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      Jak Knight, Known for ‘Big Mouth’ Netflix Series, Dies at 28

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      Mr. Knight, who was a stand-up comedian, died on Thursday in Los Angeles, his family said.Jak Knight, a stand-up comedian, writer and actor known for his role on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 28.His family on Saturday confirmed his death in a statement that did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Knight had recently finished filming as an actor in the movie “First Time Female Director,” written and directed by Chelsea Peretti.Starting in March, Mr. Knight starred with Chris Redd, Sam Jay and Langston Kerman in the Peacock series “Bust Down,” which he also helped to create. He was also an executive producer on the HBO talk show “Pause with Sam Jay” and was nominated this year for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the show.From 2017-21, he was a writer and producer for the hit animated sitcom “Big Mouth” and voiced the character Devon. Mr. Knight worked as a writer for the ABC comedy “Black-ish” from 2019-20. His 30-minute Netflix stand-up special aired in 2018 as part of “The Comedy Lineup” series.He was named a 2014 Comedy Central Comic to Watch, a 2015 New Face at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival and an L.A. Comic to Watch by TimeOut in 2018.He opened for various stand-up comedians, including Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher and Hannibal Buress.Details about his surviving relatives were not immediately available.As news of his death spread, tributes to Mr. Knight appeared on social media.The comedian James Adomian said on Twitter that whenever he was performing with Mr. Knight, he knew it would be a “wildly funny night.”“He was winning big, all of it well deserved, so witty and memorable every moment on stage and off,” he wrote. More

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      Using Comedy to Push for Abortion Rights

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      Lizz Winstead, the “Daily Show” co-creator, has marshaled her contacts in the standup world to help supporters turn protest into action.“Things are awesome — never better!” joked Lizz Winstead, the comedian, producer and abortion rights activist. “Sleeping well; no diarrhea. Things are awesome.”Things are decidedly not awesome, but comic misdirection might as well be oxygen for Winstead, who has banked her career on satirizing politics and media and calling out hypocrisy, as the co-creator of “The Daily Show” and a host and director on the now-defunct left-wing radio network Air America. For most of the last decade or so, though, she has been singularly, steadfastly focused on one issue, abortion. Her preferred method for delivering her message is the variety show: a little schtick, a little song, a little taboo talk.“Don’t be ashamed of having an abortion,” the comedian Joyelle Nicole Johnson said onstage at “Bro v. Wade,” a benefit show in Brooklyn that Winstead organized recently with her group Abortion Access Front. “Maybe be ashamed of how you got pregnant. I got pregnant the classy way: On the floor. On an Amtrak train. In the handicapped restroom, babeeey!”Joking about abortion is nothing new; George Carlin went there, among many others. But Winstead’s goal is sharper: with righteous fervor and a Rolodex of comic all-stars, she leads a nonprofit that uses unexpected tools — like humor and men — to advocate for abortion as health care and as a fundamental human right.She told her own abortion story on a Comedy Central special in 1992, and in the decades since, has been warning, on stages across the country and in social media campaigns, that reproductive rights were in jeopardy. Long before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, Abortion Access Front was preparing. Now, it is mobilizing as never before: On Sunday it will host “Operation Save Abortion,” a livestreamed daylong training session, with more than 60 partners and 25 panelists from local and national care, funding and policy organizations, and secure ways for viewers to plan direct, on-the-ground action. It will be capped off by a set from Johnson, a board member and ride-or-die touring performer, who lately has become accustomed to delivering punch lines to an audience that has spent the day weeping.Joyelle Nicole Johnson, left, with Winstead, is a board member and ride-or-die touring performer for Abortion Access Front. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Politicians aren’t going to save us,” Winstead, 60, said. Laughter won’t either. But with her network of grassroots advocates, abortion providers and entertainers, she hopes to change the narrative around abortion, eliminate the shame and give newly fired-up supporters the tools to get involved. “If people have to march one more time, and rage and feel helpless and hopeless, they win,” she said of her anti-abortion opponents. “We need to give people who are, like, ‘What can we do?’ an answer,” she added.That includes the people responsible for 50 percent of a pregnancy — men. On the eve of Father’s Day last month, Abortion Access Front produced a “Dads for Choice” video starring W. Kamau Bell, the comedian, CNN host and commentator, and inviting men to consider who bears the monetary costs of contraception: “Nobody ever got pregnant from a vibrator!”