JENNY SLATE

The Maker

Always in Creative Process, Jenny Slate Reflects on a Big Year of Films, her Latest Book, and a Starring Role on Critically Acclaimed Series, Dying for Sex---with Eyes Wide Open to Where Inspiration Might Strike Next

PHOTOS BY Andrew de francesco
WORDS BY TAMARA RAPPA

Listen to the extended podcast interview --- find Story + Rain Talks and Jenny Slate's episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.

Tamara Rappa: Jenny, life has been full for you this year with films, a book, and a series. Where are you now, and is it important for you as an artist to take space around your projects, and around all the creative energy and output needed for them?  What does taking and making space look like?

Jenny Slate:  Physically, right now, I am in Los Angeles, in Silver Lake. I am in my friend's apartment that, weirdly, used to be my apartment. It's a very lovely, tiny apartment.  I lived here right before I met my husband. My friends lived across the street, and they took over my lease once I left.  It's really nice to be here. This place is deeply peaceful, I remember it being so, and it's almost odd to be back in here. I haven't come back very many times, but I needed a quiet place. My own house is filled with dogs and a four year old. It is really important for me to create breathing room between creative projects. Also, I don't tend to be a workaholic. I think I am every-day-in-touch-with the instinct to be in creative process. My goal, I think, is to be successful enough so that I can be in the daily version of that more. For me, honestly, a lot of it is about nesting. I'm a very nest-y animal; cooking and tidying and making everything just-so is not just soothing for me, it really clears my mind. Also, I'm not looking to do back-to-back things. A lot of time, especially with my writing, I'll have an idea and it feels really important to me and it feels viable, but it can almost be overwhelming and like I can't exactly get to it yet. So when I'm fortunate enough to be able to have the time to just let it sit, I kind of let it sit.

TR: We get a slice of your life through your work. Your home, your family---all make appearances in your work, from stage to books. Is there a story about your life or your career that you find yourself reflecting upon, and that you haven't had a chance to share yet?

JS: When something is ready to be expressed outside of my personal life, there tends to be no hesitation in terms of either putting it in standup or putting it on the page. I'm just not sure that what I'm going through right now is entertaining enough to be a part of my work. But it is important. This winter, we moved back to Los Angeles. It will be our last winter here, and then we won't really spend any time here unless I'm working here. We decided to come back for one last stretch of time, and my daughter got to go to a preschool here with her little cousin. I'd had this big plan to be writing the whole time, but we flew in on the night of the fires and I had friends who lost absolutely everything. It was a deeply sad time. There's been so much sorrow and fear, generally, and increasing every day---with the current administration. I really wanted to go to my writing as a way to support my emotional life and soothe myself, but it actually felt bad to try to work on this new exciting idea that I had. For the first time in my life, I've had to call the people who I work with and say, 'I'm not quitting, but I can't touch this right now.' I'm just a bit too focused on my life, on people, and on really wanting to be in my relationships. I just don't have the switch-back-and-forth mode. It's very odd. I don't have it...

TR:  On our podcast, our guests often describe moments of creativity that they were surrounded by while growing up. I'm specifically thinking about what were you like in college, at Columbia. What do you remember about that time, specifically?

JS:  I absolutely loved college. I didn't enjoy high school very much. I just could not get socially comfortable. It's no one's fault at this point; I just hadn't really found an understanding of what would make me feel good, socially. At college, I really found my group. I met best friends that are still my best friends today. The way I looked? I was a heavy stoner wearing super low-rise jeans with my thong showing sometimes. I had really long, curly hair, and I dyed the bottom of it Manic Panic raspberry-red. I had a belly button pierce. I wore a lot of midriffs. I wore two bras to really push up my boobs and be booby. I was a kind of Jewish Shakira, trying to have some influence from Erykah Badu or something, but I was not cool in that way at all. I was smoking weed and having the best time. I was an English major. I loved reading, loved writing essays. I loved being on my own, but in a space that I understood. I made my first real best friends. I was heartbroken a lot; heart sick a lot. I had a lot of relationships that didn't work out. It was this terrible combination of not actually being ready for a serious relationship at all, but thinking that the way that one defines themselves as lovable, is by being in hardcore monogamy that leads to marriage. My parents are high school sweethearts. I don't know where exactly I picked that up, it was just in culture. I remember really wanting to be in one of those couples where you're best friends and you're not ever worrying about whether or not your boyfriend likes you. I just couldn't couldn't click in, but I loved school and I was so happy. I'd realized this version of myself that I always wanted to be. When I started doing improv and excelled, it was like realizing that you could run really fast or something. I felt very at home [at Columbia], and it was one phase of coming into my own. It was a really important, really sweet time. Then, I had to go through more phases, and not be exactly like that anymore.

