Eleanor Stanford

“I used to hang out with her,” he said, gazing at the sketch in the Cartoon Museum. “It’s so sad. God, if I’d died at 27, I would have missed out on so much.”

Back in the mid-2000s, when he and Winehouse were deep in the drug-soaked North London party scene, Fielding, a comedian, would never have predicted how he spends most of his time today: hosting “The Great British Baking Show” and hanging out with his daughter.

“It kind of gets better as you get older, in a weird way,” he said. Back then “it was all crazy and fast. It reminds me of a different person really.”

When Fielding signed on a few years ago to host the “Baking Show” (known as “The Great British Bake Off” in Britain), he was still famous as that hedonistic person: Britain’s most charming goth; a poster boy for weirdos everywhere, thanks to his show “The Mighty Boosh”; an indie darling who wore capes, makeup and sequins for his TV appearances.

Unlike the shows Fielding frequented, the “Baking Show” has always aired before British TV’s 9 p.m. watershed for “offensive content,” creating a pastel world appropriate for viewers of all ages. After seven seasons, it was moving from the BBC to Channel 4 and replacing the hosts, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins. (Season 10 is currently airing in Britain; on American Netflix, where it’s known as Collection 7, new episodes arrive on Fridays.)

When Fielding was announced as one of their replacements, the tabloids’ reactions made him think he’d just ruined his career. “Can you believe this is the new face of Bake Off?” asked the front page of the Daily Mail under a photo of Fielding wearing eyeliner, necklaces and a mullet. Paparazzi hid in the trees outside Fielding’s house.

On “The Mighty Boosh,” one of the strange and beautiful characters he played was a merman who shot light out of his “man-gina.” The naughtiest comedy on “Bake Off” came from double-entendres about a cake’s “soggy bottom.” It seemed like a bold choice by Channel 4, but with a younger audience than the BBC, executives seemed to be hoping that Fielding would bring a little edge to their version of the “Baking Show.”

On their first day of filming, he and his co-host, Sandi Toksvig, felt as if they were “going to the gallows,” Fielding said, the fear of ruining a beloved show weighed on them so heavily.

For Fielding, accepting the job meant reframing the way he saw himself and his work. “Unfortunately for me, I did go to art school, and I do have that snobby art school cool thing,” he said. His more avant-garde tastes felt at odds with fronting a popular reality TV show.

But he loved the “Baking Show,” having become a fan when he binged an entire season during an especially terrible hangover. That, combined with the appeal of working with Toksvig, persuaded him to take the job.

Here, in this museum of comic strips and satirical sketches, Fielding’s trademark mullet, eyeliner and skinny jeans wouldn’t look out of place on the walls. In conversation, he is generous and witty, and much more self-reflective than his TV persona. He zipped among topics like a hummingbird, hovering on a subject just long enough to dip into its absurdity or poignancy before another more appealing option presented itself.

He wondered where once-popular cartoon characters are now. (Biffo, a strange man-bear hybrid who wouldn’t look out of place on “Boosh,” was “probably in rehab.”) In front of a cartoon of Prime Minister Boris Johnson sitting on the Shard, the famously jagged London skyscraper, Fielding noted: “He was kind of fun when he was the Mayor of London. It’s a little bit frightening now.”

A girl with a portfolio case under her arm turned a corner and stopped short.

“Wow, it’s you; you’re here,” she said to Fielding. “You’re fantastic.”

Not missing a beat, he beamed and replied, “Yes, I live here,” gesturing at the colorful walls before complimenting her purple hair.

Three seasons in, Fielding has proved the doomsayers wrong: Fans of the “Baking Show” have more than accepted him and Toksvig (and Prue Leith, who replaced Mary Berry as Paul Hollywood’s co-judge). The opening sketches have become weirder, and the banter with the bakers has become loaded with a few more innuendos and jokes about sexuality, but the producers make sure it all falls within the show’s safe, comfortable world.

When he’s collaborating with Toksvig and others on the opening sketches, Fielding knows that the very off-the-wall style of comedy he usually writes wouldn’t work for the show. “You can’t push your vision onto something that already has a tone. You have to respect the tone,” he said.

He also subdues his zany style for the show in order to avoid distracting from the bakers. Even so, there are many roundups devoted to his colorful sweaters and shirts (which have featured smiley faces, ice cream cones, tomatoes and tigers). “It’s good for boys who wear makeup and aren’t regular people,” he said.

Fielding, who is 46, has called himself “a bit of a Peter Pan character.” He describes the “Baking Show” as “the realest job I’ve ever had,” one for which he gets picked up at a certain time and recites certain lines and records certain voice-overs. It was a bit of a shock to the system after what he described as the “ludicrously arty” and unstructured working style he had with his co-creator Julian Barratt on “The Mighty Boosh.” (The creative energy Fielding brought to that show is now channeled mostly into his painting, he said.)

“You end up going a bit stir crazy in the tent,” he explained: Day after day, little on the show changes besides the faces behind the stations. Talking to the contestants is his favorite part of the job, he said; he sees his role as part therapist, part friend and part clown, keeping things loose and comforting bakers when cakes collapse and ganaches stay dull. (Occasionally his surreal jokes don’t quite land with the contestants — in the current season, Alice has often looked a little confused by him.)

He knows nothing about baking, although Hollywood did once show him how to bake a loaf of bread. (“It was like that scene in ‘Ghost’ with Demi Moore,” Fielding said.) He framed the recipe Hollywood wrote out and hung it in his kitchen, but he hasn’t been tempted to attempt another bake.

As seen in his most popular work, Fielding functions best as part of a team, playing off the energy of others. His dynamic with Toksvig works, he said, because “she’s quite male and I’m quite female.” Toksvig — who is a lesbian, founded her own political party and has written more than 20 books — is also his go-to source off the air if there’s something in politics that he needs explained.