“The more complicated the issues are, the more humor can break things down to their basic points, and clarify things,” Bell said. Especially for topics that have traditionally been deemed uncomfortable, “humor can invite people in.”Why might comedy be an especially effective tool now? “Well, the other stuff hasn’t worked,” said David Cross, who was part of the all-male “Bro v. Wade” lineup. “Look where we find ourselves.”Abortion Access Front performances feature sketch comedy; music; standups like Sarah Silverman, Michelle Buteau, Jenny Yang, Aida Rodriguez and Negin Farsad and notables like the writer Dan Savage and filmmaker Mark Duplass; and on the road, conversations with local abortion providers, to highlight their needs. Even pro-abortion-rights crowds are often edified and galvanized, according to audience surveys collected by a researcher from the University of California, Los Angeles.“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said. Beginning in 2016, the showcases toured annually across dozens of cities, including in states hostile to abortion.David Cross performing at “Bro v. Wade.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesOne of the group’s messages is that everybody can find a way to contribute; abortion rights supporters need not march in every street protest or continually reach into their overstretched wallets. “If you have 10 minutes a month to give, I can give you something to do that’s meaningful,” Winstead said. “And I don’t want you to feel bad that that’s all you can give. Life is too messed up right now.”At one clinic, in Huntsville, Ala., Abortion Access Front and its volunteers planted hedges out front, to help block anti-abortion protesters. In Detroit, at the request of another clinic, they threw a block party as a gesture of welcome and gratitude to the community.“For a lot of these folks, in the only clinic in their state, they feel really isolated,” said Amy Elizabeth Alterman, an abortion scholar, ethnographer and public health researcher at U.C.L.A. Out of safety concerns or for social reasons, “many abortion providers don’t tell friends and family what they do.”Winstead’s organization, which has a full-time staff of 10 and many volunteers, served as a much-needed balm. “When a band of feminists explodes out of a van, wearing pro-abortion swag and saying, ‘Thank you for what you do. What can we do and how can we celebrate you?’ it’s often very emotional,” Alterman said. “Sometimes providers cry.”Winstead and the group are not trying to reach across the aisle to change anti-abortion evangelists’ minds. Since she became outspoken on the issue, she has personally experienced a backlash. “My parents, when they were alive, got calls constantly saying, your daughter’s a baby murderer,” she said. They were Catholic — “it really scared them.” Her shows were boycotted; old employers were called in efforts at intimidation. She “paid a lot of money,” she said, to erase her personal data from the internet.Now, “there’s no place I can get fired from — come at me, I don’t care,” she said. Fomenting any cultural shift requires real dedication, said Dean Obeidallah, the comic and radio host, who was on the “Bro v. Wade” bill and performed at Winstead’s first abortion-rights benefit a decade ago. “I can tell you from years of doing comedy, and trying to dispel stereotypes about Arab Americans, it’s never a light-bulb moment,” he said. “For people on your side already, you have to make them feel like they’re in the right place. For people who aren’t on the right side, or even have hate, it’s chipping away.”“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said of her group’s performances.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor those in the Minnesota-born Winstead’s orbit, it’s not surprising that she rose from a politically minded standup to an activist leader. “She’s just one of those — you meet them throughout life — boundless energy, high-strung, talk very quickly, gesticulate wildly, kind of people,” said Cross, a friend for more than 30 years.Johnson, the comic who has been with the organization since it started, said, “I think she’s a non-somniac, like Obama’s a non-somniac, to be able to do all the things she does. Her brain is constantly worrying — since 2016, her hair has turned white.”Even for Abortion Access Front, whose allies long knew that reproductive care and women’s rights were under attack, the weeks since Roe v. Wade was overturned have been, as Winstead said, gut-churningly surreal and destabilizing. “I’ve always felt unsafe in this country,” said Johnson, who is Black, “but now it’s almost a slapstick level of unsafe. It’s chaos.”Winstead said, “This is almost our last shot, because we’re burned out — and that’s by design.”But this moment has also sharpened activists’ focus, and expanded their tent. Since Roe was overturned, “I talk about it every chance — you’re going to hear abortion, abortion, abortion out of Joyelle’s mouth,” Johnson said. “I do it for the women in the audience who are not as liberated as me, those women who cannot tell their closest family members. I hope it liberates some people.” Viva Ruiz, a performer and activist whose group, Thank God For Abortion, is involved in the training session Sunday, said, “Everybody needs to use their way — the more variance there is, the more tactics there are, the more successful we can be.” She added, “The thing is, to just not stop. To keep showing up.”Together, Winstead agreed, “we are more motivated to fight and stay in the fight. And be relentless.” More