TR: The tone of your writing is so uniquely metaphorical and poetic. How do you describe it? Or do you not? Do you just feel it, and not describe it?

JS: I do just feel it. I'm not trying to make it be any way. And that doesn't mean it that doesn't need to be edited, and that it can't go from eight pages to four lines. I'm very, very open to change, but I like it when things are abstract yet steeped in the psyche. I love Elizabeth Hardwick. There's a book I just read, called My First Book by Honor Levy. It's full of everything, but parts of it are very surreal or abstract. I love the writers Claire-Louise Bennett and Fleur Jaeggy, because I can decipher their work. Not that I could give you a plot synopsis sometimes, but I get it. I was talking to my sister-in-law last night... What is it with opera? I know it's beautiful, but the people who are, 'I love opera'? I'm just like....I don't really understand it. It's really hard for me to understand what's happening. For me, abstract or surrealist post-modernist prose by Clarice Lispector or Leonora Carrington... those things just make sense to me. And I need them. I'm not really sure I write like those people, but at least they serve as examples of people standing in, maybe, a very large area with me.

TR: There are two Marcel The Shell books, so beautifully crafted. You've also written a book with your father, About The House; you published Little Weirds in 2019, and your latest, Lifeform, was released this past October. How did you compile the stories for Lifeform?

JS:  It was so hard to write when I started writing Lifeform. Beginning in late spring of 2020, I had little scraps of ideas that I'd started to put down. I was a couple months pregnant, and I found it just impossible. I hated everything I seemed to be interested in. I think it's natural, but sometimes there are moments in writing, especially in journaling, when it's totally okay to have pettiness, bitterness, grievances that don't really move into anything else. I'm not ashamed of it, but it's not what I want to put out into the world, on a wall, like forever, you know? I'd found it really hard to write anything that felt like it could breathe and progress.  I found it hard to say something interesting, and that wasn't ​just me having a tiny little shit fit. That's cruel to say about myself, I know, but sometimes it's just that way. Then, in the summer of 2023, my daughter was two and a half, and I could suddenly just catch a wave. I had absolutely no plan, and I was so desperate to write the book, to write it because I'd had the book deal since the spring of 2020. There was the feeling of, I'm not doing my homework---and I hate that feeling. You know when you are so upset that you don't know what to eat, and then there's part of you that's like, just eat anything? Put anything in your mouth. There was this piece that did end up in my book that's about a vision of a water column; this weird fantasy moment of imagining something, but that also feels like a vision being sent from nature. At that point I was pregnant and imagining my head kind of split at the jaw, and this column of water is flying at my body, sending itself down into my body, towards where I was making a life form. That was at the center; I put that piece in the center of a big empty space in my mind. Then, if anything felt like it could, in any way, be paired with it---even if clashing patterns, so to speak--I'd  work on those. I had about one hundred and eight pieces open at one time, and I would work on what was interesting to me. Every day I would make myself work. Then I started organizing them into phases, something that was much simpler than what I was trying to do, and that felt really good. It was a process of, first, expunging, getting things out of my mind, and then, allowing the clog to go away, allowing myself to feel. I was really keeping an eye on the self-critic that isn't useful in the creative process; the Meanie that's mean. I loved it, but it was really hard.

TR:  You really feel the phases of Lifeform. There are so many parts I love, and there are two excerpts that I especially love, one on page 84, when you go into, 'I make her body, I keep pulling through the dark until she is filled with enough of a draw to make her spirit leap into her body.' And then I also love a section a few pages later, 'Yet the idea that I would go to a man's house while he is all day, all night, growing another life form inside of his own body, and that I would leave small, hot, wet bags on his side tables.'