When Fielding became a father a year and a half ago, everything shifted again. “I didn’t really count on the fact that once I had a baby I’d want to hang out with them all the time,” he explained. He has writing projects at various production stages — a children’s book, a film, a Netflix show — but all have taken a back seat to dancing to ’80s music with his daughter, Dali (named after Salvador Dalí).

Out on the street, Fielding posed for photos in a giant pink and yellow fur coat, chatting with people walking past.

“Oh, sorry, is this your wall?” he asked two construction workers who were rolling cigarettes a few feet away. They looked up, smirking, and one said: “Nah mate, you’re all right. Carry on.” So he did.

This article originally appeared in

How Noel Fielding Went From a Hedonist to a Host of 'The Great British Baking Show'

LONDON — Noel Fielding paused at a cartoon of Amy Winehouse.

“Spice mania” was at its peak: A typical music magazine cover at that time shouted “Spice Girls: We’re the biggest pop band that ever lived!” I was all in, playing Geri in schoolyard concerts and daydreaming about clomping around in platform shoes once I became old enough to be the mistress of my own wardrobe. I loved that they were also British, that they were cheeky, that they talked about being best friends. Their music itself was almost incidental to what they represented to me.

Their first (and only) feature film was announced, shot and released in a span of eight months, coinciding with the group’s second album, “Spiceworld.” The music industry machine around the Girls was churning out content as fast as it could, and tastemakers were not wholly impressed. In his review for the British movie magazine Empire, Ian Nathan wrote, “the shock here is sheer dullness.” Film critic Roger Ebert gave it half a star, musing, “What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?”

Actually, I think there’s quite a lot to say. Should you need a refresher: Geri Halliwell (Ginger), Melanie Brown (Scary), Emma Bunton (Baby), Melanie Chisholm (Sporty) and Victoria Beckham (Posh) go on a completely illogical adventure in their Union Jack-painted double-decker tour bus. Their progress is tracked by a ragtag assortment of men: a documentary film crew, an evil tabloid newspaper editor and some cynical movie writers from Hollywood. Everyone wants to make money off the Spice Girls, but the Spice Girls just want to be there when their best friend, Nicola (Naoko Mori), has her baby.

Those searching for a definition of “camp” before this year’s Met Gala on the theme would have done well to watch “Spice World.” There are dream sequences, an alien invasion, a boat accident and army drills; they say things like “Hold onto your knickers, girls” and “No more Mr. Nice Spice.” There’s perhaps the greatest dress-up montage in movie history, with Mel C as Danny Zuko and Geri as Mel C; there’s Meat Loaf as a bus driver and Roger Moore as a Bond-like villain with a pet piglet. There’s Mel B wearing an astronaut suit over a tiger print bralette and Geri wearing a feathered bodysuit; there’s liberal breaking of the fourth wall. This joyful pandemonium lit up all the pleasure receptors of my 8-year-old brain.

But first loves rarely last. As the years passed, my world — and the lenses through which I understood it — became more complicated. I took literary theory classes at university. I discovered feminism’s overlapping waves, how ecological and human distress intersect, the way colonialism has shaped the world’s imagination.

The Spice Girls’ relentless pep and revealing outfits became a little embarrassing, an easy shorthand for my childhood naïveté. Who needs “girl power” when you have roll-up cigarettes and Luce Irigaray? This was England at the turn of the last decade, and the indie rock bands I loved were mostly made up of scrawny white men with artistic bangs. When people asked me which album I bought first, I was evasive, loathe to name the “Spice” cassette that I had played until it broke.

The Spice Girls was, after all, a pop group assembled by hungry music-industry executives, and managed, during the years of their stratospheric rise, by Simon Fuller, who went on to found the “Idol” reality competition franchise. They leaned into merchandising and endorsement deals with an intensity quite unlike any group before them, putting their name on advertising campaigns for candy, soft drinks and even supermarkets. What did “girl power” even mean? Making as much money as possible?

Now that I was firmly in that stage of life when you have “lofty” ideals and understand the world better than people both older and younger than you — also known as your early 20s — that hardly seemed original or feminist. When the group announced reunions in 2007, 2012 and 2016, I wondered what they really had to offer beyond nostalgia.

Recently I spent a few weeks at my parents’ house, and came across the beloved “Spice World” DVD. I watched it, surrendering to the same impulse that a few days earlier had led me to reread my teenage diaries. It was a delight — a silly, uncomplicated delight that hit my brain like the first cool fall breeze.

Directed by Bob Spiers, who also directed the original “Absolutely Fabulous” episodes, the film is much smarter and more self-aware than I once gave it credit for. It pokes fun at the mainstream cultural institutions the group’s success brought them into contact with — the movie industry (both Hollywood and independent filmmakers), London’s tabloids, the music world, the British class structure. Best of all, “Spice World” satirizes the Spice Girls themselves.

The question always hovering around industry-manufactured pop acts — especially female ones — is the extent to which they’re driving their own brand. In “Spice World,” the Girls want us to know that they are fully in on the joke. “Do godmothers get stretch marks?” Posh asks. “Do you think I’m always going to be seen as Baby Spice?” Emma asks, “even when I’m [gulp] 30?” The plot climaxes with Posh taking the wheel of their tour bus in her strappy stilettos, and saving the day. (Despite this convincing show of unity, all was clearly not well in the real Spice world: Geri quit the band before the movie came to DVD, citing “differences between us.”)

As the credits roll, we cut to the set of the movie we’ve just watched with the cast members milling around, discussing their roles. “They want me to play their road manager,” Richard E. Grant says into his cellphone. “Well, I don’t want to end my career.” The Girls know all the reasons you dismiss them, and they’re forcing you to laugh with them, instead.

The Spice Girls were absolutely working the (very sexist) system, and making a lot of money off it, but they were doing it slyly, with a wink and a grin. They were, I think, misunderstood at the time, and I wonder if an irreverent, breezy group like theirs could even exist today.

