch would have resulted in dismissal from the job. “Although I had and have always had a strong moral compass, I didn't have the strength to refuse to do the sketch after I was told I would be fired,” she said.
Hutsell she added that she had the chance to apologise to Bialik during an encounter a decade after the SNL sketch: "The whole situation haunted me for years, but thankfully I had an opportunity at an audition about ten years after the fact to look Mayim in the eye and apologize for what I did, to which she responded, 'I release you!' I took that to mean that she accepted my apology and that meant more to me than she will ever know," Hutsell said.
“If I could go back and change history, I would have refused to wear the prosthetic nose and taken the risk of losing my job,” Hutsell said. “That would have been the right thing to do.”