JS: [The story] has to be worth my time enough for it to be there forever. The 'small, hot bags' that you're referring to are tea bags that a guest was leaving. I had these definitions of what a person should be like, and what it means if they're mad or if they don't like something that's happening. If they can't be relaxed about something. I'm trying to undo these norms that don't serve me, and one of them is, really not liking it when people are checked out in terms of how they're affecting other people in nuanced ways. It really bums me out, but what also bummed me out is the amount of being so uptight that I was serving to myself as a reaction to my own anger. It's not like I am the world's most considerate person, but it's also deeply painful to me at this point, like, intolerable, to not call out the ways in which I find that some of us are dwelling in this weird zone of the privilege of not having to be responsible for other people's wellbeing. Oftentimes I'd find that this person who was visiting expected the best to be flowing in their direction, even though they were not doing anything as difficult as what I was doing.  I found it to be bizarre. I find that behavior, no matter what the gender identity is of the person, to be misogynistic behavior. I'm burned up by it, and it's not because I'm an uptight neatnik....me even saying so shows how frightened I am by speaking it out loud. But you know what? My fright is warranted because I've basically never been in a situation where I've mentioned to an unconscious misogynist that what they're doing in their disregard, their defensiveness, their unwillingness to participate in community standards and their wish for everyone to make it go away for them; even said in the most nursery-school, nice, mommy, and you're-not-in-trouble way----has always been met with, 'You only see this because you have problems. You only see this because you're crazy. You only see this because you're insecure. You only see this because you're spoiled, and it's never enough.' I've gotten to the point where I want to at least put it in my writing, to show not necessarily how abhorrent it is, but that it's also very stupid and in fact, funny,, silly, clownish, and sad---and out of touch, to be that way. I wanted to find a way to write about it where it feels like people can read it and still feel understood, but they don't feel totally fucking pissed.

TR: Does 'The House Guest' know about about your story?

JS: 'The House Guest' is an amalgamation of a couple people who were passing through...

TR: Your brief stint on SNL in three words?

JS: Glad-it-happened. Is that three? It was a necessary opportunity for me to take. I saw a lot in myself that I didn't expect to see. Though challenging, it completely pointed me the direction of my own natural success, and it doesn't hurt at all anymore. At the time it sort of felt like college breakup. It broke my heart. I was so ashamed. But I don't feel that way about it at all anymore. That's what time will do. Lessons, when they arrive, might arrive with a big blast. But then there's light. They're showing you something. There's something in that blast that contains light. For me, it also contains warmth at the end, and gratitude for even getting to try. In people or in experiences, I'm not someone who has those feelings of  'the one that got away'. I don't want to live with that. I'm so grateful that I got to see what was there for me. I love playing characters and stuff, but I really didn't understand the job. I was not the right person to be there, and that's a very humbling thing to learn. It doesn't mean that I'm bad at comedy or whatever, but it was a weird thing to assume one could do. Like, I don't think I could be in Les Mis; I'm pretty clear on that one...

TR:  Marcel The Shell is your most famous voice; and you've voiced many characters. Did the extraordinary success of Marcel The Shell  surprise you? And, in looking back now, do you have any additional thoughts or perspective as to why it resonated so with critics and audiences alike? Is there anything new that comes up for you?

JS: It clearly does resonate with people but I don't own that for myself. That is the achievement of those people. Every time we love a piece of art, that's our achievement. The original creation is the achievement of the artist and the people who may have helped them, or made them feel encouraged or inspired... the beauty and offerings of their world at that time. And when you love someone, that's your achievement of being able to connect. I can't control that. We made Marcel  because, Dean [Fleischer Camp] and I were, individually and together, connecting to a concept, connecting to each other, to something that pleased us stylistically. We did it so freely and with no aim, honestly. We weren't trying to have an aim, but we also just didn't have an aim. Dean, my co-creator, the director of Marcel, and the person who really created the look of Marcel, is such an incredible filmmaker. He had promised a friend that he would make a video for their comedy show in Williamsburg. I think we were in a rush. He didn't know what to do. I was doing this voice. We made this thing. It pleased us so much. We really didn't think much more than that. I think like ten people saw it, initially. I remember him texting me while, I think, I was at a summer camp reunion, and he was like, 'Whoa, people loved it. One person asked if I would put it on the internet because they want to share it with a family member who was in the hospital.' It's not that I didn't think it was special. I loved it, but it also reminded me of us. It reminded me of myself, of the ways that I prop myself up and keep myself going, and of the ways that, when it comes down to it, I'm not really encumbered or obscured by my own shame or feelings of low self-worth, when I'm just kind of clean and feeling like myself. That simplicity; the smallness of saying things simply, and being kind of casual about really being into your life. How Marcel speaks and sees the world? That's me. I identify with that. I don't think a lot about how far it went, except to be so glad about it. More of the work came to us. Now we can make a movie, so we should make the movie. Doing that work, all through Cinereach who funded us, was basically like having an arts grant. We didn't do it with a studio. We had animators, an animation studio, the Kyoto brothers...but we didn't do it with a large Hollywood studio because we didn't want to. We knew what we wanted to do. I'm watching The Studio right now, Seth Rogen's new show, and I love it so much, and I especially love watching Seth Rogen as an actor. Over the last few year his acting is reaching new places. We watched an episode last night where his character has to give Ron Howard, who's playing a fictional version of himself, a note. I was thinking about it because it's like, you do sometimes need to give a filmmaker a note, you know? Like with Dean.