So much of the conversation around present-day pop stardom has become serious and fraught, with debates over whether to “cancel” artists for saying the wrong thing. Mainstream feminism has morphed into yet another set of rituals for women to perform in public, another abstract standard by which to judge them. “Spice World,” speaking to me from the ancient pop past (aka the ’90s), was a reminder that there should be space for many ways of being a powerful woman in public.

No, “girl power” is not going to fix structural gender inequality. But a fun film telling young girls to look after each other and beware of creepy men seems fine to me. And maybe fine is enough. Maybe it’s disingenuous to demand more of our pop stars than that.

In the summer of 1998 “Titanic” was six months into its marathon run in theaters, revelations about President Bill Clinton’s infidelity were hurtling him toward impeachment and I, a kid living in a small English village, was subjecting my younger brothers to weekly screenings of “Spice World” on DVD. I had recently turned 8 years old and believed, quite simply, that this film was the best thing adults had ever created.

'Spice World,' Now More Than Ever

It took a year of reporting to piece together what happened, specifically why Dee Dee Blanchard’s sickly daughter, Gypsy Rose, whose medical care was Blanchard’s full-time job, would want her mother dead. It turned out Gypsy wasn’t really sick, didn’t need her wheelchair and that this disturbing murder involved a case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome, in which a caregiver fabricates illnesses to attract sympathy and financial support, or for other reasons.

Gypsy is in prison serving a 10-year sentence for second-degree murder. Her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The 8,000-word piece Dean wrote in 2016 for BuzzFeed about Gypsy’s life and Dee Dee’s death immediately went viral, and filmmakers began contacting her about turning the story into a feature film. But Dean wanted the time and space to explore the emotion of the story, in addition to presenting the gory details of the crime, so she decided to go down the route of TV dramatization. The result is the miniseries “The Act,” starring Patricia Arquette and Joey King as Dee Dee and Gypsy. The first two episodes are available to stream on Hulu, and the remaining six episodes will be posted weekly on the streaming service.

In a phone conversation last week, Dean (who created the show with writer Nick Antosca) discussed what it’s like to walk onto a TV set for the first time as a showrunner, the emotional experience of telling Gypsy’s story across different mediums and why it’s important to have women well-represented behind the camera as well as onscreen. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What was your thought process going into production?

A: The goal was to make people understand at a base level that there was an emotional logic to what happened here, for the people who lived through it. There’s a tendency to say, “This is such a crazy story; can you believe these people?” And the truth was that after the process of reporting, I could believe these people, and I wanted whatever project we did to reflect that.

And I hope we got that emotional logic right. It’s the kind of thing that even when you interview everyone, they’re still processing it, so you’re always kind of guessing. One of the things I want to emphasize is that I didn’t know everything, and I’m not sure anybody knows everything here. Still, years later, people are putting the pieces together.

Q: Often true-crime shows or documentaries are produced with the explicit goal of getting justice for the people whose stories they tell. Did you have a similar goal in mind when telling Gypsy’s story?

A: I think the justice system in this country, and specifically the United States’ system of punitive justice, is not great, and it is especially not great at apprehending a case like this where the circumstances of the murder were extremely complicated.

I don’t think that the right place for Gypsy is prison. I think that her needs are not necessarily going to be met by the prison system, and that’s something that I’ve thought about a lot. And one of the things that this show could do is complicate people’s reactions to a sensationalized true crime story.

And that goes for Nicholas Godejohn, too. No one is denying that a violent crime happened here, but the reason that he became involved and his own family background are things that I wish had played more strongly into the consideration of his sentence, which was pretty harsh: life without parole.

Q: Do either Gypsy or Godejohn know that the show has been made?

Q: Some of the press around the show has been criticized for downplaying your role as a showrunner, and emphasizing the role of your co-creator, Nick Antosca.

A: Everyone, including myself, was aware going in that my expertise was not in [TV] production, and that’s why I chose Nick as a partner. And so I think because of that, and because of the fact it’s not always the way that things get covered in the entertainment press, sometimes people miss things.

Mostly I’ve been hoping that people would pick up on the fact that there were so many women involved in the show. In our writers room, we had four women and two men. Most of the episodes were directed by women. It was a real goal for everyone involved, right up the chain to Hulu.

Q: What did having so many women involved in the production mean?

A: At its core, it’s the story of the relationship between a mother and daughter. I think there was a lot of willingness to talk about menstruation and subjects that would have been a lot more uncomfortable for male collaborators than it was for me and my female collaborators.

There’s certainly a universal story about coming of age here that could apply to men as well, but repressing Gypsy’s sexuality was a big part of the power being held over her. It was a priority for pretty much everyone that we get across that it shook out the way it did because Gypsy was a girl, and that entailed things like the mother dressing her up like a doll, which a lot more people than Gypsy would report as their experience of their mother.

There’s a lot of interest in dark female stories since “Gone Girl,” and the story that we’re pretty comfortable with is of a female detective who is trying to solve murders, and who ends up just being pulled down by the experience. But that’s not really the extent of female dysfunction in the world, and in fact it feels like a very safe kind to depict. Whereas here, this wasn’t a very safe kind of female dysfunction, and it still doesn’t feel that way, three years in.

Q: The show is an intense watch. What has been your experience of working on this story for so long?

A: It’s emotionally intense to make a television show under any circumstances. But this one has a relationship to reality, plus the story itself is so wrenching. I know that the show is intense, but in a way that is the truest thing that I can say about what happened here: that it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t a cool, crazy time where people were just scammers of some kind. It was a deep, emotional experience, and when it fell apart everyone was left feeling like they were in the aftermath of a bomb. I’m proudest of the show when it gets that across.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/arts/television/the-act-hulu-michelle-dean.html" id="795bb591-afa9-3c36-a843-3f6421f86fbd">The New York Times</a>.

