Kate McKinnon is opening up about a relatively unheard of, but thankfully benign, condition.
“I took a photo of my tongue and sent it to an actor friend of mine,” the Saturday Night Live alum, 41, told People in an interview published on Saturday, September 6.
“We both have the same medical condition,” she continued. “It’s called geographic tongue. Your tongue sheds in patches and looks like an atlas, hence the name ‘geographic tongue.’”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, geographic tongue is a “noncancerous condition that causes smooth, reddish patches on your tongue.” A person can have the condition without experiencing any symptoms, according to the health organization, and it neither causes health issues or requires treatment.
Still, and despite her health condition being far from harmful, McKinnon admits she isn’t thrilled by her diagnosis.
“It’s gross,” the actress and comedian told the publication. “We brag about how geographic we are on any given day. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this in a magazine.”
Bragging about her relatively unheard of medical condition isn’t the only way the Roses star is deciding to pass her time. After leaving SNL behind in 2022, and going on to star in several successful movies including 2023’s blockbuster Barbie, McKinnon is busy practicing her fermenting skills.
“You can lacto-ferment any vegetable by putting them in a big clean jar with water to cover and then you weigh all that and subtract the weight of the jar, and then multiply that by .035 and then add that amount of salt (by weight), shake it up and let it sit for seven days,” she told the outlet in the same Saturday interview. “I’ve been fermenting. Aziza made me do it!”
McKinnon has also been flexing her DIY-skills, putting up what she described as “faux-beams” on her “bedroom ceiling.”
“I sourced the wood and cut it and oiled it and treated it for bugs and installed it and fixed it and it took me three years,” she explained. “But the skills I gained will last a lifetime. I love skills.”
As for her health, having a benign — and somewhat odd – medical condition puts McKinnon in an arguably prestigious category among her Hollywood peers. During a 2008 appearance on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, actor Ashton Kutcher revealed he has webbed toes.
“I have two toes that are connected, webbed. This made headline news? … They are just a little connected. It is good to tell everyone,” he explained at the time. “I heard this one little kid who had webbed toes and he thought he was abnormal but then he saw that I have them too and it confirmed that he is abnormal.”
He added, “I thought everyone’s toes were like that. You can actually cut it when you are born. People’s toes are joined then grow apart. Mine just didn’t [grow apart] all the way.”
Denzel Washington, for his part, has a crooked pinky finger, while Jennifer Garner has a condition called brachymetatarsia, a foot deformity that causes her pinky toe to overlap with her ring toe.
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