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Speaker 1: Hi, everyone.
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Speaker 2: It's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Welcome back to Work in Progress this week, friends. We are joined by a woman who I have just adored and for so long, not only for the work she does in the world and how she carries herself and her unbelievable sense of fashion and just honestly how frickin' cool she is, but because we met doing some really amazing activism together for women and girls. And ever since, I've just been so blown away by her brain and her commitment. And I'm so thrilled she's here today. We are joined by the iconic Purna Jagannathan. She is a person whose story inspires me so much. Some people's reinventions or adventures start with a leap. Purnas began with a decision to stop. She chose to stop postponing the life she wanted that perhaps she'd always wanted since she was a little girl. A decade ago, she left a very successful career in advertising to pursue acting full time. And she has quickly become known for characters that are funny and fierce and unstoppable. And now with major new roles in both HBO's Lanterns and Apple TV's Nocturne, she is leveling up into another even more ambitious chapter. Aside from the incredible work she's doing on screen, something that I love about Porna is that she's the kind of woman who refuses to stay silent or make herself smaller. She is insatiably curious and asks the best questions. And I think all of that spirit comes together in a way that shapes both her work and her advocacy so beautifully. We first met when we co-hosted a screening of an Oscar-winning documentary called Period, End of Sentence. Check it out if you haven't seen it. And I remember sitting in the theater that night just being so amazed by her energy and her thoughtfulness She's really a special person to behold, whether you get to do that off screen or on. So if you've ever wondered what becomes possible when we break out of the limits placed on us and we build a life that feels truly our own, Porn is living proof. Let's dive in. Hi.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: Hello.
00:02:59
Speaker 2: I'm so happy to see you.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: So happy to see you.
00:03:04
Speaker 2: How are you?
00:03:05
Speaker 1: I'm so good.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: Oh, well, I love the show. I'm so excited. I can't wait to like jump into all the things. I mean, even from the preview, I was like, that's my kind of superhero show. Like what the, where did this come from?
00:03:20
Speaker 3: It's a, it's a thriller.
00:03:21
Speaker 1: It's a whodunit. And as I was going through it, like I, Did like, I'm really good at seeing things coming.
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Speaker 3: I'm so good at it. Didn't see anything coming.
00:03:35
Speaker 2: I love that. That's so fun. Especially, I mean, yeah, to be surprised when you read so many scripts, when you're, when you're so used to it, that's a great feeling.
00:03:45
Speaker 1: It is. It was shocking. I mean, I love it. Episode is shocking. Yeah.
00:03:53
Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't give it away.
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Don't give it away.
00:03:55
Speaker 2: I'm going to ask you. Because I want to go back before we dive into the present. I love to really run it back with people, especially because you're normally here to talk about something that's in the zeitgeist or reflect on something happening in your career. And I like to really rewind and think about if you got to interact with your younger self, you know, poor Nat, eight or nine years old, especially because you came into your present career from a whole different one.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:04:34
Speaker 2: You know, I think about life phases.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:04:36
Speaker 2: Would that little girl be so amazed by where your life is right now and what it looks like?
00:04:42
Speaker 1: I think that little girl, I definitely have the life that that little girl would have wanted. I think things just changed drastically. And I got further and further away from that. You know, that little girl definitely had a really great idea of like how, I always will say this, like the whole family could watch the same movie and I am the only one watching it completely differently from everyone else. I still remember I was very young. I was probably like three or four. My, we live in an apartment building in New Delhi and one person on the top floor had a TV. So we, the whole family, like all the families would go and, you know, gather around when there was a movie being screened, you know, once, once every month or something. And I still remember at four, my mother, I remember her being really upset that she had to leave the film because I was so upset watching. And, like, I don't remember what was going on, but I could feel, like, I could feel the emotions so much more intensely than those around me in some strange way. And she'd remember every month.
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Speaker 3: Like, halfway through, she'd have to pick me up.
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Speaker 1: They'd tell her to leave because the kid was crying, and they'd pick me up and take me downstairs.
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Speaker 3: And, you know, there was, like, a frustration around it.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, but very... You know, very, very open and creative. I went to a school when I was eight. I was in Pakistan. So we went to a school where so many of my friends from that school ended up being these beautiful artists. And, you know, I think things really like shifted after that. They become a little more rigid, a little more less creative. And I really had to find my way back to the eight year old.
00:06:45
Speaker 5: Wow.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: You know, you mentioned being in Pakistan then, and I know you moved around a lot because your dad was a diplomat. I think about the experience of bouncing around so much as a kid as being hard and maybe also fascinating. But when you say you got away from creativity, did his work, you know, diplomatic work is so serious and, you know... important um and I think sometimes maybe seen oppositionally to art was it like pressure from that or or just sort of the way the the winds carried you that maybe brought you away from your creativity for a.
00:07:26
Speaker 1: Bit that's a really good question um I think I think after that phase I moved to Argentina after Argentina I feel like I Kept moving. But I will tell you the critical period in Argentina where I was like the only person of color, which has happened before. I grew up in Ireland and I didn't feel that way in Ireland. But in Argentina, I really, really felt like the person of color, the only person of color.
00:07:56
Speaker 4: Wow.
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Speaker 1: They had never back then.
00:08:01
Speaker 3: I know the country's change.
00:08:02
Speaker 1: It was it was the racism was very intense. Their indigenous population was completely eradicated. Um, and so I, you know.
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Speaker 3: I was in, in a school.
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Speaker 1: System and surrounded by people, even though, you know, I didn't know what racism was, um, till I was in Argentina. Like I didn't, I never experienced it. And so it was a, it was not only that, but you are, so there's tons of racism and tons.
00:08:36
Speaker 6: Of isolation, but It was like, sure, there was school plays or school choir or school, whatever. I just couldn't participate or I wasn't not allowed to.
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Speaker 3: I was never cast.
00:08:48
Speaker 1: You know, if I did audition for something, I was just I wasn't part of the machine at all. And really interesting, like a really interesting, if I think about it, I think from that age onwards, like the beauty standards was so different from who.
00:09:06
Speaker 3: I was up until then.
00:09:08
Speaker 1: Up until way into my adulthood, even when I lived in India, you know, the beauty standards in India are so vastly different from what I look like. And so really kind of disconnecting from art and any sort of beauty for a very, very long time. Yeah, I always joke like I just got a full length mirror in my house a year ago. And it's because I just I didn't I had a little bathroom mirror growing up. I didn't know what, like I knew what my face looked like and I'd get on a stool and look at my shirt, but I can't style shoes or handbags or anything. I had no idea what's going on.
00:09:46
Speaker 2: That is so crazy to me because I think you're one of the most stylish women I know.
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Speaker 1: Thank you. I didn't, I grew up with a very erased sense of self.
00:09:56
Speaker 2: Wow. That's fascinating that not feeling as a young woman that you fit a beauty standard, feeling othered could make you reject beauty almost as a concept, not just even as a personal identifying trait, but as a concept.
00:10:16
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think so. I think I had to find my way back to it. Wow. We didn't grow up with....
00:10:25
Speaker 2: We just.
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Speaker 1: We grew up in a different time. We grew up when... You know, I think about India, which had one channel. You know? It was so expensive to go to the movies.
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Speaker 3: I didn't... Did I see a play?
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Speaker 1: I must have seen a play, like a school play, but I didn't see a play till I was.
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Speaker 3: well into my 20s.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: So really like interacting, I remember being in, moving to New York and that's when I started interacting with.
00:11:00
Speaker 3: This particular art form, right? In an actual meaningful way.
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Speaker 2: That's so cool. And you also majored in journalism.
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Speaker 1: You also, is that right? Yes. Oh, yes.
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Speaker 4: Yes.
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Speaker 2: I mean, I wound up leaving college a year early for my first job. And I remember thinking, oh, we're going to, like, go do a show where they made Dawson's Creek. Like, we'll probably do two or three seasons. Like, no show's ever going to beat the creek. And then we did nine seasons. And I was like, oh, I guess I'm not going back to college like I thought I would when it was over.
00:11:37
Speaker 1: What drew you into journalism? So.
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Speaker 2: I went for a BFA. And there was something, at least for me at that time, where going into such a hardcore theater program that only talked about theater, did theater, ate and breathed. It made me... I actually kind of regret, just for me, to be clear, people out there, study what you want. But I kind of regret going at all. Because I felt.
00:12:08
Speaker 2: As I was coming into myself as an actor, so like free and kind of wild and a little feral. And it made me so self-conscious. I still second guess my choices. And after the first year in it, I was like, I'm going to lose my mind. I can't do this. But I know I'm a storyteller and I know I love to understand stories. people's experiences and how they relate to what's going on in the world and how to talk about them honestly and also with kindness. And I thought, well, journalism, I can go write about it. Yeah. And that was my shift. And that was also when I started really like booking work.
00:12:53
Speaker 1: What? Yeah.
00:12:55
Speaker 2: So I'm just obsessed about hearing about it for you. I'm like, tell me why you did it. What were you up to? Where did you go?
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Speaker 1: I mean, I do think, you know, someone asked me, if I wasn't an actor, what else would I do? I think I would have found my way to journalism. Like me, Ronan Farrow.
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Speaker 5: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Like I have never in my life been intimidated meeting anyone. And I remember clocking that my legs shaked when I met Ronan Farrow.
00:13:26
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:13:26
Speaker 1: Like, I just think, I think that type of journalism, that acute journalism, knows and that dogged need for the truth and exploration of the truth wow like.