Four years ago, journalist Michelle Dean saw a news report about a woman who had been murdered in Missouri. Included were the mug shots of the woman’s daughter and her boyfriend, who had been arrested for the crime.

In 'The Act,' Real-Life Horror Has an Emotional Logic

The final season of Jenji Kohan’s groundbreaking show about inmates in a women’s penitentiary arrives on Netflix on Friday. In 2013, the show introduced us to Piper (Taylor Schilling), a New Yorker with an artisanal soap company. Piper went to prison after pleading guilty to an old charge of carrying drug money, and we were introduced to a sprawling population of indelible women incarcerated alongside her.

The show has crammed a vast plot and many characters into what amounts to only about 18 months of fictional time, including multiple prison gang power grabs, deaths, rapes, births, escapes, a riot and a big move from minimum to maximum security. While Piper left prison in the Season 6 finale, after finishing her sentence, her new wife, Alex (Laura Prepon), is still incarcerated, and Season 7 opens to find Taystee (Danielle Brooks) coming to terms with a life sentence after being convicted of murdering a guard.

What does successfully wrapping up this sprawling show look like for its creator? “Impact and connection, more than anything,” Kohan said in a phone interview this month. “Even if people are nothing like these characters, if they can recognize the emotional truth of their human experience, then it’s been a success.”

Kohan, who also created “Weeds” and “GLOW,” reflected on why she finds dramedy more realistic than straight drama, how she shapes her characters’ back stories and why she tells her kids to talk to strangers. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

How does it feel to be coming to the end of seven seasons of the show?

It’s a mixed bag. I’m ready to be out of prison. It takes up a lot of psychological space, and it can be oppressive and difficult and depressing. But it was a privilege to do this show. The people that came together to build it and inhabit it were remarkable, and the fact that we got to normalize diversity — it’s really hard to give that up. But seven years is a good run, and it was time.

The early seasons explored how and why women end up in prison, and this final season seems really to focus on how incarceration changes people. When did you know the shape of different characters’ arcs?

Every year, we start three or four months before shooting as a writers’ room, and we talk about our goals, about issues we want to write about, about stories we want to tell. That’s how the season begins to take shape. So, by the time we start writing, we’ve spent weeks and weeks just throwing things on the board, and figuring out those arcs and those stories.

So, it was part of the process that we take on every year, only this year the stakes were a little higher because we wanted to wrap up the show. But we also feel like, in some alternate universe, all these characters and this show continue, really.

Do you see the show as a form of protest?

It’s a call to awareness, a call to empathy and a call to feel injustice and want to do something about it. At the same time, I feel like my first job is to entertain, and hopefully people just have a good experience in watching it.

In this new season, there are story lines around ICE detention centers and the #MeToo movement, as well as prison. How do you balance these heavy topics with making the show entertaining and funny?

I think that it’s organic. I’m a strong believer in humor for survival. I don’t believe a drama that is 100% dramatic, because that’s not how we live and function as human beings. So I find it very natural to slam comedy up against tragedy, because it mirrors life.

So, I want to talk a little about the show’s legacy. I don’t feel as if “Orange” got the credit it deserved sometimes.

This is for you to say, not for me to say. (Laughs.) And I felt the same way about “Weeds,” frankly. I can’t rely on public perception or accolades — I’ve got to keep my head down and do the work, otherwise I’d be crushed. It’s not an area I focus on a lot, except late at night when I can’t sleep.

One of the ways “Orange” was ahead of its time is the diversity of the cast, right from Season 1.

It’s so important because I think for so long (television) hasn’t been a natural representation of the population, and it should be. But before all of the diversity and the inclusion or whatever, our baseline is talent. You can be a black lesbian in a wheelchair, and that’s great. You tick a lot of boxes. But if you can’t act, I’m sorry, you’re not getting the part. And because (people of color and other marginalized groups) had been neglected, there was so much talent. It was like, oh my God, people have been idiots for not tapping that.

The character of Piper — and the real Piper’s memoir — was a Trojan horse of sorts to get more diverse stories onscreen, and she remains a lead character right through to the end of this final season.

I think, in the beginning, it certainly was that. But I think it evolved in such a way that it’s a pantheon of really interesting characters, Piper included, and she’s just one among a group of people with amazing stories to illustrate. It wasn’t taking away from anyone else.

Where do you and the writers find inspiration for all the characters’ back stories?

It’s personal, it’s podcasts, it’s news. It’s “I overheard this on the bus,” it’s “I had a dream last night.” It comes from everywhere, and I really strongly don’t believe you have to be it to write it, because it’s our job to imagine other people’s experiences.

Your shows often portray women’s stories that are offbeat, or at least rarely seen. What’s your process for conceiving show concepts?

I hate to define my brand, but what I’m really more interested in than offbeat women’s stories is crossroads, where really different people are forced to interact with one another.

Have you experienced that yourself?

Absolutely. They’ve been some of the best times in my life. My first job was on “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” and while on that job, I learned to play dominoes. I ended up on the boardwalk in Venice Beach by the basketball courts, playing with a really assorted group of fellas, to the point where I was running down there every afternoon.

I spent time with all sorts of people who were very unlike me, and who had very different backgrounds, and different races, and different experiences. It was so much fun, and I think that might have been one of the first times I was really aware of how exciting that could be.

And I suppose, in a way, the experience of watching television can be that as well.

For a long time, there were black shows, and there were white shows, and I would watch all of them. There’s so many ways to live, and it’s nice to be reminded that yours isn’t the only one. It’s something we’re so lacking and so afraid of right now. I want to encourage it. I’m the mother who told her children, “Talk to strangers.” I think stranger danger is a terrible message, actually.

Many characters who were dangerous or scary early in “Orange,” like Red, Pennsatucky and Suzanne, aren’t by the end of the show.