TR: You play a far different best friend in It Ends With Us compared to Nikki in Dying for Sex, but are the two women similar in any way?

JS:  No. I mean, other than me playing them, I think it's totally two different pieces of work, two different writers...totally different. I'm often cast as people who are 'the funny person', but in Dying for Sex, what was offered to me was such an incredible combination of character traits. The character of Nikki doesn't seem to be like any other character I've been lucky enough to play. And to be given that much time and space---a whole limited series---was such a dream. It was a dream just to be that character for so long. That the character goes on her own thing, a journey that's very different than Michelle's character, though they're also doing something together, is far different than anything that I've done in the past. I was on that set longer than I when I was on the set of Obvious Child. I think Obvious Child was eighteen days long, maybe twenty. That's not a lot. When I think about it now, I just think, man, I really hope that I can be successful enough to be attached to a film that's going to get made, even if in a year, and have that year to prep; have a year to think about every single option I can for how to say a given line. There's a scene in Dying for Sex, when Michelle Williams says to Sissy Spacek, a very simple line, she says, 'How dare you?' And she says it so softly. It's the opposite amount of heat, of pushing away, of ripping a curtain down... to show, 'How dare you?' Saying 'How dare you?' to someone is an incredibly intense thing to say. I was watching [that scene] with my husband, because he hadn't seen the whole series, and, I mean, she laid that question down like a terrible feather; a feather of truth. Whoa. [Michelle] makes the most beautiful choices, and I want to have the chance, again, to make as many choices as I had the time and space to make on that job..

TR: Your work across TV and film is so vast. I found myself re-watching On the Rocks last night, the gorgeous Sofia Coppola film where you star opposite Rashida Jones. You play a school mom, and you're a mom to a young child, yourself. Who is your character in the film? She's such a brilliant person to watch, like all of your characters.

JS: Thanks, oh, that's so nice. I really wanted to be in that movie. I just love Sofia Coppola so much. At the time I didn't have a child. I didn't know much about mothering, and because the writing was so good, I think I knew what to do. Sofia is such a great director. It's not a very big part. She's this woman that Rashida's character encounters at drop-off sometimes.  I've been lucky enough, in my child's school, to really enjoy the people I see when I drop her off, and in fact, I've experienced really making friends.

TR: The school woman is the 'anti-friend'; the person you don't want to wait in line with at the school at all.

JS: Totally. I kind of thought of her, in a good way, because I love this character, as a version of Lara Flynn Boyle's character in Wayne's World. She plays his ex-girlfriend, and she's like, 'Hey Wayne!' and kind of comes out of nowhere; this woman who is just so intense. She's really self-involved and kind of leaking, emotionally. She's so inappropriate, a terrible listener, and she's really not looking for a conversation. She's just blasting stuff at Rashida.  I think, at one point, they told me,  'Just talk, just talk, just totally talk.' There was enough on the page that I knew how to follow that. And, you know, I really like that: I really like improvising and being some other identity that I would never be. It's like someone saying, 'It's okay to paint on these walls, because you're not going to get in trouble.'

TR: What do you want for your child, Ida, in this life? Do you feel there is anything you need to work harder at, as a mom in the public eye? 