00:13:44
Speaker 4: Wow incredible it's incredible and when i read stuff that great journalists do and great pieces i'm like it's so evocative it's so such.
00:13:58
Speaker 1: A and it's similar it's similar to what we do right we have to figure stuff out and why, and look for the, like, why did that person meet that person at that particular time? And look for like the divinity in that timing. I don't know. I, I, I feel like I would approach, oh, I do approach acting the same thing I might have if I was a journalist. And even when I was in advertising, I was doing something called consumer research, which is still like what makes, what makes the consumer tick? where does the brand find its place in the consumer's life? And that meant looking into, you know, what the consumer does, not what they say. So that was super interesting and super great training ground, actually, unconsciously.
00:14:49
Speaker 2: And now a word from our wonderful sponsors. Yeah, how do you think about that now? Because you had a really successful advertising career.
00:15:06
Speaker 3: It was a long career.
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Speaker 1: My job was when I was 14 in advertising, and I quit when I was.
00:15:20
Speaker 3: God, I quit 10 years ago in August.
00:15:25
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:15:26
Speaker 2: Oh, my God. Happy 10-year anniversary.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:15:29
Speaker 2: Oh, it's so major. But I guess I'm curious, yeah, looking back, what do you think it taught you? You know, how do you think that prepared you to be such a great actor?
00:15:42
Speaker 1: My advertising?
00:15:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I will say just on a practical basis, my job was to look at consumer behavior. And consumer behavior is very different from what consumers say. So those can be drastically different things, right? So you'd go, like, I remember doing stuff for method cleaners and like, you'd go look in their homes and the method bottle is on the counter, but then you open under their sink and all their cleaning products is under their sink. So the method was somehow a status symbol. It was just felt more like perfume than a cleaning product. It was very interesting. You have to really like, go into their homes and really understand where things are placed and why they place it and the exterior, the gaze of the product, you know, so to speak.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:16:43
Speaker 1: This gaze is important. So I did a lot of that. I was doing a lot of, you know, focus groups or I was doing a lot of in-home research.
00:16:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:16:54
Speaker 1: I did look through people's trash. Yeah, just investigative work.
00:17:00
Speaker 2: Does that work? Do the things that you noticed, the sort of illuminating things, does that inform how you prepare characters?
00:17:09
Speaker 1: I remember initially, or, you know, I do remember clocking. Until today, I remember particular people from my focus groups. I remember there was a woman who would come in for Nivea. And I don't know what was going on with her in her home.
00:17:25
Speaker 3: I don't know.
00:17:27
Speaker 1: I don't know what it was. But I feel like she was in a very abusive situation where she second-guessed herself on anything and everything. And I just remember at night taking my notebook out and writing all... Oh, that's the other thing I would do. I would write all the characteristics of people I met. And just.
00:17:49
Speaker 3: How she asked me questions.
00:17:50
Speaker 2: I don't, I don't know.
00:17:51
Speaker 1: It was just that I was felt like I was always compiling depending on what people I saw. Or I remember like in a focus group, I saw someone take the glasses off and to clean them.
00:18:02
Speaker 3: They, they licked.
00:18:03
Speaker 1: Both sides and that, and I was just like, and I years, like 15 years later, I used that in a show.
00:18:10
Speaker 3: Like I did.
00:18:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: Like I, I clock, I remember clocking stuff. I remember being interested in and being and watching them, Not only in terms of just what they were saying about the product, but watching them.
00:18:24
Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, all the little behaviors.
00:18:28
Speaker 1: All the tiny, tiny, strange, interesting behaviors, yeah.
00:18:32
Speaker 2: What do you think it was that made you finally say, I'm going to hang up my advertising hat and just go full on into acting? I mean, how does one do that?
00:18:45
Speaker 3: Slowly.
00:18:45
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:18:46
Speaker 1: Yeah. There were two really big junctions. One was when I turned 30 and I don't know how old you are, but 30 is a very like astrologically very seminal. It's like if you haven't met your destiny by 30, you're, you're, you're given another chance to meet it. Wow. And then the cycle does come again, but it doesn't come like it does at 30. Yeah. And so, you know, I was naive. I'm 53 now. And I thought 30 was very like it's now or never. It's like, you know, I got it.
00:19:22
Speaker 3: It's like it's the end if I.
00:19:24
Speaker 1: Don't do it. It's you know, it's it felt like the last try.
00:19:28
Speaker 4: Wow.
00:19:28
Speaker 1: So at 30, I knew the only way I was going to do it is if I made a break from advertising. And I didn't know how to act. So I enrolled in a master's program and I auditioned and I got into one school and I. it was a three-year program, but I only lasted a year. Because I was older when I got there, I had an idea of how I learned. Does that make sense?
00:20:04
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:05
Speaker 1: In an acting... You know, I had like done a couple of theater classes when I was in college. And when I was working in advertising, I would take weekend acting classes. Most of the people were there because they had, you know, like fear of public speaking. They were like from corporate jobs. Great people.
00:20:24
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:20:25
Speaker 1: But the one year of acting in school made me, helped me make enough of a break.
00:20:32
Speaker 3: To, you know, to start.
00:20:34
Speaker 1: And then that's when I launched my own little tiny brand consulting firm, which I, you know, I went back into full-time advertising, but I really carried that kind of my little firm until 2016. That's what the 10-year thing was. Wow. Yeah.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: That's so cool.
00:20:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was cool.
00:20:52
Speaker 2: I think something I've always really appreciated about you is you're another person who really loves acting and activism. You do really powerful things with your voice. And I mean, I even think about, you know, you had your firm until 2016, but you produced your award-winning play in 2012. Yeah. Nearby, like, the choice to kind of come out into that space and, and talk about sexual violence and, you know, the specific kind of cultural experience of this young woman in India.
00:21:38
Speaker 1: Nirbhaya was in context. It was a context to a time in India, which we haven't had since, where women and men said enough is enough. You know, there was a young girl, Jyoti Singh Pandey was 23, was brutally gang raped on her way home and she didn't make it. She, you know, she, she succumbed to her injuries because she was, it was, it was so brutal. And usually there's something or the other that people will find, right?
00:22:14
Speaker 3: It was late at night.
00:22:17
Speaker 2: Had she been drinking? Why was she there?
00:22:19
Speaker 1: She didn't know like what was going on, but. This was just a girl who was a medical student who went to see Life of Pi and got onto a bus to go home.
00:22:31
Speaker 3: And it was a trap, you know.
00:22:33
Speaker 1: And, you know, the brutality of it also is the closest thing I can think of is the Black Lives Matter movement around George Floyd. And there's something about the brutality of it and the fact that you can viscerally feel it.
00:22:51
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:22:52
Speaker 1: That activates something and you know it obviously activated something in me but it it it is contextual it is it is like saying a piece of art came from the black lives movement black lives matter but the truth is it influenced every facet of society right every like Hollywood changed for a quick minute from the black lives movement we're totally back to be but you know so crazy So nearby, for me, the insight, I was sexually assaulted at nine. And me, the insight was, you know, how my silence had contributed somehow to.
00:23:36
Speaker 3: The fabric of violence.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: My silence was somehow responsible for the violence.
00:23:42
Speaker 3: To have continued.
00:23:44
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, the really... powerful thing about movements like this is, of course, I had nothing to do with what happened to her on that day. But if you can see yourself as part of.
00:23:57
Speaker 3: The problem, then you can see yourself as part of the solution.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: And so the thing was, if I can break my silence, can that break the silence, the cycle of.
00:24:09
Speaker 2: Violence, right?
00:24:09
Speaker 1: It's like, does the equation work? you know, will the, if I change this equation, will this equation shift? Yeah. So, um, I, I knew I wanted to tell my story because, you know, India has like, like South Africa, like any other.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: Country, including the States have horrific, horrific.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Uh, sexual violence epidemic against girls and boys. I think it's one in two girls and boys, but, um, It's an epidemic and everyone knows about it. No one spoke about it. And no one used to rape, for example, in the house and stuff like that. So I invited a playwright down from South Africa called Yael Farber. And I had seen Yael's play in New York. And it was a testimonial play. So, you know, the Vajana Monologues are a testimonial play, but they're done by actors. Ama Juba, the play I saw at the Culture Project in New York, was by... the.
00:25:16
Speaker 3: Actors, it's the actor's life.
00:25:18
Speaker 1: So the actors are talking about their own lives and these lives, you know, as was Nirbhaya. Nirbhaya had, you know, a bigger cast, cast of seven, I believe, but, and we all told our own stories, but a lot of us didn't think our stories were big enough to tell. As was the case with Amit Juba, which is, I'm going to tell the story of apartheid in South, the current story of apartheid in South Africa. A lot of the people just came to the workshop and said, I don't, I don't think I've been discriminating. It's like, I haven't had a big thing happen, you know? Yeah. And it's not the big thing.
00:25:58
Speaker 2: It's not the big thing.
00:25:59
Speaker 1: Everyday, small. Yeah. Or it's how you are told to view what is. It's how you are programmed to view what, The extraordinary thing that happened to you as ordinary. Yes. Are told to view it as ordinary. Therefore, no one else has to deal with it.