I believe it all goes back to the fact you’re not that worst moment in your life. I’m not saying that there are not sociopaths who might be irretrievable, but I think it’s a small percentage, and everyone else is the people who messed up. I think people do mellow with time. You spend more years on this Earth, and your perspective widens.

I don’t want to feel like we took the teeth out of everybody, and everybody became a better person. But, on the other hand, I’m in love with my characters, so maybe I got a little soft.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/arts/television/orange-is-the-new-black-jenji-kohan.html" id="2e0fccbe-ad73-3ffa-aac1-5c3d57e82ae0">The New York Times</a>.

“Orange Is the New Black” is coming to the end of its sentence.

'Orange Is the New Black': Jenji Kohan Is Ready to Get Out of Prison

The 31-year-olds met as undergraduates studying experimental theater at New York University, and in the decade or so since, they’ve caught each other up on most of their teenage experiences. In a “crazy experiment,” as Erskine described it, they took this openness and made it the core of their first TV show: “Pen15.”

“The show is our stories and our secrets,” Erskine said.

“It’s a lot of secrets,” Konkle added.

Set in a middle school in 2000, the Hulu comedy has the pair playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves in seventh grade, surrounded by actual 13-year-old actors. Watching the show feels remarkably intimate, like reading a teenager’s very funny diary. In 10 half-hour episodes, we see Anna and Maya discover masturbation, thongs and second base. Maya gets her period for the first time, and Anna survives a terrible first kiss. The show has bullying and divorce and racism.

Six years ago, when Erskine and Konkle started working on the series (which they created with Sam Zvibleman), the only depiction of middle school that seemed to accurately portray their experiences was Todd Solondz’s 1995 film “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” (Today a list of raw middle school offerings could also include Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” and “Big Mouth” on Netflix.)

Being 13 is so often a total nightmare, defined by feelings of guilt and shame. I remember being confused about pretty much everything at that age: what to wear, what to say — even what to want. All that drama and all those authentically high stakes were exactly what Erskine and Konkle were looking for as storytellers.

“We had a conversation about what’s the most reject-y, awkward, funny, sad, messed-up time, and it kept coming back to middle school,” Konkle said. “And things that you’re not supposed to talk about: like I’m not supposed to talk about [my first sexual experience] at 13, I’m not supposed to talk about masturbating, and I’m still not supposed to talk about my period.”

Viewers have been sending messages thanking Erskine and Konkle for how “Pen15” makes them feel seen and heard. “That makes us feel the same thing,” Erskine said. “Someone else saying that they relate to our experiences or had the same thing happen to them is so gratifying.”

Pouring so much of themselves into the show has been an intense experience. (Yes, you are supposed to read the title as one word and feel like a middle schooler.) For Konkle, the connection with viewers has been “extremely cathartic and positive” and also “really vulnerable and emotional.” For Erskine, the acting part of the process has been especially illuminating. “I didn’t realize that certain traumas that we had written about were actually still as raw as they are in my life,” she said. “We would talk about that, but actually experiencing that was shocking.”

This was especially true of the episode “Posh,” which is based on Erskine’s experience of dressing up as the Spice Girls with her white friends. Erskine, whose father is white and mother is Japanese, was told she had to play the pop group’s sole black member, Mel B, also known as Scary Spice, because of her race. At the time, none of Erskine’s friends stood up for her. But in the show, with the benefit of a script written by adults, Anna desperately tries to make amends.

“It was like we were correcting history in a slight way by just having [Anna] acknowledge what I was going through,” Erskine said, “and that was enough, just sort of facing it.”

Anna’s attempts to solve racism only end up hurting Maya more, and the episode becomes a sendup of a “white person being like, ‘I’m going to fix this for you,’ and that really not being the answer,” Konkle said.

Even as Konkle’s character does a better job of reacting to racism than she herself did at 13, she worried about her performance hitting the right note and not making Anna seem like the victim. It was a difficult episode to film; at one point, Erskine broke down on the set, and then Konkle immediately broke down, too.

There are other middle school memories that “Pen15” does not try to correct. Konkle’s abiding memory of her first kiss is of using her whole hand to wipe her mouth afterward. In the show, Anna has her first kiss with Brendan, a boy she meets in band. “He put his tongue in my mouth, and he did like a torpedo cat tongue and, like, drilled my mouth,” Anna tells Maya afterward.

Filmed in extreme close-up, the excruciating kiss was actually between Konkle and her real-life boyfriend. When the camera pulls back and Brendan walks away, the lower half of Anna’s face is shiny with spit, which was actually strawberry flavored lube. “It made my face tingle,” Konkle said, which “was like a little treat.”

When Maya gets her period, she keeps it a secret, which Erskine also did for an entire year. Maya’s mother is played by Erskine’s real mother, Mutsuko Erskine, whose acting debut here has been so well received she’s now getting calls for auditions. The set for Anna’s house looked so much like Konkle’s home before her parents got divorced that walking into it for the first time really threw her.

“Pen15” takes these intense personal experiences and weaves them into a love story between friends. “There’s definitely something about a friendship — especially at that age, but if you’re lucky, forever — that’s the difference between survival or not,” Konkle said. “If I had been left alone at that age, in the circumstances that I felt inside, I don’t know where I would be. So, we were definitely playing with that nightmare.”

Like many aspects of the show, Anna and Maya’s relationship plays out on several levels: In the first episode, Anna describes Maya as “the rainbow gel pen in a sea of blue and black writing utensils,” but their shared plea of “don’t leave me” in the finale had tears streaming down my face.

That final episode was one of the moments when I forgot that the actors weren’t middle schoolers themselves. “That was always the dream that people would forget for a minute that we were adults,” Konkle said.

My suspension of disbelief was, in large part, because of how well the pair depict the physicality of being 13. “I was always a thin girl growing up, and I was very self-conscious about my stomach,” Konkle said. That was especially true after Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time” video came out. This led to her character’s habit of standing with her hand held against her opposite hip.