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones Would Like the Ingénue Phase of Her Career to End Now

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones bravely walked onstage, her face a ghastly white. Under her arm, a human head.“How could you do this to me!” she bellowed at Henry VIII.As the ghost of Anne Boleyn, Edgar-Jones, the hitherto quiet child, now slathered in face paint and clutching a homemade severed body part, found herself suddenly enamored with the spotlight.“That was the first time I remember being aware of the joy of departing from yourself,” Edgar-Jones said.She recounted this pivotal school-play memory on a breezy June afternoon, perched on a cream-colored couch in a cream-colored luxury hotel suite in West Hollywood. The cream-colored dress she’d been wearing for a series of engagements earlier that day had begun to unravel, prompting a change into an oversize black blazer, T-shirt, shorts and chunky G.H. Bass loafers, all of which now stood in cool contrast to the generic palette around her.At 24, the British actress is proving a reliable standout. In a string of major roles over the past two years, she’s morphed from brooding lover (“Normal People”) to cannibal-horror heroine (“Fresh”) to defiant Mormon (“Under the Banner of Heaven”). Her latest venture, the lead in the movie adaptation of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” arrives in theaters on July 15.In the romantic drama based on the best-selling novel by Delia Owens, Edgar-Jones play Kya, an abandoned girl who raised herself in the marshes of North Carolina and eventually lands in court, accused of murder.Clockwise from top left: “Where the Crawdads Sing,” “Normal People,” “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “Fresh.”Clockwise from top left: Michele K. Short/Sony Pictures, via Associated Press; Enda Bowe/Hulu; Michelle Faye/FX; Searchlight PicturesDuring her audition for the part via video, in 2020, Edgar-Jones brought the director Olivia Newman to tears and hooked one of the producers, Reese Witherspoon.“From her first screen test, she felt every moment of abandonment and loneliness that was written on the page,” Witherspoon wrote in an email. “Her work is so honest, it breaks my heart every time I watch it.”The film, shot in Louisiana, required Edgar-Jones to take boating and drawing lessons, and work with a dialect coach to hone a Carolina drawl. Her own accent is a soft-spoken mash-up of vernaculars, thanks to her Northern Irish mother and Scottish father.She was raised in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill, the only child of Wendy, a film and TV editor, and Philip, the head of entertainment at Sky, the British TV broadcaster. A few years after her Boleyn awakening, Edgar-Jones auditioned at age 15 for the National Youth Theater with a monologue from “Romeo and Juliet” — a loving tribute to Claire Danes’s performance in the Baz Luhrmann iteration.A perk of the prestigious program, which counts Helen Mirren and Daniel Day-Lewis among its alumni, was the members-only open casting calls, including one for Sofia Coppola’s planned adaptation of “The Little Mermaid.” While the project fizzled before Edgar-Jones got very far, the casting director introduced her to the talent agent Christopher Farrar, thus giving her representation and the confidence to continue. She considered college but ultimately turned down several universities, instead taking odd jobs as a barista and a waiter while she soldiered on with auditions.“I give Daisy a hell of a lot more credit than I’d give myself at 24,” said her “Fresh” co-star Sebastian Stan. “There’s an awareness to her that I think, at that age, is hard to find.”Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“I had some income and some semblance of hope,” she said. “It was, at first, a gap year, and then it became a gap life.”After a string of smaller roles in British productions, her big break came playing Marianne opposite Paul Mescal’s Connell in “Normal People.” When the series premiered in April 2020, it was the early days of the pandemic, and the Sally Rooney adaptation provided an intimate escape for viewers muddling their way through a shutdown world. Mescal’s chain necklace and Edgar-Jones’s bangs — an impulsive salon decision after a string of failed auditions — became overnight sensations.“I watched Daisy in ‘Normal People’ and was blown away by the subtlety of her performance and the impact of her choices,” Witherspoon wrote, praising “the most utterly honest performance that made me lean in and say, ‘Who is that?’”But as enthralled as viewers were with the actors playing the show’s laconic lovers, the fanfare was kept at a literal distance from Edgar-Jones, locked down in London.“I was being told that things were significant or changing, but I was just in my bedroom,” she said. “I was having this odd experience of being on Zoom the whole time having interviews, and then I’d go on my once-daily walk and someone would stare at me, but I didn’t know if it was just because they hadn’t seen another human being or if they had seen me in a show. It was really strange.”She garnered Critics Choice and Golden Globe nominations while spending the next year and a half isolated on sets in Calgary, Vancouver and New Orleans. Then, this past spring, she went through what she terms a “baptism of fire,” bouncing from her first red-carpet premiere (for “Fresh”) to her first Vanity Fair Oscar party and her first Met Gala in quick succession.