00:26:18
Speaker 2: Well, and the idea, you know, to your point, this idea that for so long, no one wanted to talk about any of it.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:26:32
Speaker 2: And that the reaction when you share with anyone that, of minimization or we don't talk about that or it wasn't that bad you know one of the in my own experience as a woman being told something that happened to me wasn't that bad I know about it was so much worse than yeah that was far worse than the worst thing that ever happened to me and and it's a strange thing I think because when you think about her story when you think about you know, the launch of Me Too here in the States. When you think about the reaction to George Floyd, you can't watch a man get strangled to death for nine minutes for no reason and have any reaction other than abject horror, you know, being crushed by all of those people. And yet it's fascinating to me because it almost feels like we finally made some space for everyone to tell their story. And then it's like the world went, oh, there's too many stories. Now we have to deny them all again. It's too painful to admit that we do this to each other, that humans make excuses everywhere. And so now we're just going to pretend we don't do any of it in the first place. And the swing back... especially for us. You know, you mentioned earlier, you said you didn't know how old I am. I've just turned 44. And it's such a weird thing because I remember when we didn't talk about it. And then I remember when we started talking about it. And now I see that everyone's in denial of talking about it. And I can't imagine being a 22-year-old girl right now.
00:28:22
Speaker 3: I'm so with you on that.
00:28:24
Speaker 1: I'm so with you. When I see Louis C.K. on tour online, Sure, what else is he supposed to do? But there is a lack of accountability. I think that's what I always struggled with. Yeah. There's a lack of placing blame with perpetrators, keeping with perpetrators or perpetrators accepting blame and working to shift. Of course, you I have a great deal of compassion and forgiveness.
00:28:52
Speaker 4: I do.
00:28:53
Speaker 2: I have it if you take accountability.
00:28:55
Speaker 3: Thank you.
00:28:56
Speaker 1: That's exactly it. I'll wait till you take accountability. I'll wait till you understand how you're programming because we have to do it all the time. Our programming has let us down and led us astray and how we invent ourselves. I'm all about that. But You know, this time in India, this play in India was, you know, it's a testimonial play. It's us talking about our own stories of sexual assault, rape, gender-based violence. And we toured it for three years around the world. And what we saw back then was the Me Too movement, you know, where every country on every stage, we'd ask people to raise their hands if they've been affected by sexual violence in India. each person raised their hands. And, you know, a lot of people in the audiences, a lot, a lot, I would say, probably 70% broke their silence for the first time. So it was a very like, the play really started after it ended. The work of play started after the curtain went down. And really, it was my first thing around being activism. I think because I hadn't told my story, I couldn't be activated. Does that make sense? And since then have found points, things that happen much more personal.
00:30:23
Speaker 3: Ever since I guess I got activated.
00:30:26
Speaker 1: Yeah. see myself in a lot of different stories. Yeah.
00:30:29
Speaker 2: It's like something connects, then that connection never comes apart.
00:30:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:34
Speaker 2: It's so neat actually to, to know that that was the first moment because we met co-hosting the period end of sentence, the documentary about breaking the stigma around menstruation and access for girls around the world and so it it's like so it's so cool to hear where it started for you because where my connection with you started was in that same kind of.
00:30:59
Speaker 1: Yeah within a couple of years as well that's.
00:31:02
Speaker 2: Right yeah I love that and now for our sponsors in a completely you know flip the script away you addressed divides and traditions with like lightness and incredible humor in the insanely popular Never Have I Ever. You, I mean, you just make, you make me laugh so hard. Even when, you know, the subject matter is illuminating about the way the world works. What did you want people to understand about immigrant families? What did you want to show them that maybe, you know, you knew they were missing?
00:31:45
Speaker 1: You know, as I look at my, uh, a couple of years out of Never Have I Ever, a couple of years in from doing, um, both Deli Boys and this character, Zoe on Lanterns, I just feel like women, especially immigrant women, have so many falsehoods around them.
00:32:09
Speaker 4: Hmm.
00:32:11
Speaker 1: A lot um it's our our focus for women of a certain age is like it's the kids telling their stories and the mom and the dad are somehow satellite stories right yeah and yet this is like i'm you know in my i will tell you before this is the best.
00:32:33
Speaker 6: Decade enjoy every second of it i know It will pass, which I didn't know in my 20s or 30s.
00:32:44
Speaker 1: But our worlds have expanded so much. We have so much more love, so much more responsibility, so much more despair, so much more unfulfilled, so much, so much. And that is that suddenly has an expiration date on TV and films. You know, so it was and I'm an immigrant mom. You know, I came here for college and my mother is an immigrant mom. My sister and my aunts and no one parents the way that we saw immigrant mom's parent. You know, that like that one tone. It's in India. We call it sitting on someone's head where the mother is just sitting on the kid's head and just like screaming at them, like oppressing them.
00:33:26
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:33:27
Speaker 1: Sure. My mom did that. But she also did a million other things, you know.
00:33:32
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:33:33
Speaker 1: We married at 65 off of someone that she met on the internet, you know. She has traveled the world and learned every language there is to learn. She has made friends in the most hostile of territories. She parented us through like insane times. I mean, and we all did that. We all do that. And she tried to, you know, she was a diplomat's wife, so you can't really have a career. But she tried always to make money and have careers everywhere she went. She tried to learn driving. She, you know, and I was scared of becoming a parent because I never, the issue was I never saw my, I never saw a parent like me on TV, right? I have a foul mouth.
00:34:26
Speaker 3: I am not strict.
00:34:28
Speaker 1: I have no boundaries. I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not a child by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm not, I'm not the mom. I'm not a TV mom. I'm not the mom who has like, I can't cook, you know, like I will have to read the instructions on the two minute noodle packet. Every time I make it, it is amazing. unbelievable how unequipped and yet i love being a mom it's my life's purpose you know so that was the other thing i wanted to see a version of an immigrant mom yeah that is closer to um who i am and who we are and in these other characters be it daddy boys and and zoe now neither of them are moms right And it's a very, both of them are unapologetically after power. Yeah.
00:35:34
Speaker 2: I love that. I love seeing that from a woman on screen.
00:35:38
Speaker 1: And untethered.
00:35:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's like society treats ambition and women like it's a dirty word, and it is not. And I read... I read that for Deli Boys you drew inspo from The Real Housewives.
00:35:54
Speaker 7: Oh.
00:35:54
Speaker 2: Please tell me more. I'm obsessed.
00:35:57
Speaker 1: The Real Housewives are so themselves. They're so unhinged 24-7. You know, they picked characters. They picked characters who would show themselves at every moment. And I really wanted Lucky to be a very physical character. This is a huge, Deli Boys was a huge physical comedy and I wanted to have it grounded in reality. And I will do that for all my projects. I'll look at documentaries to try and find my people and study and watch and just wait and watch. I'll do it like if I'm shooting one day the night before, I'll just watch documentaries just to both free myself and like there's something, maybe it's from like one year in acting school where it's like very internal, like you have to be very internal.
00:36:51
Speaker 3: What they teach you about TV, like very internal.
00:36:53
Speaker 1: And you go to housewives, it's all out there. It's all external, right? So really the permission to be bigger and more unhinged and more wanting to be, be in control and power. Like that's what the housewives gave me. It's fascinating.
00:37:14
Speaker 2: I love that. Well, okay. This, this, this sort of like inside baseball with actors is one of my favorite things. Because when you say for your projects, you watch documentaries, like, okay, project to project, how do you know where to start? What genre?
00:37:29
Speaker 1: For Deli Boys, for example.
00:37:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:37:31
Speaker 1: For Lucky. I, the documentary i've documented very powerful women and very like i started in the uh women who were drug lords like queen pins right oh i didn't find anyone there then i went to women who had been presidents and prime ministers the indira gandhis and the margaret thatchers and i can't find anyone there.
00:37:54
Speaker 2: Because they're very they're probably more internal right mm-hmm mm-hmm very very.
00:38:03
Speaker 3: And no facial expressions.
00:38:05
Speaker 4: Right.
00:38:05
Speaker 2: You're like, that's not for me moving on.
00:38:07
Speaker 1: Yes, that's not for me.
00:38:09
Speaker 7: And I remembered, and I don't remember what the scene is.
00:38:16
Speaker 1: I remember on a plane watching a one housewives thing and saying, this is so not for me. I watched one episode years when it first came out. And I remember clocking something in that. So going to Housewives and turning it on and looking at it, being like, oh, there it is. There she is. There they are. And so I went through all the Housewives and Orange County was the one that was the most for me for season one. And then season two, I went back to Orange County and it didn't feel right. And I went to New Jersey.
00:38:53
Speaker 2: Amazing.
00:38:54
Speaker 7: Yes.
00:38:54
Speaker 1: But I will watch scenes again. The night before I shoot, I'll watch scenes. I'll record scenes. I'll watch it on my, on my phone.
00:39:03
Speaker 2: I love it.
00:39:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:39:05
Speaker 2: I love it. That's so fun.
00:39:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's so fun.
00:39:10
Speaker 2: And you're right. What a great way to, to get out of your head. Cause being an actor, man, you can really, you can start to make yourself feel a little crazy when you're like, but what is it? And is that right? Or would that be right? Or should I do this or should I? And, and, you know, one of one of the best parts of our jobs and one of the best things you can do in this job is be able to do it any way anybody wants, but also which way do you pick? And so I love that. I love that you almost like, It's like you're absorbing the spirit by osmosis or something. That's right.
00:39:47
Speaker 1: Watching very carefully, yeah.
00:39:49
Speaker 2: It's so fun.
00:39:50
Speaker 1: Also, I don't know how you approach acting, but I want it to be as lifelike and holistic as possible. I see that in your work, but I didn't know if that was your approach. I ended up training with a place called the Barrow Group. And the thing with the Barrow Group is... he doesn't remember saying this, but apparently the, the head of bear group is when you see a play, you shouldn't think, God, that actor plays a really good plumber. You think like, how do they get a plumber to act?