For Erskine, acting starts with her character’s physicality, and that informs what’s happening on the inside. She remembered hunching to try to hide the fact she was developing breasts, and so did Maya. Just as they drew on memories from middle school, their bodies have remembered what being 13 was like, too.

Hulu hasn’t renewed the show for a second season yet, but if it does, Erskine and Konkle plan to keep their characters suspended in seventh grade, “like ‘The Simpsons,'” Konkle said. They have plenty more traumatic middle school experiences to mine, from Erskine’s getting reprimanded for showing some boys a girl’s bedroom at a party, to Konkle’s waking her mom up in the middle of the night to tell her she had gotten in some very minor trouble.

Making “Pen15” has been “a good reminder to keep being so kind to myself now,” Erskine said, “as well as to the 13-year-old version of me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/arts/television/pen15-middle-school.html" id="39c618e8-8eb1-39fa-a69f-a5822aa9a55a">The New York Times</a>.

It’s hard to find something Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine don’t know about each other.

The Catharsis of 'Pen15'

Penn Badgley has some complicated feelings about going viral.

“I wouldn’t say I regret it,” he said in a phone interview earlier this week. But “all of this nuance is lost on social media, which I have to learn again and again.”

Seeing people on social media swoon over his performance as Joe, the murderous stalker at the center of the twisted hit thriller “You,” Badgley fired off a few tweets over lunch earlier this month. (“You” debuted last fall on Lifetime but recently broke out via Netflix, which is producing the next season of the show.)

What he wanted was to engage in thoughtful discussion about some viewers’ sympathetic reactions to Joe. What happened was that he put at least one fan “on blast” for romanticizing the character — his tweets received as many as 100,000 favorites, the trolls arrived and he tweeted a clarification.

This is perhaps an apt interaction to accompany a show that sharply critiques both social media and America’s tendency to give charming white men every benefit of the doubt. (Did a fan tweet “kidnap me pls” at Badgley because she was enamored by Joe, or was it in the same glib tone that a Tumblr account lusts after photos of young Josef Stalin?)

In a phone interview, Badgley discussed the importance of digging into nuanced conversations, toxic masculinity and what Joe and Dan Humphrey from “Gossip Girl,” the actor’s other best-known role, have in common. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Did you know you would be engaging with viewers on Twitter before the show came out?

A: I hadn’t thought about it, and when I did it I wasn’t thinking about it as a strategic move. I didn’t intend for it to go viral in this way; the whole point is for us to have an elevated conversation about the themes of this show.

What I ended up doing after a few of those tweets went viral was follow some of the users I quote-tweeted, and DMed them just to check in. So I actually had a lengthy conversation over DMs with one woman, and she correctly pointed out that I had sort of misinterpreted what she said. She was talking about why she was so charmed by me, the actor, rather than by the character of Joe.

What I just didn’t anticipate was that so many people would look at her as a “problematic fan.” People definitely were trolling her. And in fact, there was a person who did say in typical troll fashion, “maybe we should send real murderers to your house to make sure you know the difference.” That’s chilling and that is exactly what Joe is, so it dovetails too perfectly, because we can’t get away from Joe. I think what he’s meant to be is an embodiment and a portrait of the parts of us that can’t escape rooting for Joe. In a more just society, we would all see Joe as problematic and not be interested in the show, but that’s not the society we live in.

Q: The misunderstanding that arose in these good faith interactions read to me like another layer of the dangers of social media that the show explores.

A: I agree. It’s not every project that I think it would be interesting for the actors to be engaging in this way. For this show it made sense, because Joe is such a singular character, and because (in the show) we live so much in Joe’s head. It’s an interesting way to keep the conversation going. I think everybody who was a part of this show was very aware we could fall on our faces here. If we don’t get the tone right, this could be irresponsible and too problematic to be forgiven, and we’re pretty certain that in this climate we won’t be forgiven. So my engagement online made a lot of sense as a way of making ourselves vulnerable.

Q: Part of the brilliance of the character of Joe is that he thinks he’s an ally to women. How do you hope self-identifying progressive men reflect on some of their convictions while watching the show?

A: It would be awesome if any man watching this show could have any degree of the experience that I’ve had playing him. Personally, it’s been extremely enriching because, just look at the level of conversation we’re having now. You’re not always forced to think about the social forces in this way. We’re encouraged to some degree to “Netflix and chill” and we use television often to check out — I think there’s something about this show that forces you to check in, even though you are using it to consume and disconnect.

In my experience, it tends to be men who are more horrified by Joe. I’ll go out on a limb and wonder if that is because it’s less of a novel idea to women. He’s like a nightmare that you’ve repeatedly had, whereas men are like, “This isn’t real!” Women are like, “Of course it isn’t real, but it’s extremely representative of something.”

I wonder if, as a viewer, no matter how much you’ve enjoyed the frothiness of the show, you can’t get away with liking Joe without taking responsibility for being a part of Beck’s death. There are so many stories in the media about what we currently call “toxic masculinity” and I feel like that still doesn’t get to the depth of the phenomenon. It’s just really interesting that this show of all shows is so popular right now.

Q: It seems important that Joe looks the way that you do, which allows him to get away with so many things.

A: I do think it has a lot to do with the way he looks. Joe is not that far from some of the characters we love to see as art and dissect ad nauseam, who we’ve found in Jack Kerouac or J.D. Salinger’s work. But this was before we were having the kind of more nuanced conversations around race and gender that we are now. If anyone other than a young white man were to behave like these characters behave, nobody’s having it.

To me, Joe is this work in progress in dismantling and dissecting the myriad privileges that a young, attractive, white man carries with him. I’m not suggesting that the rest of the world shouldn’t have these so-called privileges. But I think when only one group has them, it’s actually a horrific blindness when it comes to being in touch with humanity. I think it’s material privilege but it’s not emotional or psychological or spiritual privilege, and it seems that that can be a great bondage.

