At the center of Jenny Slate’s performance in every project, you’ll always find the truth. No matter the messiness of a character’s circumstance or the chaotic path they choose, she plays every scene grounded in that character’s reality, even if it’s playing the funny albeit unhinged klepto, Mona Lisa in Parks and Recreation or her voice work as Marcel in Marcel the Shell with Shoes On as a teeny tiny little shell on a journey to find his dislocated family, and especially in Obvious Child, as Donna, a charming 20-something comedian dealing with the realities of an unwanted pregnancy. She possesses a certain depth, quirky charm, and a deep vulnerability that makes watching her breathe life into her characters exciting.
While Slate is usually known for her more comedic roles, her latest work in the FX series Dying For Sex lets her break out of the box. She plays Nikki, a friend, soulmate, and caregiver to Molly (Michelle Williams), who has terminal cancer. For the first time, Molly is dealing with childhood trauma and exploring her sexuality while on a search for connection and to feel something until she can no longer. We see Nikki step up immediately as Molly’s best friend, dropping every facet of her life to take Molly to appointments, to be a shoulder to cry on, to scream outside of a bodega, and everything in between. Nikki’s the kind of friend you want by your side for life’s big and small moments, and a friend you might ask to get you out of trouble when your computer is hacked by an amateur porn site; Nikki is this friend, selflessly, even though she knows what the outcome will be. It’s a performance that has hysterical highs and devastatingly heartbreaking lows, and it’s Slate’s best work to date.
The actress admits that as a child, she dreamed of sinking her teeth into dramatic work that asked her to stretch herself into new territory. While it’s clear that she’s always had this inside of her, she partly credits Michelle Williams for bringing her into this deeper, uncharted territory. “I’m finally doing what I wished I was doing when I was a little girl. I’m working with someone who’s really good and who I felt that I could move alongside of, and I didn’t feel like an imposter.Part of that was because she took me in, and part of that was because I allowed myself my own legitimacy.”
“I feel like I’m lucky to be given material where I can try to give as much as I want to give and operate in full expression of emotional truth.”
I sat down with Jenny Slate to speak about her brilliant work in Dying For Sex, her vulnerability, and exploring a different kind of caregiver.
Niki Cruz: The thing that makes you special as a performer is your vulnerability. You really lay it all out there and bring people into your life in a way a lot of comedians don’t. That vulnerability is such a throughline in your career both in your stand up specials and your acting career.
Jenny Slate: I’m glad you see it that way. I definitely think that is what I want people to pick up on. I don’t really have any agenda, except for myself, which is to connect to people. While we have to be good at our jobs as performers, and there is an editing process (— that’s different than shunning parts of yourself or trying to hide. It just doesn’t feel as fun to me if I’m kind of crouching while I’m connecting. So, I’ve been able to do that on my own terms and my own self-created work for a while.
NC: Do you have to take a break from performing and just LIVE to get new material?
JS: Now it works that way. Before I had my daughter, and when I lived in New York, I was constantly doing shows. I was doing shows four nights a week at least. I’ve always been an improviser. I’ve always had a general idea of what I might do in the 10 to 24 minutes I’m on stage. I’ve never written anything out. And after a while, things became fun. So I would tell the same story, or it would be in my repertoire, but it just never had a plan. Now, I’m in Massachusetts, and I’m really far from any performance places. When I’m in LA, I like to perform at Largo, but that’s bedtime for my daughter, and it’s honestly really hard for me to leave her sometimes. I’m sometimes weighing whether or not I want to do stand-up, which I love, but it also makes me feel nervous and takes a lot of energy for me during the day just processing that anxiety.