00:40:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:40:27
Speaker 1: So like that kind of specificity, um, you can only, you can only do it by like, for me, I, by watching documentaries.
00:40:38
Speaker 2: I love that.
00:40:39
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:40:39
Speaker 2: For me, it, It's funny. I'm so free on a set. And one of the things I hate more than anything is making like a tape or auditioning. Cause I'm like, but this isn't real. I'm not looking at another actor. I'm not having an experience with someone. I don't have all my, I don't have my bag and my keys and my props and my stuff and the coffee maker. And like all this stuff that I like to make it feel real isn't there. And I'm just like, this is how we're going to figure out how it's going to feel real. Without any of the real stuff?
00:41:13
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big self-tape fan.
00:41:17
Speaker 2: That's my new sort of project for myself is figuring out how to like that.
00:41:22
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:41:23
Speaker 2: You do.
00:41:24
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:41:24
Speaker 2: I'll have to pick your brain about how you enjoy it.
00:41:27
Speaker 1: I love it.
00:41:29
Speaker 2: Because I currently am like, this is weird. Put me on set and I can do anything you want. Why am I standing here being like, hi, I'm based between, like, shut up. Kills me.
00:41:41
Speaker 1: I'm six years in LA.
00:41:42
Speaker 2: I'm five, six.
00:41:43
Speaker 5: And then your husband, my husband reads with me and he's so bad.
00:41:48
Speaker 2: I love that. I love that.
00:41:52
Speaker 1: I get so into it.
00:41:55
Speaker 2: I like, I also am loving just in general hearing your joy about all of this stuff.
00:42:01
Speaker 1: Oh.
00:42:02
Speaker 2: You know, figuring out how to play these people, how to embody certain kinds of characters, how to acknowledge that women are very complicated and also not. And how, you know, really what we strive for or what I guess we desire is to be as complex as anyone else. I loved that you were talking about the new show, Lanterns, for all our friends at home. It just premiered on HBO Max. Get it together. Don't miss it. And of all the things that are so cool about being part of, you know, a DC Comics themed series.
00:42:38
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:42:39
Speaker 2: At Comic-Con, when they asked you what made you most proud, you.
00:42:44
Speaker 1: Gave an answer. No, no, no, no, no. Okay.
00:42:47
Speaker 4: No. Okay.
00:42:48
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:42:48
Speaker 5: What I meant was, what I meant was, you know, like any makeout scene or sex scene is terrifying.
00:42:59
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:43:00
Speaker 1: It's just terrifying.
00:43:02
Speaker 2: I mean, it's so weird.
00:43:04
Speaker 1: It's just weird. And it's, you know, uncomfortable. And thank God we had a good intimacy coordinator. And I was really proud I did it. I was really proud. I was like confident enough to say, to fake the confidence enough to say, okay, let's go.
00:43:21
Speaker 4: Wow.
00:43:22
Speaker 1: So that was really it.
00:43:23
Speaker 2: And in a truck, no less, right?
00:43:27
Speaker 1: In a truck, in a hotel room.
00:43:31
Speaker 2: You know, multiple locations. But I don't know, there's something about like, something about the iconic, you know, sex in car that kills me. And you guys did, you know, you did everything beautifully.
00:43:47
Speaker 1: Sex in car. I know. I think that was one of the first few days with Erin, I think. Yeah. That was the other thing that put the sex scene right up front. That's happened on every one of my shows. Yeah. Yeah. first thing to shoot somehow they think like the absolute awkwardness is totally going.
00:44:05
Speaker 2: To help we'll be back in just a minute but here's a word from our sponsors you know what's so interesting to me I recently saw an interview where Robert Pattinson was talking about this about a film that he made with Jennifer Lawrence and that they did the same thing to them and you know these are kind of wild scenes and reflecting on it he said thank god because at least it's weird and you go we barely know each other he said looking back I'm so glad because it's weird no matter what but at least we got it out of the way in the beginning and then nothing could have been weirder and he talked essentially about how it gave them so much freedom with each other because the worst was already behind them for the rest of the movie.
00:44:55
Speaker 7: That's a really good way of putting it I also am also clocking that I remember doing a makeout scene with an actor towards the end, but I hated him.
00:45:06
Speaker 2: And that's part of what he said. He said, imagine if we'd hated each other, how terrible it would have been by the end. And it really, it sort of reframed the whole thing for me and made me go, oh yeah, maybe the goal should always be just to get it out of the way first.
00:45:20
Speaker 4: Maybe.
00:45:21
Speaker 2: Because either it's the world's most intense icebreaker, or at least you don't hate each other yet.
00:45:28
Speaker 1: I just remember like that whole week, you know, I was like, don't bloat, don't bloat, don't eat anything that would bloat. And I was telling Aaron, like, I don't want to bloat. And he's like, what's bloating?
00:45:38
Speaker 2: Oh, to be a man.
00:45:40
Speaker 1: I was like, bloating. It's like when I eat something, I'll like look six months pregnant. He was like, No, I've never floated.
00:45:48
Speaker 2: Incredible.
00:45:49
Speaker 1: Incredible.
00:45:51
Speaker 2: Incredible. I mean, also he looks like he was made in a computer. Like that's a sim of a man.
00:45:56
Speaker 3: That's true.
00:45:57
Speaker 1: That's true. He had his weights on set and he'd like pick up like 80 pounds. I'd be like, Oh God, where's the, where's, where's some help for my little tiny cup of water?
00:46:10
Speaker 6: Um, yeah.
00:46:10
Speaker 2: Oh my God.
00:46:12
Speaker 1: Very differently. Let's put it that way.
00:46:15
Speaker 2: It's incredible. What's it like to do a DC show?
00:46:22
Speaker 1: I can only tell you that I know this is different. And it's different because I feel such a connection to it. Yeah. With Chandra, I am disconnected from since I was a teenager, right? So this is not, uh, you know, I, I, I always say, and this is, uh, it's, it's for me, it's revolutionizing the genre itself because the genre is good versus evil. And what happens if.
00:46:59
Speaker 3: Every character is good and evil.
00:47:02
Speaker 1: Yes. Including the people who are really supposed to be truly, truly good. Yeah. And so the complexity of every character, you know, between the two lanterns, one wants the ring, one doesn't want to give it up, one is being replaced, one needs to fight for it. The power dynamics and how ugly they become in order to want this thing. This thing. How far away from themselves they have to go in order to get what they want.
00:47:38
Speaker 2: I mean, everything... is it seems to be going swimmingly I love that for you every time I see a picture of you I'm like you look so hot you look so happy I'm just like yes girl like you what feels like your work in progress no.
00:47:53
Speaker 1: Idea I love that yeah really no idea I I always dream smaller than what's out there for me so.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: I've learned to Just wait.
00:48:07
Speaker 1: You know, unfortunately, I don't have, unlike you, I have no part in creating my future. Like, I don't write.
00:48:15
Speaker 3: So I kind of have to wait.
00:48:17
Speaker 1: But I am very, very grateful to a lot of people who see, you know, my trajectory in a different way than I do.
00:48:29
Speaker 2: That's so cool.
00:48:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. I came into this so late, you know. I think, how old were you when you used to go to college?
00:48:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was 21. But it's interesting, you know, I took a little time.
00:48:41
Speaker 1: Uh-huh.
00:48:42
Speaker 2: I needed to take a pause and fall in love with it again. And I feel like the trajectory is like everything's turning over again in a great way. But it's interesting you say that. I feel the same way in terms of like, I don't, you know, I don't write television. At least I haven't.
00:49:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:49:07
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm always in a waiting pattern too. And it's a strange thing, I think, when you're a really intelligent woman and you're used to making shit happen and you go like, what do you mean I have to wait?
00:49:20
Speaker 1: I'm enjoying the wait you are.
00:49:24
Speaker 2: I love that just.
00:49:25
Speaker 1: Recently I'm like wow the waiting I'm enjoying I'm enjoying it yeah that's my work in progress no I feel like it is you get You know, last year I did or so last basically it was Deli Boys, a show called Nocturne that's coming out very soon and Lantern. And when you're physically exhausted, then you don't you don't quite like passion and exhaustion are very closely linked.
00:50:01
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:02
Speaker 1: And so for a time there, I was like, God, is this is this what I want to do? and you know I still do I still love it but it's literally because you're so deeply exhausted yeah and yeah every set has like personalities every set has this thing that invariably will go down you know so much energy goes into dealing with that thing whatever that thing is on whatever set that you I feel like the waiting helps me remember I have barely scratched the surface.
00:50:35
Speaker 3: Oh, I hope I barely scratched the surface.
00:50:37
Speaker 1: But it, you know, it's, I think it's in the waiting.
00:50:41
Speaker 3: That it's helpful for me.
00:50:44
Speaker 2: That's great. It's a beautiful share, but it's really good advice in there too, because I think, you know, the world we live in will, it'll tell us to work until there's nothing left.
00:50:57
Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm with you on that.
00:50:59
Speaker 2: Look at that. Congratulations on the show and on all of it. I hope I get to see you soon when I'm back out that way.
00:51:06
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:51:07
Speaker 2: We'll coordinate. We'll make a plan.
00:51:10
Speaker 3: Thank you for your time, Sophia.
00:51:12
Speaker 1: You're wonderful as always. I'll see you soon.
00:51:14
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:51:15
Speaker 1: Bye. Bye.
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone.