“You know how a swan, when they’re on the river, they’re floating along really gracefully but underneath their legs are ——” she mimicked paddling furiously. Her crescendo on the Met steps wearing Oscar de la Renta “was like that,” she said. “Perhaps I looked calm, but I was terrified.”Her de facto societal debut coincided with the release of “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a true-crime drama series in which she played Brenda Lafferty, a Mormon woman who, along with her 15-month-old baby, was brutally murdered by religious extremists in 1984.In flashbacks, we see Brenda perform “The Rose,” pursue a broadcast journalism career and embolden other Mormon wives. But despite the heinous crimes at the show’s center, we never see Brenda’s actual killing or her lifeless visage onscreen. Compare that with, say, “The Staircase,” which took every opportunity to show Toni Collette meeting a graphic end.“That was something I felt was really important,” Edgar-Jones said of the omission. “Why would you want to capture the worst thing that could happen to somebody? Instead, you let their life be what’s defining.”Edgar-Jones is aiming for the career of a Jamie Lee Curtis, a Tilda Swinton or a Frances McDormand, women with an “unconventional idea of what a lead female should be.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesShe took the responsibility of playing a real person “incredibly seriously,” her co-star Andrew Garfield said, noting a certain “brilliance and joy” that he sees emanating from Edgar-Jones, onscreen and off.“There’s something unnameable that certain people have,” he said. “And, yeah, it’s talent. But it’s also a charisma and the kind of instant identification that you feel as an audience member where you go, Oh, I know this person, and I love this person. Even without them saying anything, you can feel their soul moving in a certain way and you want to follow whatever journey they’re on.”The two actors became fast friends while shooting in Canada. Off the clock, Edgar-Jones took a particular liking to electric bike and scooter rentals. “She would ride those scooters into the bitter winter months in Calgary until her hair started to freeze,” Garfield said. “She’s all about fun.”That includes routinely importing her own DJ equipment to spin house and disco tracks for her co-stars after work. Edgar-Jones is blissfully passionate about music in general: She often makes playlists for her characters (Kya’s involved a lot of Bat for Lashes and Blood Orange’s “Coastal Grooves” album) and plays guitar. She’s also developed a bond with the singer Phoebe Bridgers, who is in a relationship with Mescal of “Normal People.” Despite having, as Bridgers put it, “every opportunity to have the world’s craziest ego,” Edgar-Jones exudes wide-eyed enthusiasm. She is exceedingly polite — and perhaps a gentle liar — cheerfully telling the waiter who brought her a Pepsi instead of her requested Coke during our talk, “That’s fine. They taste the same.” And although she describes herself as shy, those who know her say she can also be uproariously off-color.In the past, her fair skin and brunette bangs have led some to describe her as the love child of Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. More recently, “Stranger Things” fans have delighted in her perceived resemblance to Eddie Munson, the beloved Season 4 character played by Joseph Quinn. “I do see it,” she said, adding that she and Quinn once met by chance at a “Soul Train”-themed club night in London. “I think I now know what I’m wearing for Halloween.”During off-hours on the “Heaven” shoot, Edgar-Jones rode electric scooters and bonded with her co-star Andrew Garfield, who said: “She would ride those scooters into the bitter winter months in Calgary until her hair started to freeze. She’s all about fun.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut career-wise, she hopes to emulate Jamie Lee Curtis, Tilda Swinton or Frances McDormand: women who have forged careers in Hollywood built on longevity and who found some of their greatest successes once they’d shed any trace of the ingénue.“These women are able to really transform,” she said, “and also play characters that are funny and complicated and, at times, the unconventional idea of what a lead female should be.”Sebastian Stan, who co-starred with Edgar-Jones in the twisty comedy-thriller “Fresh,” sees echoes of another screen legend in her work.“I give Daisy a hell of a lot more credit than I’d give myself at 24. There’s an awareness to her that, I think at that age, is hard to find,” he said and compared her to a young Meryl Streep. “I’d like to think that as she gets older, her performances are only going to get more and more rich.”Edgar-Jones has a plan to make that happen. Her bucket list includes working with Wes Anderson, Barry Jenkins, the Coen brothers, the Daniels and Greta Gerwig. And she hopes to stretch herself into the unexpected, perhaps by playing “someone really evil,” doing more comedy or directing.“I really want to just learn and learn and learn and make mistakes and learn from them,” she said, “and be free to play and ride the journey wherever it goes.” More

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      Janeane Garofalo Never Sold Out. What a Relief.