There’s a lot of my life that just doesn’t feel appropriate for stand-up anymore. It feels more appropriate for essay writing, or books, or just personal relationships. That said, something will happen where all of a sudden I realize there is a giant unexamined trove that I should put into an hour, and then the way I have to build that is slowly over a year or seven tour dates, where I’ll go and play. I play theaters that are usually under 1000 seats, and then I’ll do an hour two nights in a row and record it. It’s much different than four shows a week just fucking off, but what I need is still the same, which is to tell the truth about something, but in the context of stand-up and to remind people that I like them. I want to tell them something really personal. Sometimes a lot of life goes by, like five or six months and I don’t do any shows, and I don’t have the urge to do stand up, and then I’ll kind of catch a wave, and suddenly I want to do it again.
NC: Speaking of this urge to tell the truth, Dying For Sex, is such honest and truthful work. It’s such a beautiful exploration of female friendship and soulmates and also shows caregiving in a really special way.
JS: I’m glad you think that because I feel the same way. I was excited that the script was so gorgeous, emotionally speaking, and the story was vivid, alive, and truthful in the face of death, and that the comedy was just really, really strong. Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock decided to not make any compromises. There is a really earnest but also funny discussion of how trauma installs itself in the body and the psyche and that those are connected, and you don’t even notice until you have a big event where you realize the way you’re living doesn’t really represent what you want or who you privately know yourself to be. They took that on so beautifully and directed us with such care and thoughtfulness and with such an eye on the comedy that I felt that we didn’t lose anything.
NC: When I was watching your performance, I realized this was a departure from what people have seen you do. I also enjoyed and bought Nikki and Molly as these two best friends. You and Michelle have that natural, funny chemistry together. What was it like to tap into that chemistry?
JS: In terms of working with Michelle, it was the thrill of working with one of my favorite actors, this brilliant, sensitive, open human. It was unlike anything else I’ve experienced. It was invigorating. One of the many reasons why Michelle and I connect so well is that she hopes for a true energy that you can build on and that you can really move with. It’s the kind of thing you don’t question, just observe. You don’t get in its own way. I’m so grateful, and I like it so much, and I’m just going to keep it going by being aware of what it is and being really prepared so that at once you have that sort of likeweird, organic person-to-person magic. You take it further with preparation and diligence in terms of the story and serving that really, good writing.
NC: One of my favorite scenes is when Nikki is pushing Molly into the car for their great escape from Molly’s husband Steve. It’s chaos, and funny, and yet, Nikki isn’t a chaotic person, which I found to be really interesting. She’s a pillar of strength for Molly, which I think, really speaks to the role caregivers take on.
JS: Yeah, Nikki is not Steve, and she’s not organized in a traditional way. She is reliable. There are some elements of her life that don’t go with a hospital environment or being a primary caregiver, like her bag really is a black hole. You don’t want an unwrapped crumb cake in a hospital waiting room, but that’s Nikki’s life. There’s nothing wrong with it. What doesn’t work and what is stifling and deadening for Molly is Steve’s connection with her illness and his complete disconnection and unawareness and disinterest and fear of who Molly really is. He really doesn’t know her. He doesn’t understand what she wants, and Nikki does know and understand all of those things, and she is excited by the idea of learning more. She’s not threatened by the idea that Molly is going to change and become a different version of herself.
Nikki has a lot of energy to spend, though. It’s really wide and blasting and ready to go at the start of the show, and as the show progresses, Nikki becomes more purposeful with her energy. It’s not just in caregiving, but it’s also changing her awareness, her style, and the way she prioritizes things. I really like that she kind of physically falls away at the end of the series. I asked to be stripped down, to stop wearing makeup for the most part, to take the jewelry off, to be wearing baggy, movement clothes. She’s exhausted, and she’s not putting herself together, and her tooth is infected, and she’s considering not taking care of that, but in terms of the emotional connection, that’s becoming more and more intentional all the time. It is always engaging. It’s strong, it’s full of love. I just wanted to show that a caregiver doesn’t look one way.
NC: There’s so much joy in this show, which sounds odd when you just read the premise, but there is. Then there are moments that are heart wrenching AND funny at the same time. As an actress, how was it to balance or hold all of those different emotions?