00:00:00
Speaker 2: It's Sophia. Welcome to Work in Progress. Welcome back to Work in Progress this week, friends. We are joined by a woman who I have just adored and for so long, not only for the work she does in the world and how she carries herself and her unbelievable sense of fashion and just honestly how frickin' cool she is, but because we met doing some really amazing activism together for women and girls. And ever since, I've just been so blown away by her brain and her commitment. And I'm so thrilled she's here today. We are joined by the iconic Purna Jagannathan. She is a person whose story inspires me so much. Some people's reinventions or adventures start with a leap. Purnas began with a decision to stop. She chose to stop postponing the life she wanted that perhaps she'd always wanted since she was a little girl. A decade ago, she left a very successful career in advertising to pursue acting full time. And she has quickly become known for characters that are funny and fierce and unstoppable. And now with major new roles in both HBO's Lanterns and Apple TV's Nocturne, she is leveling up into another even more ambitious chapter. Aside from the incredible work she's doing on screen, something that I love about Porna is that she's the kind of woman who refuses to stay silent or make herself smaller. She is insatiably curious and asks the best questions. And I think all of that spirit comes together in a way that shapes both her work and her advocacy so beautifully. We first met when we co-hosted a screening of an Oscar-winning documentary called Period, End of Sentence. Check it out if you haven't seen it. And I remember sitting in the theater that night just being so amazed by her energy and her thoughtfulness She's really a special person to behold, whether you get to do that off screen or on. So if you've ever wondered what becomes possible when we break out of the limits placed on us and we build a life that feels truly our own, Porn is living proof. Let's dive in. Hi.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: Hello.
00:02:59
Speaker 2: I'm so happy to see you.
00:03:00
Speaker 1: So happy to see you.
00:03:04
Speaker 2: How are you?
00:03:05
Speaker 1: I'm so good.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: Oh, well, I love the show. I'm so excited. I can't wait to like jump into all the things. I mean, even from the preview, I was like, that's my kind of superhero show. Like what the, where did this come from?
00:03:20
Speaker 3: It's a, it's a thriller.
00:03:21
Speaker 1: It's a whodunit. And as I was going through it, like I, Did like, I'm really good at seeing things coming.
00:03:30
Speaker 3: I'm so good at it. Didn't see anything coming.
00:03:35
Speaker 2: I love that. That's so fun. Especially, I mean, yeah, to be surprised when you read so many scripts, when you're, when you're so used to it, that's a great feeling.
00:03:45
Speaker 1: It is. It was shocking. I mean, I love it. Episode is shocking. Yeah.
00:03:53
Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't give it away.
00:03:55
Speaker 1: Don't give it away.
00:03:55
Speaker 2: I'm going to ask you. Because I want to go back before we dive into the present. I love to really run it back with people, especially because you're normally here to talk about something that's in the zeitgeist or reflect on something happening in your career. And I like to really rewind and think about if you got to interact with your younger self, you know, poor Nat, eight or nine years old, especially because you came into your present career from a whole different one.
00:04:33
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:04:34
Speaker 2: You know, I think about life phases.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:04:36
Speaker 2: Would that little girl be so amazed by where your life is right now and what it looks like?
00:04:42
Speaker 1: I think that little girl, I definitely have the life that that little girl would have wanted. I think things just changed drastically. And I got further and further away from that. You know, that little girl definitely had a really great idea of like how, I always will say this, like the whole family could watch the same movie and I am the only one watching it completely differently from everyone else. I still remember I was very young. I was probably like three or four. My, we live in an apartment building in New Delhi and one person on the top floor had a TV. So we, the whole family, like all the families would go and, you know, gather around when there was a movie being screened, you know, once, once every month or something. And I still remember at four, my mother, I remember her being really upset that she had to leave the film because I was so upset watching. And, like, I don't remember what was going on, but I could feel, like, I could feel the emotions so much more intensely than those around me in some strange way. And she'd remember every month.
00:06:04
Speaker 3: Like, halfway through, she'd have to pick me up.
00:06:06
Speaker 1: They'd tell her to leave because the kid was crying, and they'd pick me up and take me downstairs.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: And, you know, there was, like, a frustration around it.
00:06:13
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:06:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, but very... You know, very, very open and creative. I went to a school when I was eight. I was in Pakistan. So we went to a school where so many of my friends from that school ended up being these beautiful artists. And, you know, I think things really like shifted after that. They become a little more rigid, a little more less creative. And I really had to find my way back to the eight year old.
00:06:45
Speaker 5: Wow.
00:06:46
Speaker 2: You know, you mentioned being in Pakistan then, and I know you moved around a lot because your dad was a diplomat. I think about the experience of bouncing around so much as a kid as being hard and maybe also fascinating. But when you say you got away from creativity, did his work, you know, diplomatic work is so serious and, you know... important um and I think sometimes maybe seen oppositionally to art was it like pressure from that or or just sort of the way the the winds carried you that maybe brought you away from your creativity for a.
00:07:26
Speaker 1: Bit that's a really good question um I think I think after that phase I moved to Argentina after Argentina I feel like I Kept moving. But I will tell you the critical period in Argentina where I was like the only person of color, which has happened before. I grew up in Ireland and I didn't feel that way in Ireland. But in Argentina, I really, really felt like the person of color, the only person of color.
00:07:56
Speaker 4: Wow.
00:07:57
Speaker 1: They had never back then.
00:08:01
Speaker 3: I know the country's change.
00:08:02
Speaker 1: It was it was the racism was very intense. Their indigenous population was completely eradicated. Um, and so I, you know.
00:08:12
Speaker 3: I was in, in a school.
00:08:16
Speaker 1: System and surrounded by people, even though, you know, I didn't know what racism was, um, till I was in Argentina. Like I didn't, I never experienced it. And so it was a, it was not only that, but you are, so there's tons of racism and tons.
00:08:36
Speaker 6: Of isolation, but It was like, sure, there was school plays or school choir or school, whatever. I just couldn't participate or I wasn't not allowed to.
00:08:47
Speaker 3: I was never cast.
00:08:48
Speaker 1: You know, if I did audition for something, I was just I wasn't part of the machine at all. And really interesting, like a really interesting, if I think about it, I think from that age onwards, like the beauty standards was so different from who.
00:09:06
Speaker 3: I was up until then.
00:09:08
Speaker 1: Up until way into my adulthood, even when I lived in India, you know, the beauty standards in India are so vastly different from what I look like. And so really kind of disconnecting from art and any sort of beauty for a very, very long time. Yeah, I always joke like I just got a full length mirror in my house a year ago. And it's because I just I didn't I had a little bathroom mirror growing up. I didn't know what, like I knew what my face looked like and I'd get on a stool and look at my shirt, but I can't style shoes or handbags or anything. I had no idea what's going on.
00:09:46
Speaker 2: That is so crazy to me because I think you're one of the most stylish women I know.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: Thank you. I didn't, I grew up with a very erased sense of self.
00:09:56
Speaker 2: Wow. That's fascinating that not feeling as a young woman that you fit a beauty standard, feeling othered could make you reject beauty almost as a concept, not just even as a personal identifying trait, but as a concept.
00:10:16
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think so. I think I had to find my way back to it. Wow. We didn't grow up with....
00:10:25
Speaker 2: We just.
00:10:25
Speaker 1: We grew up in a different time. We grew up when... You know, I think about India, which had one channel. You know? It was so expensive to go to the movies.
00:10:40
Speaker 3: I didn't... Did I see a play?
00:10:42
Speaker 1: I must have seen a play, like a school play, but I didn't see a play till I was.
00:10:47
Speaker 3: well into my 20s.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: So really like interacting, I remember being in, moving to New York and that's when I started interacting with.
00:11:00
Speaker 3: This particular art form, right? In an actual meaningful way.
00:11:05
Speaker 2: That's so cool. And you also majored in journalism.
00:11:10
Speaker 1: You also, is that right? Yes. Oh, yes.
00:11:13
Speaker 4: Yes.
00:11:14
Speaker 2: I mean, I wound up leaving college a year early for my first job. And I remember thinking, oh, we're going to, like, go do a show where they made Dawson's Creek. Like, we'll probably do two or three seasons. Like, no show's ever going to beat the creek. And then we did nine seasons. And I was like, oh, I guess I'm not going back to college like I thought I would when it was over.
00:11:37
Speaker 1: What drew you into journalism? So.
00:11:40
Speaker 2: I went for a BFA. And there was something, at least for me at that time, where going into such a hardcore theater program that only talked about theater, did theater, ate and breathed. It made me... I actually kind of regret, just for me, to be clear, people out there, study what you want. But I kind of regret going at all. Because I felt.
00:12:08
Speaker 2: As I was coming into myself as an actor, so like free and kind of wild and a little feral. And it made me so self-conscious. I still second guess my choices. And after the first year in it, I was like, I'm going to lose my mind. I can't do this. But I know I'm a storyteller and I know I love to understand stories. people's experiences and how they relate to what's going on in the world and how to talk about them honestly and also with kindness. And I thought, well, journalism, I can go write about it. Yeah. And that was my shift. And that was also when I started really like booking work.
00:12:53
Speaker 1: What? Yeah.
00:12:55
Speaker 2: So I'm just obsessed about hearing about it for you. I'm like, tell me why you did it. What were you up to? Where did you go?
00:13:00
Speaker 1: I mean, I do think, you know, someone asked me, if I wasn't an actor, what else would I do? I think I would have found my way to journalism. Like me, Ronan Farrow.
00:13:14
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:13:14
Speaker 1: Like I have never in my life been intimidated meeting anyone. And I remember clocking that my legs shaked when I met Ronan Farrow.
00:13:26
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:13:26
Speaker 1: Like, I just think, I think that type of journalism, that acute journalism, knows and that dogged need for the truth and exploration of the truth wow like.