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      That concept might be the reason her trailblazing stand-up career has been overshadowed; it may also be the reason she’s still so sharp, our critic argues.On a rainy Wednesday night in Brooklyn, after an introduction with a minimum of fanfare, Janeane Garofalo walked onstage at the Eastville Comedy Club and looked out at a dozen people so scattered that calling them a crowd seems like a stretch. She spotted one man by himself who had attended a show of hers a few days earlier and happily pointed him out.Third on a bill filled with young unknowns, Garofalo, 57, settled into her set with supreme comfort, wandering into multiple tangents and digging into self-deprecation. “When someone tells me I can’t do something,” she said, holding the pause with precision timing honed over three and half decades of telling jokes, “I’m grateful.”It was a humble setting to see one of the most consequential comics of the past half century. Garofalo is a pioneer and Generation X icon who for a few years, it was reasonable to argue, meant for stand-up what Kurt Cobain did for music. The only moment during the set that hinted at her legacy came when Garofalo walked out of the spotlight and into the audience. The couple in the front row, already laughing, sat up a little straighter.Later in the set, she turned to her career. “The ’90s were good, but then it dipped,” Garofalo said, adding dryly that she now realized that comedy was not her forte. “You know what is? Filibustering.”Janeane Garofalo performs constantly in New York on bills with other comics, though you might not know it because she has little to no public profile. She’s not on Twitter, Instagram or any social media. She has no website or podcast, hasn’t done a special in years and doesn’t even have a computer, smartphone or email address. She turned down interviews with me twice. If you want to see her perform — and I recommend it — you have to search her out and sit in the room with her. I periodically stumble across her in a show and it always comes as a happy surprise from another time, like discovering a storied zine that only a few people still knew existed.As she made jokes about refusing to go to the doctor and her inability to apply herself, a cringeworthy thought occurred to me: Is this what not selling out looks like?I always found that pejorative phrase ridiculous: Selling out. Isn’t that the goal? It never made sense to me that a band stunk as soon as it signed with a major label. Or that artists should be shamed for making money to pay the rent. But as the stigmatization of selling out has faded over the past few decades, so vanished from the conversation that you rarely hear it used without sarcasm, I confess that I miss it. Something useful has been lost.In his shrewd new book “The Nineties,” Chuck Klosterman argues that nothing defined that decade more than the concept of selling out. To illustrate, he focuses on “Reality Bites,” now considered the quintessential Generation X movie. It also happens to feature Janeane Garofalo as a jaded eye-roller who delivers quips like “Evian is naïve spelled backwards.”The movie centers on an aspiring filmmaker played by Winona Ryder who is pursued by a responsible corporate striver (Ben Stiller, the film’s director) and a caddish poet who hates the right things (Ethan Hawke). She chooses Hawke. Klosterman writes that while Hawke’s character seems irresponsible to boomers and toxic to millennials, he was the right choice for Generation X. For them, and only them, Klosterman argues, “an authentic jerk was preferable to a likable sellout.”“Reality Bites” was released when I was in college, and most people I knew didn’t root for either of Winona Ryder’s options so much as against the movie, sensing a cynical attempt to capture the youth market, a major studio romanticizing indie credibility. Stiller screened it on campuses across the country, and at my school, he was received with hostility at the postshow Q. and A. One student questioned the filmmakers for mocking corporate greed while taking product-placement money from the Gap and R.J. Reynolds. Stiller bristled, saying it cost money to make a movie.In promoting “Reality Bites,” Garofalo took a cannier approach. Appearing on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” she short-circuited complaints about hypocrisy by criticizing Universal Pictures for trying to market “Reality Bites” as a Generation X story. It’s not, she said, dismissing the term as a buzzword, which was how I saw it at the time, too, and telling the flummoxed Letterman that she was uncomfortable following the script mapped out with his producers for their conversation. She sold the movie perfectly by performing contempt for selling a movie.The partnership between Stiller and Garofalo is an even better representation of the 1990s divide on selling out than “Reality Bites.” They dated briefly and worked together throughout the decade, starring on TV shows and appearing in movies, co-hosting the MTV Movie Awards and co-writing a self-help spoof, “Feel This Book.” Stiller was a bigger star, but Garofalo had more cachet. (On Entertainment Weekly’s 1997 list of the 50 Funniest People Alive, she came in 39th, five spots ahead of him.) While his fame has grown, her seismic significance to comedy has been forgotten enough to make a refresher necessary.Just as the 1980s comedy boom was going bust, Garofalo — along with Colin Quinn, Dana Gould and Alan Gelfant — put on a show at a bookstore in Hollywood that became a weekly magnet for talented young stand-ups looking beyond conventional club comedy. Stiller performed there and used some of the comics on his breakthrough television series, “The Ben Stiller Show.” So did David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, who met through Garofalo and went on to make another sketch comedy landmark, “Mr. Show.”This bookstore was one of the centers of a blossoming new comedy scene. Some called it alternative comedy, others balked at that term. The cool move was to embrace it ironically as Garofalo did in one of her early television appearances. When the host of “The Dennis Miller Show” made a joke about her Doc Martens, she deadpanned: “I’m the alternative queen.”Garofalo didn’t just help shift the comedy scene away from clubs. Her style represented a sea change from the polished, tight and desperately relatable bits ready-made to translate into a sitcom or a late-night appearance. In jean shorts and tights, she inched