Q: A lot of the themes Joe embodies seem to echo the themes of Dan Humphrey, your character on “Gossip Girl.” Do you think they both share the thread of being a creepy observational outsider?

A: Yeah. First of all, any part of me that was resisting the Dan Humphrey comparison has stopped because I’ve come to recognize how much of this is a surreal progression of Dan Humphrey. He’s the very special white man who somehow thinks that he’s an outsider, and it’s like, “Bro, you’re not an outsider — you are the inside; everyone else is on the outside.” It would all be so comical, if it wasn’t also the generating impulse for so much prejudice which can get translated into violence.

I think there’s a way of seeing Joe as the first time we’ve represented this kind of character in a responsible fashion, because to the degree that we are making him romantic and charming and glamorous, we are still being like “Yeah, but he kills four people and then Beck. What more can we tell you about his character than that?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/television/penn-badgley-you-netflix.html" id="6c41ff07-0db4-3a69-a7a6-257cac504d19">The New York Times</a>.

Spoilers ahead for the first season of “You.”

What Penn Badgley Wants Us to Learn From 'You'

I remember many lines Nora Ephron wrote for their elegance and wit, for how aspirational they feel.

“I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home ... only to no home I’d ever known” is a beautiful way to explain being in love. (“Sleepless in Seattle,” 1993)

“You get born too, a whole part of you that you didn’t know you had, suddenly you have all this love to give, it’s almost as if you expand” is a deeply evocative way to describe motherhood. (“Heartburn,” 1986)

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim” is a perfect thing to say in a commencement speech at a women’s college. (Wellesley College, 1996)

But there’s one line from “When Harry Met Sally” that I have repeated for the last 15 years because of its perfect banality: “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.”

It’s said by Carrie Fisher, who plays Sally’s best friend, Marie, four times over the course of the film. It becomes a narrative tether, situating us in what has and hasn’t changed in the characters’ lives as we jump ahead by several years. The hairstyles may change as the film bounds through New York in the 1980s, but Marie is still dating a married man, her friends are still telling her he’s never going to leave his wife, and she is still replying, “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.”

The central question of “When Harry Met Sally” is whether (presumably straight) men and women can be friends without sex getting in the way. Beyond that tired conceit, though, the film, which is almost 30 years old, explores what different kinds of intimacy look like. And “you’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right” might be the most intimate line in the film.

Contained within those repeated “you’re rights” is the number of times Marie and her friends have had this well-worn conversation off screen. Each time she says them, Fisher weights these eight words with varying amounts of sadness, resignation, self-awareness and delusion. And Meg Ryan’s Sally is always there to listen to Marie, to commiserate and calmly offer the same advice.

The “I know” is sincere, but there’s a big difference between knowing and doing. The line pops into my head when I know what I should do but I’m enjoying not quite doing it. My brother and I quoted the line to each other as teenagers in a bad New York accent, sibling code for “you’re so annoying, but I’m glad you’re here.” I found myself saying it when, all grown up, friends attempted to counsel me about a flailing relationship.

The line slips perfectly into the sort of circuitous, repetitive conversations that people who care about each other have on a daily basis, but which don’t usually make for great movie dialogue.

The way Ephron conveys this intimacy is especially impressive considering how difficult it is to write compelling rom-com dialogue.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” is written by Richard Curtis, who practically invented the British rom-com, and yet even he misses the developing-romantic-intimacy mark.

That film builds memorable and wonderful friendships, which is why the funeral scene is so moving. But it’s hard to become invested in the central couple, as they hardly seem to know each other.

In the final scene, having just ditched his fiancee at the altar, Charles (Hugh Grant) announces he knows the woman he loves, and “it’s the person standing opposite me now, in the rain.” That person is Carrie (Andie MacDowell), who responds in a monotone as water streams down her face and sopping hair: “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.”

Water running down your face does not seem like something you fail to register, however blue Grant’s eyes are; it is also a very unsubtle metaphor for the feeling of being struck by love from the heavens.

Clearly, it’s hard to write rom-com dialogue that feels spontaneous and emotion-driven, and if you haven’t established convincing closeness, a romantic crescendo can fall flat.

Because Ephron writes the quiet, day-to-day intimacy of “When Harry Met Sally” so well, the film’s big, cinematic moments work too.

When Harry runs across New York to declare his love for Sally on New Year’s Eve, the setup has the potential to stumble into cliché.

But Ephron centers the couple’s emotional climax in how well they know each other, in the romance of paying attention to the humdrum details of life, and so the moment feels anything but predictable.

“I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich,” Harry exclaims to Sally.

The ending works so well partly because Ephron has prioritized building intimacy of various kinds throughout the movie.

And Marie and Sally’s friendship is the foundation of this. We see the women expressing their weaknesses and fears to each other with an ease that sets the tone for and corroborates Harry’s declaration that the magic of love is in the everyday.

And Marie has her own happy ending.

Rom-com best friends often get the smart one-liners, but they rarely get a dramatic narrative arc.

When we met Marie, she carried a Rolodex of datable men, folding down the corner of a card when one gets married. Long before the closing credits, she’s married to a man she really loves and is embracing domesticity.

To get there, she just had to talk it out with people who love her a few dozen times. I buy it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/arts/24love-eleanor.html" id="c19d9c06-35d8-3086-aee3-7a3b4fea16b7">The New York Times</a>.

(Why I Love ...)

How Intimacy in Movie Dialogue Goes a Long Way

“Booksmart,” a thoroughly Gen Z comedy that balances thoughtfulness and irreverence, confirms what last year’s raucous delight “Blockers,” among other recent titles, only suggested: the movie mainstream, catching up with television, is finally ready to tell jubilant stories about teenagers who happen to be lesbians.