00:13:44
Speaker 4: Wow incredible it's incredible and when i read stuff that great journalists do and great pieces i'm like it's so evocative it's so such.
00:13:58
Speaker 1: A and it's similar it's similar to what we do right we have to figure stuff out and why, and look for the, like, why did that person meet that person at that particular time? And look for like the divinity in that timing. I don't know. I, I, I feel like I would approach, oh, I do approach acting the same thing I might have if I was a journalist. And even when I was in advertising, I was doing something called consumer research, which is still like what makes, what makes the consumer tick? where does the brand find its place in the consumer's life? And that meant looking into, you know, what the consumer does, not what they say. So that was super interesting and super great training ground, actually, unconsciously.
00:14:49
Speaker 2: And now a word from our wonderful sponsors. Yeah, how do you think about that now? Because you had a really successful advertising career.
00:15:06
Speaker 3: It was a long career.
00:15:09
Speaker 1: My job was when I was 14 in advertising, and I quit when I was.
00:15:20
Speaker 3: God, I quit 10 years ago in August.
00:15:25
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:15:26
Speaker 2: Oh, my God. Happy 10-year anniversary.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:15:29
Speaker 2: Oh, it's so major. But I guess I'm curious, yeah, looking back, what do you think it taught you? You know, how do you think that prepared you to be such a great actor?
00:15:42
Speaker 1: My advertising?
00:15:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I will say just on a practical basis, my job was to look at consumer behavior. And consumer behavior is very different from what consumers say. So those can be drastically different things, right? So you'd go, like, I remember doing stuff for method cleaners and like, you'd go look in their homes and the method bottle is on the counter, but then you open under their sink and all their cleaning products is under their sink. So the method was somehow a status symbol. It was just felt more like perfume than a cleaning product. It was very interesting. You have to really like, go into their homes and really understand where things are placed and why they place it and the exterior, the gaze of the product, you know, so to speak.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:16:43
Speaker 1: This gaze is important. So I did a lot of that. I was doing a lot of, you know, focus groups or I was doing a lot of in-home research.
00:16:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:16:54
Speaker 1: I did look through people's trash. Yeah, just investigative work.
00:17:00
Speaker 2: Does that work? Do the things that you noticed, the sort of illuminating things, does that inform how you prepare characters?
00:17:09
Speaker 1: I remember initially, or, you know, I do remember clocking. Until today, I remember particular people from my focus groups. I remember there was a woman who would come in for Nivea. And I don't know what was going on with her in her home.
00:17:25
Speaker 3: I don't know.
00:17:27
Speaker 1: I don't know what it was. But I feel like she was in a very abusive situation where she second-guessed herself on anything and everything. And I just remember at night taking my notebook out and writing all... Oh, that's the other thing I would do. I would write all the characteristics of people I met. And just.
00:17:49
Speaker 3: How she asked me questions.
00:17:50
Speaker 2: I don't, I don't know.
00:17:51
Speaker 1: It was just that I was felt like I was always compiling depending on what people I saw. Or I remember like in a focus group, I saw someone take the glasses off and to clean them.
00:18:02
Speaker 3: They, they licked.
00:18:03
Speaker 1: Both sides and that, and I was just like, and I years, like 15 years later, I used that in a show.
00:18:10
Speaker 3: Like I did.
00:18:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:18:11
Speaker 1: Like I, I clock, I remember clocking stuff. I remember being interested in and being and watching them, Not only in terms of just what they were saying about the product, but watching them.
00:18:24
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:18:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, all the little behaviors.
00:18:28
Speaker 1: All the tiny, tiny, strange, interesting behaviors, yeah.
00:18:32
Speaker 2: What do you think it was that made you finally say, I'm going to hang up my advertising hat and just go full on into acting? I mean, how does one do that?
00:18:45
Speaker 3: Slowly.
00:18:45
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:18:46
Speaker 1: Yeah. There were two really big junctions. One was when I turned 30 and I don't know how old you are, but 30 is a very like astrologically very seminal. It's like if you haven't met your destiny by 30, you're, you're, you're given another chance to meet it. Wow. And then the cycle does come again, but it doesn't come like it does at 30. Yeah. And so, you know, I was naive. I'm 53 now. And I thought 30 was very like it's now or never. It's like, you know, I got it.
00:19:22
Speaker 3: It's like it's the end if I.
00:19:24
Speaker 1: Don't do it. It's you know, it's it felt like the last try.
00:19:28
Speaker 4: Wow.
00:19:28
Speaker 1: So at 30, I knew the only way I was going to do it is if I made a break from advertising. And I didn't know how to act. So I enrolled in a master's program and I auditioned and I got into one school and I. it was a three-year program, but I only lasted a year. Because I was older when I got there, I had an idea of how I learned. Does that make sense?
00:20:04
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:05
Speaker 1: In an acting... You know, I had like done a couple of theater classes when I was in college. And when I was working in advertising, I would take weekend acting classes. Most of the people were there because they had, you know, like fear of public speaking. They were like from corporate jobs. Great people.
00:20:24
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:20:25
Speaker 1: But the one year of acting in school made me, helped me make enough of a break.
00:20:32
Speaker 3: To, you know, to start.
00:20:34
Speaker 1: And then that's when I launched my own little tiny brand consulting firm, which I, you know, I went back into full-time advertising, but I really carried that kind of my little firm until 2016. That's what the 10-year thing was. Wow. Yeah.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: That's so cool.
00:20:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was cool.
00:20:52
Speaker 2: I think something I've always really appreciated about you is you're another person who really loves acting and activism. You do really powerful things with your voice. And I mean, I even think about, you know, you had your firm until 2016, but you produced your award-winning play in 2012. Yeah. Nearby, like, the choice to kind of come out into that space and, and talk about sexual violence and, you know, the specific kind of cultural experience of this young woman in India.
00:21:38
Speaker 1: Nirbhaya was in context. It was a context to a time in India, which we haven't had since, where women and men said enough is enough. You know, there was a young girl, Jyoti Singh Pandey was 23, was brutally gang raped on her way home and she didn't make it. She, you know, she, she succumbed to her injuries because she was, it was, it was so brutal. And usually there's something or the other that people will find, right?
00:22:14
Speaker 3: It was late at night.
00:22:17
Speaker 2: Had she been drinking? Why was she there?
00:22:19
Speaker 1: She didn't know like what was going on, but. This was just a girl who was a medical student who went to see Life of Pi and got onto a bus to go home.
00:22:31
Speaker 3: And it was a trap, you know.
00:22:33
Speaker 1: And, you know, the brutality of it also is the closest thing I can think of is the Black Lives Matter movement around George Floyd. And there's something about the brutality of it and the fact that you can viscerally feel it.
00:22:51
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:22:52
Speaker 1: That activates something and you know it obviously activated something in me but it it it is contextual it is it is like saying a piece of art came from the black lives movement black lives matter but the truth is it influenced every facet of society right every like Hollywood changed for a quick minute from the black lives movement we're totally back to be but you know so crazy So nearby, for me, the insight, I was sexually assaulted at nine. And me, the insight was, you know, how my silence had contributed somehow to.
00:23:36
Speaker 3: The fabric of violence.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: My silence was somehow responsible for the violence.
00:23:42
Speaker 3: To have continued.
00:23:44
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, the really... powerful thing about movements like this is, of course, I had nothing to do with what happened to her on that day. But if you can see yourself as part of.
00:23:57
Speaker 3: The problem, then you can see yourself as part of the solution.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: And so the thing was, if I can break my silence, can that break the silence, the cycle of.
00:24:09
Speaker 2: Violence, right?
00:24:09
Speaker 1: It's like, does the equation work? you know, will the, if I change this equation, will this equation shift? Yeah. So, um, I, I knew I wanted to tell my story because, you know, India has like, like South Africa, like any other.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: Country, including the States have horrific, horrific.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Uh, sexual violence epidemic against girls and boys. I think it's one in two girls and boys, but, um, It's an epidemic and everyone knows about it. No one spoke about it. And no one used to rape, for example, in the house and stuff like that. So I invited a playwright down from South Africa called Yael Farber. And I had seen Yael's play in New York. And it was a testimonial play. So, you know, the Vajana Monologues are a testimonial play, but they're done by actors. Ama Juba, the play I saw at the Culture Project in New York, was by... the.
00:25:16
Speaker 3: Actors, it's the actor's life.
00:25:18
Speaker 1: So the actors are talking about their own lives and these lives, you know, as was Nirbhaya. Nirbhaya had, you know, a bigger cast, cast of seven, I believe, but, and we all told our own stories, but a lot of us didn't think our stories were big enough to tell. As was the case with Amit Juba, which is, I'm going to tell the story of apartheid in South, the current story of apartheid in South Africa. A lot of the people just came to the workshop and said, I don't, I don't think I've been discriminating. It's like, I haven't had a big thing happen, you know? Yeah. And it's not the big thing.
00:25:58
Speaker 2: It's not the big thing.
00:25:59
Speaker 1: Everyday, small. Yeah. Or it's how you are told to view what is. It's how you are programmed to view what, The extraordinary thing that happened to you as ordinary. Yes. Are told to view it as ordinary. Therefore, no one else has to deal with it.