JS: The first thing I want her to understand, is how much my relationship with her is something that I asked for, something I want, and something that's very, very secure and can't be corrupted, no matter what she does or what she wants. I want her to understand that I am a source of constant growing love, and that she is a person who has that. One of the best things we can give to young people is an understanding of their own permanent lovability. I really, really, really want that for her. I'm not sure that I experienced it, and it's led me to a lot of worthwhile expression. It's been also really hard for me at times. When I was younger, I did not have a lot of agency. I didn't feel as free as I do now at 43. I want Ida to know that the world is a field of relations. It's cause and effect. Things don't come from nowhere. People don't come from nowhere. Everybody has a heart. We really need to be thoughtful about how we engage. I want her to feel that, as a person who is lovable, and that it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It means that she has the ultimate safety in me and in Ben, my husband. She has us and she'll always have us. Interacting with the world as a kind, loving, excited person is her gift to receive, and her opportunity to hold. That's the main thing that I want for her.

TR: Dying for Sex is currently streaming on Hulu, and I am imagining what it took to perform in this series, and what the months of your life were like right after wrap.

JS: Man, was it such a good experience. Michelle Williams is just extraordinary, in so many ways. To be able to have her as a dance partner, and to be able to be taken seriously by one of my favorite living actors, to be able to be accepted by her, to watch her care so much about what we were doing, to realize that l care just as much...it was a real moment in understanding my own self-defined legitimacy. ...Backed up by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock writing it. They're so incredible. I thought, Michelle wants me to be here, and she sees me. She's not like seeing hope for what I will be. She's watching my work. She's connecting with me. We're glad we're here. It felt so good. I felt really enrobed in my character, [Nikki]. Especially towards the end, when we really took off all the makeup, for the most part. I thought of her look, with her dark, dark hair hanging down, as, this is Nikki---and these are Nikki's clothes---for when she's doing movement exercises with her theater group. It's a look not meant to broadcast the way that she's falling apart. It's appropriate for how she needed to move in her space, for being open to what's going to happen to her. She's not going to try to dress herself up for some other life, because this is what it is. When we wrapped, and I made sure that we weren't going back for any re-shoots, I knew I was going to do this, I'd been talking about it for like a month---I thought, I've got to cut all my hair off. I don't think I can like look in the mirror and see myself as Nikki anymore.

TR: So that's the story behind the hair chop! It looks so good on you, and you had to clip away your character.

JS: Thank you. It feels so good. I've never really needed a big refresh before. I feel really good about it. I don't tend to be that way, but I thought, I literally need to lighten up and kind of bounce away from this. My feelings about the show are very happy, but I also did feel really bonded to my character. I remember Michelle saying to me that she was going to grow her hair longer. I thought, I'm going short. After we wrapped I saw her maybe a week later. We went out to dinner with Liz Meriwether. I saw her walking down the street, she has such incredible personal style, she was wearing a little tuxedo shirt with frills on the front and jeans, and she still had her pink hair. I was thinking, she's a woman on the street; she's not Molly anymore, and I'm not Nikki. [Michelle] was like, 'My God, you cut your hair!' We were staring at each other. I thought about how glad I was that I changed how I look, because if I still looked like Nikki, and Michelle went out into the world looking different than Molly, I was afraid I'd feel left behind. Instead, it felt like we both disembarked from something. I felt rebooted, though not trying to forget what happened. It is one of the most dear memories of my career and my life as a performer. The system was reset a little bit, it was starting to be summer, and my plan for the summer was to actually just relax... but then an opportunity to be in a beautiful indie film with Amy Adams came up. I love her so much, she's one of my favorite actors. I spent most of July popping into that film, and it filmed in Massachusetts where I live most of the year. I ended up not taking the rest that I needed, but I really wanted to make that movie.

TR: The New Yorker called the best friendship you portray with Michelle Williams in Dying for Sex, 'all-consuming and boundaryless'. What do you say to that?

JS: Yes, sounds right! I'm not sure what else they said, I hope I'm not agreeing with a review that's like, well, Jenny Slate....

TR: When I read it, it had me reflecting on my best friendships and wondering, are they 'all-consuming'? Are they 'boundaryless'? And I wondered what your thoughts are, knowing that you have a best friend...