JS: It feels natural to me. I think I’m kind of made to be sort of an emotional creature of many different appendages. I think within a scene, it’s important to trust the director, that the notes that need to be the loudest are being played the loudest, and that’s where I trusted [director] Shannon [Murphy] to be like, “I actually want to see more of this here.”
Yes, this is serious, but we wanted to show the comedy because that will also gesture at the seriousness of the situation in an unexpected way. And you trust the director to angle you in the right direction and to show you what ratio you need, but in terms of serving a combination of comedy and drama, that feels real to me, it feels right, it feels natural. It’s what life actually is like. And I feel an appetite for it. I feel hunger to do more things like that.
NC: At the top of this interview, you had mentioned how the show addresses death head on, and that’s part of the reasons why I love this show. It showcases that there’s comedy in tragedy. I’m thinking of the scene where you close Molly’s mouth after she passes, and it just wouldn’t stay shut, and you’re trying to honor her request. How was it filming that day? Is it something where you could allow yourself to decompress from at the end of the day?
JS: The first thing, I think, is to just take what the script is asking us to do really seriously. It’s a really intimidating thing, I think, to read a scene like that that’s marked by loss. The loss has finally occurred. And then there’s this joke that is so grim, but also exact evidence of Nikki being respectful of Molly’s wishes. Nikki has to do this.
I tend to just push myself through the truth of the scene and really tailor it to the energy that I am feeling moving through.I do tend to perform on through. I don’t think about it. I know where I am, even in the dark, and I just keep pushing through to the other side of the scene. The way I decompress is in different ways. There were some days where we would do a very emotionally sorrowful thing at the beginning of the day, but then the end of the day would be really funny, and I just would walk out tired and happy. It was hard not to feel those tremors of sadness, but the fact is you walk off the set, and I would notice a sadness in me. I’m not a method actor. No one on set was, so the way to decompress is to interact with the environment, and to be real. I did a lot of meditating in between scenes, and at the beginning of the day, and atthe end of the day. Part of that also became changing the way I looked. By the time we ended the show, I had a real urge to stop looking like the character of Nikki even though I loved being her.
It’s a brief ride, but then you get off, it’s a lot like getting off of a ride at an amusement park.
NC: I love that description. The takeaway about this show, for me, is how compassionate this show is in the way that it talks about the process of death and how it positions it as such a normal part of life. It sounds simple, but we don’t talk about it as a society. It’s very taboo, and it made me wonder, why aren’t we talking about this more? Everyone goes through this.
JS: People are afraid of being afraid. It’s sort of an inside-out version of “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”There are things that have been deemed emotionally unsightly and not for the living, but death is what happens to everything that is alive, and you are alive right up until you’re not. For so many of us, this is the biggest thing that will ever happen to us. We’ll finally meet that mysterious, powerful moment.
I don’t think it’s a normalized thing to talk about dying or think about it, other than with so much fear and tension. And I think one thing about Dying For Sex — you used the word compassionate. It’s such a compassionate show. It’s also about invention. It’s about hope, being a part of being alive right up until the end. And it is certainly about forgiveness. And I think one of the reasons why we don’t talk about death is that we just can’t forgive it for being a real sin. I think nurseAmy, played by Paula Pell, so brilliantly, so beautifully, her monologue about the active dying process, allows us to forgive death for being scary, and to sit with it in a different way.
NC: And then there’s that beautiful end scene where Nikki sees two older women having a moment. There’s a specific look on her face as she’s viewing these two women sharing something sweet. What do you think she’s thinking in that moment?
JS: I think she is feeling a pang of what she will never have and a zing, like a pluck of a heartstring because she loved Molly so much. She sees an image of the future that she will never have, and it hurts her. It’s also so beautiful that she had the person who she would have had that with, and there’s gratitude there, and there’s loss. And I also imagined it’s like just a little bit of a message.
All episodes of Dying for Sex are available to stream on Hulu. Jenny Slate is Emmy-eligible in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
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