stand-up closer to the eccentric solo show, where a sharply honed point of view mattered more than accessible setups and hard punch lines. Her humor leaned on stories and a political sensibility, refracted through a culturally savvy lens. She fiercely skewered the fashion industry for giving women body image issues and fashionistas later pushed back by putting her on worst-dressed lists. Her jokes scoffed at cliché (“I don’t even speak during sex for fear of sounding trite”), and she dropped references in televised sets that not everyone would get (Antigone, Sub Pop Records) and continually teased the crowd.On her 1995 HBO half-hour, she walked onstage to applause that she immediately mocked: “You just did that because this is on television.” In the beloved “Larry Sanders Show” and the cult movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” she played sarcastic (and now very meme-able) misanthropes, becoming the rare comic who represented something larger in the culture. Original writers for “Friends” and MTV’s “Daria” have cited Garofalo as an inspiration for characters for their shows. In his recent memoir “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” Odenkirk argues that Garofalo’s early stand-up anticipated much of the ambitious work in our current scene. “Janeane was the spark of the big bang, of a comedy reinvention that still resonates.”Garofalo, with Chris Farley, left, and George Clooney, during her short tenure on “Saturday Night Live.”Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesWhereas Stiller shifted into blockbuster movies in the 1990s, Garofalo ran into choppier waters in the mainstream in ways that now seem clearly sexist. Her stint at “Saturday Night Live” was chronicled in an infamous New York magazine piece that included scenes of Al Franken yelling at her, Adam Sandler giving her the silent treatment and a writer unleashing his wrath after she called a sketch sexist. She compared her treatment there to “fraternity hazing” and didn’t last a full season. When it came to the big screen, she dismissed her one major leading role, a female Cyrano in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” as “not my kind of movie.”It’s hard to say if these experiences changed her view on establishment success or confirmed it. But at the end of the decade, in her book with Stiller, she gave this advice: “Being popular and well liked is not in your best interest,” before adding, “If you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the public’s regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent on you to not fit in.”When The Times did a story on the new generation of alt comics in 1997, Stiller recalled that when Garofalo had a bit that killed, she would not repeat it out of fear of being hack. “It’s almost like she was going too far the other way, because she didn’t want to be accepted,” he said. Odenkirk hit similar notes discussing her in “We Killed,” an oral history about women in comedy: “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in,” he said. “That’s not a good thing in the long run.”That may be true if the goal is conventional Hollywood success. But what if you actually believed the 1990s discourse about selling out? Or short of that, just internalized it? Then some skepticism about success makes sense. And why not? Only a fool thinks the funniest comics are the most popular or that deeply respected ones don’t remain obscure. Moreover, it’s entirely reasonable to look at the state of popular culture and just roll your eyes.There has always been something off-putting about self-righteousness over selling out. Indie music snobs are easy to parody. And obsession with credibility can paralyze artists. “Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche” than anxiety over selling out, Klosterman wrote, expressing a view darker than my own, so alert to cost that it gives short shrift to the benefits.Though it can seem otherwise, the ’90s critique of selling out was not only used to sneer. Besides directing a bit of shame at product placement, the most valuable thing it did was provide a powerful vision of making it that didn’t rely on money and popularity. A close read of early issues of The Baffler, a small, influential journal that at its inception that decade was something of a think tank for the dangers of selling out, offered hints at a positive ideal. It could be found in zines, indie music labels, offline.This utopian view of a culture independent of corporate interference was defiantly local, uncompromising and wary of fame. Today, when everyone is trying to go viral and artists are judged by the most soulless Internet metrics, the value of an alternative seems more important than ever. The current stand-up of Janeane Garofalo fits in nicely.Speaking of Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk once explained, “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in.”Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesThat doesn’t mean she sees it that way. Her current comedy is filled with self-deprecating jokes about her failures, flaws, projects that didn’t get picked up. After the ’90s, she helped start Air America, the influential liberal radio station that collapsed but not before giving early platforms to Rachel Maddow and Marc Maron. She has taken scores of acting jobs in film and television, but they have little bearing on the one constant: her stand-up, the rare form where you can have near total control over your art.We live in an age of dumb demographic stereotypes. Millennials, we’re told, are entitled snowflakes and boomers are selfish egotists. Describing huge groups of people in a few traits is absurd, but that doesn’t mean those reductionist ideas don’t shape us. The water in which you swim matters. I was reminded of this at a birthday party for my daughter’s friend. A dad my age told me of being in a band in the ’90s that signed to a major label and how he still talks to his therapist about selling out. Back then I never identified with Generation X, but now I do. When I watch “Reality Bites” today, not only do I like it more, but I can find something to relate to in every character, too.In movies and plays from the 1990s (“Clerks,” Eric Bogosian’s “subUrbia”), the slacker could be a goofy kind of hero. Compare that with the ethos today summed up by Bo Burnham in his special “Inside,” which features his song “Welcome to the Internet.” The refrain goes: “Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime/anything and everything all of