JS: I think my relationship with my best friend is, and I think Molly and Nikki's relationship as well, is boundaryless---but consenting to it. There have been a couple times where I put too much on my best friend, startlingly recently, but my expectation of her, is that she will always be there for me and I will always be there for her. If she were to say to me, I cannot hear about this thing anymore---and that's not really happened ever---I'm not going to fight that. And I think Molly and Nikki are the same. They do have blind spots, all people do, because we're not each other, you know, we're differentiated. That's why friendship is incredible; because it's someone else being as intimate with you if you're lucky as as a person can be. I do I think of course Nikki and Molly's relationship is boundaryless and all-consuming, but I also think it is It's very generative and they're not in a rut, they're moving. It has velocity. There's so much growth and change, and that's what happens to them because of how they are so entwined and bonded. It's not inappropriate even though people on the outside are like, whoa, what are you doing? It's what they want to be doing; it's their first choice, and not because they're unhealthy. Both characters have experienced many people saying that the ways in which they engage in their career, or sex, or relationships---is unhealthy. They know their relationship is safe and healthy and they won't be discouraged from it. As it becomes more more intense, because Molly is dying, Nikki has to realize that she, herself is not dying. Molly reminds her of that. They still continue on, letting the situation completely be the current and the flow of their experience. They take it to the end.

TR: Could you do that for a friend, and what would it entail from you?

JS:  Yeah, I could do that for a friend, for sure. It would be different for me because I have a child who goes to school. I have a partner. It would be really, really hard, logistically. But yes, if my best friend asked me to help her, I would help her in any way that I could. I have quite a few close friends; my sisters; my family, of course; my husband---all who I would fully do that for, for sure.

TR: I have had close interactions with cancer patients in my life that remind me of a couple of your scenes in Dying for Sex... there was this line of yours, 'I'm going to love someone until the end'. I was with my grandmother for her last moments. Another one is Nikki saying to Molly in the series that she's proud of her; I got to say those last words to my dying friend. But it's another scene that really stood out to me, the scene towards the end, when Molly's hospice nurse outlines the stages of death for her in great detail. It made me contemplate why Liz and Kim felt it was important to include. Do you know how that death discussion was researched, and what the discussions were around why it had a place within the context of the story?

JS:  I don't know what their research process was, or what led them to want that to be a moment. I know it's one of my favorite moments in the show. And also, in my own life, I was with my grandfather, Paul, while he was dying. There was a lot in that experience that I knew about. I will ask Liz and Kim. For me it works really well, I love that it's there, and I love how Paula Pell performed it. We're often shown the emotions of the dying, we're shown the caregivers, or the dying body as an image. When I was pregnant, I listened to these hypno-birthing meditations that tell you what's happening inside your body. Don't you want to know? It's cool to have that information. You know what Molly is going through, and it also shows something about Molly. She's scared, but she's not scared. She's still curious until the very end. Because of Molly's curiosity, the writers give us an opportunity to be a little bit less alienated from the natural, medical, and emotional---process of end of life.

TR:  I'd read that the real Nikki was on set, and obviously very involved. What really stood out to you about her, in meeting her?

JS: Nikki is beaming all the time. She genuinely seems like a small sun in the sky. She is beaming with energy, has a huge smile, is open, is willing to talk, and she's also sensitive. The first day that I met her, we went to a bar, had a glass of wine, and cried. She is an extraordinary person. She was able to offer me a lot of information about what her grieving process was like, even five years after Molly had passed away. She talked about the anger she felt, whether it was towards the doctor who misdiagnosed her and discouraged her from double-checking her own body, or the anger about the loss, or the general anger for people who don't care for other people. She's such a righteous person, and it was incredible having her there.

TR: With so much great TV these days, are you interested in writing your own show? What's next for you?

JS: I don't  like to write TV or film by myself, but I would like to do that with a partner. I have some ideas floating around. I also really want to write another kid's book, not a Marcel book, but another picture book. And I'm writing a screenplay right now. There's a lot going on all at once. I would also like to write a theater piece for myself. I was trying to do at the start of January, but I kind of got deflated---not by the material, but by life. There's always a lot that I'm trying to do all at once, in small doses, and then something will overtake everything else. But right now there's nothing that's formed enough to talk about. I'm just trying to enjoy my day-to-day these days. I'm just trying to keep my eyes open.