00:26:18
Speaker 2: Well, and the idea, you know, to your point, this idea that for so long, no one wanted to talk about any of it.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:26:32
Speaker 2: And that the reaction when you share with anyone that, of minimization or we don't talk about that or it wasn't that bad you know one of the in my own experience as a woman being told something that happened to me wasn't that bad I know about it was so much worse than yeah that was far worse than the worst thing that ever happened to me and and it's a strange thing I think because when you think about her story when you think about you know, the launch of Me Too here in the States. When you think about the reaction to George Floyd, you can't watch a man get strangled to death for nine minutes for no reason and have any reaction other than abject horror, you know, being crushed by all of those people. And yet it's fascinating to me because it almost feels like we finally made some space for everyone to tell their story. And then it's like the world went, oh, there's too many stories. Now we have to deny them all again. It's too painful to admit that we do this to each other, that humans make excuses everywhere. And so now we're just going to pretend we don't do any of it in the first place. And the swing back... especially for us. You know, you mentioned earlier, you said you didn't know how old I am. I've just turned 44. And it's such a weird thing because I remember when we didn't talk about it. And then I remember when we started talking about it. And now I see that everyone's in denial of talking about it. And I can't imagine being a 22-year-old girl right now.
00:28:22
Speaker 3: I'm so with you on that.
00:28:24
Speaker 1: I'm so with you. When I see Louis C.K. on tour online, Sure, what else is he supposed to do? But there is a lack of accountability. I think that's what I always struggled with. Yeah. There's a lack of placing blame with perpetrators, keeping with perpetrators or perpetrators accepting blame and working to shift. Of course, you I have a great deal of compassion and forgiveness.
00:28:52
Speaker 4: I do.
00:28:53
Speaker 2: I have it if you take accountability.
00:28:55
Speaker 3: Thank you.
00:28:56
Speaker 1: That's exactly it. I'll wait till you take accountability. I'll wait till you understand how you're programming because we have to do it all the time. Our programming has let us down and led us astray and how we invent ourselves. I'm all about that. But You know, this time in India, this play in India was, you know, it's a testimonial play. It's us talking about our own stories of sexual assault, rape, gender-based violence. And we toured it for three years around the world. And what we saw back then was the Me Too movement, you know, where every country on every stage, we'd ask people to raise their hands if they've been affected by sexual violence in India. each person raised their hands. And, you know, a lot of people in the audiences, a lot, a lot, I would say, probably 70% broke their silence for the first time. So it was a very like, the play really started after it ended. The work of play started after the curtain went down. And really, it was my first thing around being activism. I think because I hadn't told my story, I couldn't be activated. Does that make sense? And since then have found points, things that happen much more personal.
00:30:23
Speaker 3: Ever since I guess I got activated.
00:30:26
Speaker 1: Yeah. see myself in a lot of different stories. Yeah.
00:30:29
Speaker 2: It's like something connects, then that connection never comes apart.
00:30:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:30:34
Speaker 2: It's so neat actually to, to know that that was the first moment because we met co-hosting the period end of sentence, the documentary about breaking the stigma around menstruation and access for girls around the world and so it it's like so it's so cool to hear where it started for you because where my connection with you started was in that same kind of.
00:30:59
Speaker 1: Yeah within a couple of years as well that's.
00:31:02
Speaker 2: Right yeah I love that and now for our sponsors in a completely you know flip the script away you addressed divides and traditions with like lightness and incredible humor in the insanely popular Never Have I Ever. You, I mean, you just make, you make me laugh so hard. Even when, you know, the subject matter is illuminating about the way the world works. What did you want people to understand about immigrant families? What did you want to show them that maybe, you know, you knew they were missing?
00:31:45
Speaker 1: You know, as I look at my, uh, a couple of years out of Never Have I Ever, a couple of years in from doing, um, both Deli Boys and this character, Zoe on Lanterns, I just feel like women, especially immigrant women, have so many falsehoods around them.
00:32:09
Speaker 4: Hmm.
00:32:11
Speaker 1: A lot um it's our our focus for women of a certain age is like it's the kids telling their stories and the mom and the dad are somehow satellite stories right yeah and yet this is like i'm you know in my i will tell you before this is the best.
00:32:33
Speaker 6: Decade enjoy every second of it i know It will pass, which I didn't know in my 20s or 30s.
00:32:44
Speaker 1: But our worlds have expanded so much. We have so much more love, so much more responsibility, so much more despair, so much more unfulfilled, so much, so much. And that is that suddenly has an expiration date on TV and films. You know, so it was and I'm an immigrant mom. You know, I came here for college and my mother is an immigrant mom. My sister and my aunts and no one parents the way that we saw immigrant mom's parent. You know, that like that one tone. It's in India. We call it sitting on someone's head where the mother is just sitting on the kid's head and just like screaming at them, like oppressing them.
00:33:26
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:33:27
Speaker 1: Sure. My mom did that. But she also did a million other things, you know.
00:33:32
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:33:33
Speaker 1: We married at 65 off of someone that she met on the internet, you know. She has traveled the world and learned every language there is to learn. She has made friends in the most hostile of territories. She parented us through like insane times. I mean, and we all did that. We all do that. And she tried to, you know, she was a diplomat's wife, so you can't really have a career. But she tried always to make money and have careers everywhere she went. She tried to learn driving. She, you know, and I was scared of becoming a parent because I never, the issue was I never saw my, I never saw a parent like me on TV, right? I have a foul mouth.
00:34:26
Speaker 3: I am not strict.
00:34:28
Speaker 1: I have no boundaries. I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not a child by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm not, I'm not the mom. I'm not a TV mom. I'm not the mom who has like, I can't cook, you know, like I will have to read the instructions on the two minute noodle packet. Every time I make it, it is amazing. unbelievable how unequipped and yet i love being a mom it's my life's purpose you know so that was the other thing i wanted to see a version of an immigrant mom yeah that is closer to um who i am and who we are and in these other characters be it daddy boys and and zoe now neither of them are moms right And it's a very, both of them are unapologetically after power. Yeah.
00:35:34
Speaker 2: I love that. I love seeing that from a woman on screen.
00:35:38
Speaker 1: And untethered.
00:35:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's like society treats ambition and women like it's a dirty word, and it is not. And I read... I read that for Deli Boys you drew inspo from The Real Housewives.
00:35:54
Speaker 7: Oh.
00:35:54
Speaker 2: Please tell me more. I'm obsessed.
00:35:57
Speaker 1: The Real Housewives are so themselves. They're so unhinged 24-7. You know, they picked characters. They picked characters who would show themselves at every moment. And I really wanted Lucky to be a very physical character. This is a huge, Deli Boys was a huge physical comedy and I wanted to have it grounded in reality. And I will do that for all my projects. I'll look at documentaries to try and find my people and study and watch and just wait and watch. I'll do it like if I'm shooting one day the night before, I'll just watch documentaries just to both free myself and like there's something, maybe it's from like one year in acting school where it's like very internal, like you have to be very internal.
00:36:51
Speaker 3: What they teach you about TV, like very internal.
00:36:53
Speaker 1: And you go to housewives, it's all out there. It's all external, right? So really the permission to be bigger and more unhinged and more wanting to be, be in control and power. Like that's what the housewives gave me. It's fascinating.
00:37:14
Speaker 2: I love that. Well, okay. This, this, this sort of like inside baseball with actors is one of my favorite things. Because when you say for your projects, you watch documentaries, like, okay, project to project, how do you know where to start? What genre?
00:37:29
Speaker 1: For Deli Boys, for example.
00:37:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:37:31
Speaker 1: For Lucky. I, the documentary i've documented very powerful women and very like i started in the uh women who were drug lords like queen pins right oh i didn't find anyone there then i went to women who had been presidents and prime ministers the indira gandhis and the margaret thatchers and i can't find anyone there.
00:37:54
Speaker 2: Because they're very they're probably more internal right mm-hmm mm-hmm very very.
00:38:03
Speaker 3: And no facial expressions.
00:38:05
Speaker 4: Right.
00:38:05
Speaker 2: You're like, that's not for me moving on.
00:38:07
Speaker 1: Yes, that's not for me.
00:38:09
Speaker 7: And I remembered, and I don't remember what the scene is.
00:38:16
Speaker 1: I remember on a plane watching a one housewives thing and saying, this is so not for me. I watched one episode years when it first came out. And I remember clocking something in that. So going to Housewives and turning it on and looking at it, being like, oh, there it is. There she is. There they are. And so I went through all the Housewives and Orange County was the one that was the most for me for season one. And then season two, I went back to Orange County and it didn't feel right. And I went to New Jersey.
00:38:53
Speaker 2: Amazing.
00:38:54
Speaker 7: Yes.
00:38:54
Speaker 1: But I will watch scenes again. The night before I shoot, I'll watch scenes. I'll record scenes. I'll watch it on my, on my phone.
00:39:03
Speaker 2: I love it.
00:39:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:39:05
Speaker 2: I love it. That's so fun.
00:39:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's so fun.
00:39:10
Speaker 2: And you're right. What a great way to, to get out of your head. Cause being an actor, man, you can really, you can start to make yourself feel a little crazy when you're like, but what is it? And is that right? Or would that be right? Or should I do this or should I? And, and, you know, one of one of the best parts of our jobs and one of the best things you can do in this job is be able to do it any way anybody wants, but also which way do you pick? And so I love that. I love that you almost like, It's like you're absorbing the spirit by osmosis or something. That's right.
00:39:47
Speaker 1: Watching very carefully, yeah.
00:39:49
Speaker 2: It's so fun.
00:39:50
Speaker 1: Also, I don't know how you approach acting, but I want it to be as lifelike and holistic as possible. I see that in your work, but I didn't know if that was your approach. I ended up training with a place called the Barrow Group. And the thing with the Barrow Group is... he doesn't remember saying this, but apparently the, the head of bear group is when you see a play, you shouldn't think, God, that actor plays a really good plumber. You think like, how do they get a plumber to act?