the time.”Garofalo’s stand-up always made apathy and boredom look cool, glamorous and, most important, sensible. About boomers, she joked: “They got married and worked hard so their kids didn’t have to, and guess what, we don’t.” There’s a performance in this, of course, since she has always worked hard, but the hustle and grind has never been her brand, to use a word she probably wouldn’t.Garofalo isn’t that different today than she was three decades ago, less likely to skewer those who promulgate unrealistic body standards than to confess her own. Her hair is longer, more tangled, but her clothes remain darkly colored, rumpled. “I’m not ready for Eileen Fisher,” she said in characteristic deadpan. “I can’t cross that Rubicon.”Her affect remains wry, offhanded; she walks onstage holding papers and uses references more highbrow than your typical joke slinger, but she is also often disarmingly personal and self-loathing.The main impression you get from her act is of a restlessness that is physical, as she roams into the crowd, but also intellectual, as she repeatedly entertains new ideas, following them down rabbit holes even at the expense of the joke. There is a real excitement and unpredictability about her sets that can be captured only in live performance. She never tells a joke the same way twice. Her comedy always seems resolutely present, frequently vulnerable, challenging and delighting her audience in equal measure.It would be easy to see Garofalo performing with comics half her age to a sparse Brooklyn crowd as a portrait of decline. But to my Generation X eyes, it looks like a kind of triumph. More

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      The Saga of a World War II Ancestor of Miss Piggy, Bert and Yoda

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      Long before Frank Oz brought many Muppets to life, his father, an amateur Dutch puppeteer, made a Hitler marionette as an act of defiance. He buried it during the war.The puppet stands 20 inches tall, hand-painted and carved out of wood, its uniform tattered and torn. But for all it has endured over more than 80 years — buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif. — it remains, with its black toothbrush mustache and right arm raised in a Nazi salute, immediately and chillingly recognizable.It is a depiction of Hitler, hand-carved and painted in the late 1930s by an amateur Dutch puppeteer, Isidore (Mike) Oznowicz, and clothed by his Flemish wife, Frances, as they lived in prewar Belgium.The Hitler marionette, an instrument of parody and defiance, offers an intriguing glimpse into the strong puppetry tradition in the family of the man who retrieved it from that attic: Frank Oz, one of its creators’ sons, who went on to become one of the 20th century’s best-known puppeteers, bringing Cookie Monster, Bert, Miss Piggy and others to life through his collaborations with Jim Henson, and later becoming a force in the Star Wars movies, giving voice to Yoda. The marionette will be shown publicly for the first time later this month at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.Oz’s father was drawn to puppetry from the day when, as an 11-year-old boy, he passed a street show of outsize, colorful Sicilian puppets in Antwerp. “As a youngster, I was interested in things three-dimensional,” Oznowicz told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. After they arrived in Oakland in 1951, Oz’s parents founded the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild, and the family living room became a gathering spot for puppet makers and enthusiasts from across the region. Oz learned how to string puppets from his father, and as a teenager, he earned $25 an hour doing puppet shows, and served as an apprentice puppeteer at Children’s Fairyland, an amusement park.Mike and Frances Oznowicz at a puppet fair in Children’s Fairyland in 1956.via the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild and Children’s Fairyland ArchivesBut Oz — who parlayed his successes in puppetry into a long career as an actor and a director — was never drawn to carrying on the family tradition.“It was a great training ground for me until I hit 18 and I said, I’m done with this, I don’t want to be a puppeteer,” Oz, 78, said in a recent interview as he sat on a bench in Riverside Park in New York. “I never wanted to be a puppeteer. I want to be a journalist, actually.”It was a chance encounter with Henson, whom he met at a puppeteer’s convention when he was still a teenager, that changed the course of his life.“I really don’t care about puppets,” Oz said, under the mist of a light June rain. “I really don’t. And never did. And Jim showed me how to be successful. Then I became successful at the very thing that I didn’t initially want, but the joy was working with Jim and the Muppets.”Oz was startled when he came across the puppet years ago in the attic of his family home in Oakland — “I thought, ‘Oh My God.’” He brought it to New York where he displayed it, along with seven marionette heads carved by his father, in a museum case in his apartment on the Upper West Side.The puppet, the carved heads and a video interview Frank conducted with his father before his death in 1998, will be shown at “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History,” opening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on July 21. (Frank’s nom-de-Hollywood is “Oz,” but his legal name remains Oznowicz.)“I never wanted to be a puppeteer,” Frank Oz said. He parlayed his successes with puppets into a long career as an actor and a director.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe exhibition tracks the remarkable story of this puppet and how Isidore, who was Jewish and was born in Amsterdam, and Frances, who was Catholic, fled Antwerp in 1940 as the Nazis advanced and bombs exploded across Belgium. At the urging of Frances’s mother, who was fearful that they would be captured with such a defiant marionette as they tried to outrace the Nazis, they buried the puppet in their backyard.“He and Mom made a pact that when the bombs landed in Antwerp — and they were expecting that — they’d be ready go to,” said Ronald Oznowicz, 80, who is Frank’s older brother. “They had their bikes ready and their food ready. They had a whole plan and the object was to get to England.”Isidore and Frances traveled through southern France, Spain, Morocco and Portugal — the tale of their journey is recounted in the video interview — before settling in England, where Frank and Ronald were born.The family returned to Antwerp after the war and dug up the puppet. It was another five years before they obtained a visa and came to the United States. The puppet came with them. (A third child, Jenny, was born after they settled in the United States.)