In the film we meet Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) on her last day of high school. She and her best friend, Molly (Beanie Feldstein), have been accepted into Ivy League colleges, and Amy hasn’t kissed a girl yet. As the two embark on their first — and last — night of high school partying, a driving force in the movie’s unfolding chaos is Amy’s crush on her classmate Ryan (Victoria Ruesga), a smiley, tattooed skateboarder.

Amy is anxious about her inexperience, anxious that Ryan won’t like her back, anxious that she will embarrass herself — in short, she has the classic worries of a never-been-kissed teen. Add to that the question of whether Ryan likes girls at all: in an exchange that is typical of how comfortable the film is with the evolving way we talk about identity, Molly notes that Ryan wore a polo shirt to prom. “That’s her gender performance, not her sexual orientation,” Amy replies.

Unlike several recent movies that follow a gay teen’s coming out (“Alex Strangelove” and “Love, Simon,” for example), Amy is not anxious about the fact of her queerness. She’s out to her parents, who are overbearingly supportive; she and Molly identify as sex-positive feminists.

In “Blockers,” Sam (Gideon Adlon) and her best girlfriends make a pact to lose their virginity at prom. Attempting this with her male date helps Sam realize she’s gay, and despite her initial worry, coming out is frictionless (her dad has already realized she’s a lesbian), and loving (her friends react with squeals and affirmations). The movie’s last triumphant moment is Sam kissing her crush, Angelica (Ramona Young), on the dance floor.

In this way, these movies reflect a decision that Dan Levy, the co-creator of the television show “Schitt’s Creek,” made to never include homophobia or bigotry in his series. In an interview with Vulture, he said, “If you put something like that out of the equation, you’re saying that doesn’t exist and shouldn’t exist.”

Television has its own uneven history portraying gay women, including a trend at the turn of the century on shows like “Party of Five” and “Sex and the City” of introducing a lesbian or bisexual character, who would have a single, much-publicized kiss with a main character before disappearing from the show.

But these days you can find thoughtful portrayals of teen lesbians on “Riverdale,” “One Day at a Time,” “Everything Sucks!” and “Derry Girls,” among others.

Creating characters like Sam and Amy means figuring out how to weave several strands of sexuality — teen, female and queer — in a way that does not feel exploitative. Hollywood filmmakers have not been especially comfortable depicting desire that is either female or queer, and the teen comedy has long been a kingdom ruled by hormone-riddled straight boys. That’s why the space given to these lesbian teen protagonists feels like a breath of fresh air.

For the past two decades, Hollywood’s fictional high schools have — by and large — clumsily lumped teen lesbians into two dehumanized categories: fetishized or feared.

For the objectified lesbian, “American Pie 2 (2001)” set the tone. The film’s dude leads are spending the summer painting houses, and Steve Stifler (Seann William Scott) becomes convinced the two women living in one home are lesbians, so he breaks in, hunting for “proof.” The women (who, in heels and short skirts, are presented as a male fantasy of what lesbians look like) arrive home to change, watched by three of the house painters who are now hiding in the closet. The two guys left outside describe the “hot lesbians” over their walkie-talkies, gaining a rapt audience of men (cashiers, truck drivers, police officers) whose radios accidentally pick up their channel.

When the women discover the boys have broken in, they kiss and touch each other for the enjoyment of their intruders. In its assertion that lesbians exist for male pleasure, “American Pie 2” was just reflecting a mainstream contemporary understanding of what being a lesbian means.

“Mean Girls,” released three years after “American Pie 2,” epitomizes Hollywood’s fear of lesbians. The beloved comedy, written by Tina Fey, feels like it belongs to a later, more progressive generation of teen movie (not least because it continues to be referenced by people like Ariana Grande and Hillary Clinton). But the central revenge plot is based on lesbian panic: Janis (Lizzy Caplan), so traumatized by a rumor that she’s a lesbian, becomes determined to destroy Regina (Rachel McAdams), the classmate who started the rumor.

Janis is staunch in her rejection of feminized girl culture, wearing a suit to prom. In a different version of the movie, she could have an empowering arc in which she comes out and is accepted. Instead, by the end of “Mean Girls” she has a boyfriend, and the assumption that being a lesbian is both life-destroying and shameful remains uncontested.

“Mean Girls” is far from the only teen movie to marginalize lesbians: “Bring It On,” “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser” and “Pitch Perfect” all have jarring jokes that laugh at queer women.

As questions about representation in Hollywood entertainment have become more urgent in recent years, prominent lesbian characters have slowly begun to trickle into the movie mainstream. Of course, independent cinema has long been a place to find complex queer women, from “Desert Hearts” to “Bound” to “Pariah.” Mainstream movie culture, which carefully takes its cues from societal norms, is just catching up. Recently, we’ve seen lesbians on the big screen in a tear-jerker romantic drama (“Carol”), a girls’ trip movie (“Rough Night”), a twisted period drama (“The Favourite”), a classic period drama (“Collette”), a sports biopic (“Battle of the Sexes”) and a revenge thriller (“The Handmaiden”).

The conventional high school comedy is not the only place you can now see nuanced stories of lesbian teens on the big screen: “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” a wrenching movie about a gay conversion camp, “Hearts Beat Loud,” an earnest indie about a Brooklyn teen and her dad, and “Princess Cyd,” a coming-of-age movie, were all released in the past few years. (Honorable mention should also go to Netflix’s “Dumplin’,” whose combat boot-wearing, patriarchy-hating Hannah is lesbian-coded, even if she isn’t explicitly named as such.)

Jokes about masturbation, crushing on a cool girl from afar, messy first sexual experiences, bodily fluids in places they shouldn’t be, porn in places it shouldn’t be. Olivia Wilde’s directing debut “Booksmart” has many of the moments we’ve come to expect from a gross-out high school comedy, except this time, the teenager on a merry quest for sexual discovery is a lesbian.

Eleanor Stanford

Articles written by the author