00:40:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:40:27
Speaker 1: So like that kind of specificity, um, you can only, you can only do it by like, for me, I, by watching documentaries.
00:40:38
Speaker 2: I love that.
00:40:39
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:40:39
Speaker 2: For me, it, It's funny. I'm so free on a set. And one of the things I hate more than anything is making like a tape or auditioning. Cause I'm like, but this isn't real. I'm not looking at another actor. I'm not having an experience with someone. I don't have all my, I don't have my bag and my keys and my props and my stuff and the coffee maker. And like all this stuff that I like to make it feel real isn't there. And I'm just like, this is how we're going to figure out how it's going to feel real. Without any of the real stuff?
00:41:13
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big self-tape fan.
00:41:17
Speaker 2: That's my new sort of project for myself is figuring out how to like that.
00:41:22
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:41:23
Speaker 2: You do.
00:41:24
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:41:24
Speaker 2: I'll have to pick your brain about how you enjoy it.
00:41:27
Speaker 1: I love it.
00:41:29
Speaker 2: Because I currently am like, this is weird. Put me on set and I can do anything you want. Why am I standing here being like, hi, I'm based between, like, shut up. Kills me.
00:41:41
Speaker 1: I'm six years in LA.
00:41:42
Speaker 2: I'm five, six.
00:41:43
Speaker 5: And then your husband, my husband reads with me and he's so bad.
00:41:48
Speaker 2: I love that. I love that.
00:41:52
Speaker 1: I get so into it.
00:41:55
Speaker 2: I like, I also am loving just in general hearing your joy about all of this stuff.
00:42:01
Speaker 1: Oh.
00:42:02
Speaker 2: You know, figuring out how to play these people, how to embody certain kinds of characters, how to acknowledge that women are very complicated and also not. And how, you know, really what we strive for or what I guess we desire is to be as complex as anyone else. I loved that you were talking about the new show, Lanterns, for all our friends at home. It just premiered on HBO Max. Get it together. Don't miss it. And of all the things that are so cool about being part of, you know, a DC Comics themed series.
00:42:38
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:42:39
Speaker 2: At Comic-Con, when they asked you what made you most proud, you.
00:42:44
Speaker 1: Gave an answer. No, no, no, no, no. Okay.
00:42:47
Speaker 4: No. Okay.
00:42:48
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:42:48
Speaker 5: What I meant was, what I meant was, you know, like any makeout scene or sex scene is terrifying.
00:42:59
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:43:00
Speaker 1: It's just terrifying.
00:43:02
Speaker 2: I mean, it's so weird.
00:43:04
Speaker 1: It's just weird. And it's, you know, uncomfortable. And thank God we had a good intimacy coordinator. And I was really proud I did it. I was really proud. I was like confident enough to say, to fake the confidence enough to say, okay, let's go.
00:43:21
Speaker 4: Wow.
00:43:22
Speaker 1: So that was really it.
00:43:23
Speaker 2: And in a truck, no less, right?
00:43:27
Speaker 1: In a truck, in a hotel room.
00:43:31
Speaker 2: You know, multiple locations. But I don't know, there's something about like, something about the iconic, you know, sex in car that kills me. And you guys did, you know, you did everything beautifully.
00:43:47
Speaker 1: Sex in car. I know. I think that was one of the first few days with Erin, I think. Yeah. That was the other thing that put the sex scene right up front. That's happened on every one of my shows. Yeah. Yeah. first thing to shoot somehow they think like the absolute awkwardness is totally going.
00:44:05
Speaker 2: To help we'll be back in just a minute but here's a word from our sponsors you know what's so interesting to me I recently saw an interview where Robert Pattinson was talking about this about a film that he made with Jennifer Lawrence and that they did the same thing to them and you know these are kind of wild scenes and reflecting on it he said thank god because at least it's weird and you go we barely know each other he said looking back I'm so glad because it's weird no matter what but at least we got it out of the way in the beginning and then nothing could have been weirder and he talked essentially about how it gave them so much freedom with each other because the worst was already behind them for the rest of the movie.
00:44:55
Speaker 7: That's a really good way of putting it I also am also clocking that I remember doing a makeout scene with an actor towards the end, but I hated him.
00:45:06
Speaker 2: And that's part of what he said. He said, imagine if we'd hated each other, how terrible it would have been by the end. And it really, it sort of reframed the whole thing for me and made me go, oh yeah, maybe the goal should always be just to get it out of the way first.
00:45:20
Speaker 4: Maybe.
00:45:21
Speaker 2: Because either it's the world's most intense icebreaker, or at least you don't hate each other yet.
00:45:28
Speaker 1: I just remember like that whole week, you know, I was like, don't bloat, don't bloat, don't eat anything that would bloat. And I was telling Aaron, like, I don't want to bloat. And he's like, what's bloating?
00:45:38
Speaker 2: Oh, to be a man.
00:45:40
Speaker 1: I was like, bloating. It's like when I eat something, I'll like look six months pregnant. He was like, No, I've never floated.
00:45:48
Speaker 2: Incredible.
00:45:49
Speaker 1: Incredible.
00:45:51
Speaker 2: Incredible. I mean, also he looks like he was made in a computer. Like that's a sim of a man.
00:45:56
Speaker 3: That's true.
00:45:57
Speaker 1: That's true. He had his weights on set and he'd like pick up like 80 pounds. I'd be like, Oh God, where's the, where's, where's some help for my little tiny cup of water?
00:46:10
Speaker 6: Um, yeah.
00:46:10
Speaker 2: Oh my God.
00:46:12
Speaker 1: Very differently. Let's put it that way.
00:46:15
Speaker 2: It's incredible. What's it like to do a DC show?
00:46:22
Speaker 1: I can only tell you that I know this is different. And it's different because I feel such a connection to it. Yeah. With Chandra, I am disconnected from since I was a teenager, right? So this is not, uh, you know, I, I, I always say, and this is, uh, it's, it's for me, it's revolutionizing the genre itself because the genre is good versus evil. And what happens if.
00:46:59
Speaker 3: Every character is good and evil.
00:47:02
Speaker 1: Yes. Including the people who are really supposed to be truly, truly good. Yeah. And so the complexity of every character, you know, between the two lanterns, one wants the ring, one doesn't want to give it up, one is being replaced, one needs to fight for it. The power dynamics and how ugly they become in order to want this thing. This thing. How far away from themselves they have to go in order to get what they want.
00:47:38
Speaker 2: I mean, everything... is it seems to be going swimmingly I love that for you every time I see a picture of you I'm like you look so hot you look so happy I'm just like yes girl like you what feels like your work in progress no.
00:47:53
Speaker 1: Idea I love that yeah really no idea I I always dream smaller than what's out there for me so.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: I've learned to Just wait.
00:48:07
Speaker 1: You know, unfortunately, I don't have, unlike you, I have no part in creating my future. Like, I don't write.
00:48:15
Speaker 3: So I kind of have to wait.
00:48:17
Speaker 1: But I am very, very grateful to a lot of people who see, you know, my trajectory in a different way than I do.
00:48:29
Speaker 2: That's so cool.
00:48:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. I came into this so late, you know. I think, how old were you when you used to go to college?
00:48:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was 21. But it's interesting, you know, I took a little time.
00:48:41
Speaker 1: Uh-huh.
00:48:42
Speaker 2: I needed to take a pause and fall in love with it again. And I feel like the trajectory is like everything's turning over again in a great way. But it's interesting you say that. I feel the same way in terms of like, I don't, you know, I don't write television. At least I haven't.
00:49:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:49:07
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm always in a waiting pattern too. And it's a strange thing, I think, when you're a really intelligent woman and you're used to making shit happen and you go like, what do you mean I have to wait?
00:49:20
Speaker 1: I'm enjoying the wait you are.
00:49:24
Speaker 2: I love that just.
00:49:25
Speaker 1: Recently I'm like wow the waiting I'm enjoying I'm enjoying it yeah that's my work in progress no I feel like it is you get You know, last year I did or so last basically it was Deli Boys, a show called Nocturne that's coming out very soon and Lantern. And when you're physically exhausted, then you don't you don't quite like passion and exhaustion are very closely linked.
00:50:01
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:02
Speaker 1: And so for a time there, I was like, God, is this is this what I want to do? and you know I still do I still love it but it's literally because you're so deeply exhausted yeah and yeah every set has like personalities every set has this thing that invariably will go down you know so much energy goes into dealing with that thing whatever that thing is on whatever set that you I feel like the waiting helps me remember I have barely scratched the surface.
00:50:35
Speaker 3: Oh, I hope I barely scratched the surface.
00:50:37
Speaker 1: But it, you know, it's, I think it's in the waiting.
00:50:41
Speaker 3: That it's helpful for me.
00:50:44
Speaker 2: That's great. It's a beautiful share, but it's really good advice in there too, because I think, you know, the world we live in will, it'll tell us to work until there's nothing left.
00:50:57
Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm with you on that.
00:50:59
Speaker 2: Look at that. Congratulations on the show and on all of it. I hope I get to see you soon when I'm back out that way.
00:51:06
Speaker 3: Okay.
00:51:07
Speaker 2: We'll coordinate. We'll make a plan.
00:51:10
Speaker 3: Thank you for your time, Sophia.
00:51:12
Speaker 1: You're wonderful as always. I'll see you soon.
00:51:14
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:51:15
Speaker 1: Bye. Bye.