“I have to tell you: This is a son’s remembrance,” Oz said. “My parents left Belgium in time. But sadly, half of his family was killed in the gas chambers because they didn’t leave. My father never really liked to talk about it. It was too difficult for him.”“All these stories of my mother and father, they were just fairy tales to me,” he said.Indeed, much of this story is murky, as it reconstructs the life of the parents of one of the men so instrumental in making the Muppets beloved: Isidore was, by day, a window trimmer and sign painter, and Frances became a dressmaker. It is not exactly clear how — or even if — the Hitler puppet was used in performances.An old photograph of the Hitler marionette, which was buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif.via Frank Oznowicz, Jenny Oznowicz and Ronald Oznowicz; Jason MadellaThis exhibit came to be because of happenstance. “The Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited,” which was first shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, was set to move this summer to The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the institution, in keeping with its mission, was looking for ways to place the exhibition in some sort of Jewish context.“I was aware that Frank Oz was Jewish and wondered if there was any kind of story that Frank would want to tell here,” said Heidi Rabben, the senior curator of the museum. Karen Falk, the head archivist for the Henson collection, told her about the puppet that Oz had retrieved from his parents’ attic, and Rabben asked Oz if she could borrow it for this exhibit.“It was such an incredibly inspiring story about resilience and resistance,” Rabben said. “That is what we are interested in: What are the ways we can share stories of the Holocaust? We have limited information and it’s very selective based on what our parents and grandparents chose to share. How do we make sure we never forget?”The two exhibits will overlap for a few weeks; the Henson exhibit closes in mid-August.The Hitler puppet is the centerpiece of “Oz is for Oznowicz.” The mustache, the hair and the eyebrows are painted black; Isidore carved the mustache so that it protrudes from the puppet. A Nazi arm band is strapped around the left arm. No effort was made to refurbish the Hitler puppet or any of the heads; they are being presented the way Frank found them. The marionette’s right leg is exposed because of a tear in the uniform.Given its subject matter and the sensitivities of a museum dedicated to addressing questions of Jewish history, “Oz is for Oznowicz,” contains a warning for attendees: “This exhibition contains a marionette of Adolf Hitler that may be disturbing for some viewers. Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today.”Isidore’s sons remember him as a man of pointed humor with a strong political sensibility, and said it was in character for him to use humor and parody for political effect. But once they made it back to the United States, and embarked on lives as immigrants in a new country, they tried to put that chapter of their lives behind them.After their meeting at a convention of the National Puppeteers of America, Jim Henson asked Frank Oz to come to New York and work part-time with him for six months in 1963. He stayed with Henson until 1986.Oz said he jumped at the chance to lend his parents’ work to the Henson exhibition.“I want to show how people can express themselves in a positive way during a war — and make fun of people through other means,” he said. “I just want to honor my parents. I want to people to see how lucky we are right now, even in the terrible situation we are in right now.” More

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      Phoebe Robinson Is Trash, and She’s Fine With It

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      Robinson created and stars in “Everything’s Trash,” a new series that “is a celebration of people who aren’t in a rush to change who they are,” she said.“Everyone is trash,” Phoebe Robinson explained. “We all have our great qualities, but we also have flaws. Sometimes they’re lovable. Sometimes they’re not. And it’s OK.”This was a on a recent summer morning and Robinson — a writer and performer best-known for her essay collections and the podcast-turned-HBO-show “2 Dope Queens” — was sermonizing in between sips of lemonade at a coffee shop in Downtown Brooklyn. She had arrived a few minutes late. (Lateness, she would later explain, is one of her trashiest qualities.) Around the corner stood a blue Bigbelly garbage can ornamented with her image, an ad for her new show, “Everything’s Trash,” which debuts Wednesday on Freeform. Robinson stars as Phoebe, a podcast host facing down adulthood with pluck and hedonism while her very together older brother (Jordan Carlos) runs for state office.Robinson, 37, adapted the show from her 2018 collection, “Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay.” If creating, producing, writing for and starring in a show sounds like a lot of jobs, I should also note that this is the second show from Robinson’s production company, Tiny Reparations; that she runs a publishing imprint of the same name; and that she recently published a third essay collection. She also debuted her first standup special, “Sorry, Harriet Tubman,” last fall on HBO Max. Really, it’s enough to make a person want to go back to bed.In “Everything’s Trash,” Robinson stars as a podcaster stumbling toward adulthood.Giovanni Rufino/FreeformOn this morning, she greeted the day in sequined sandals, pants that matched the lemonade and a crinkly black jacket. (A Hefty bag, but make it fashion.) Under that jacket was a cropped T from U2’s “The Joshua Tree” tour. (Robinson is on record as loving U2 maybe more than anyone alive.) Over that lemonade, Robinson, exuberant and focused, discussed exploiting her young adulthood for laughs and whether she is still trash. Spoiler: “Of course I’m still trash!” she said.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The book is based on the events and missteps of your late 20s and early 30s. How close does the show hew to your actual life?It’s a healthy combination of writers’ room and real life. My brother really is a state rep. But I would not hook up with his political rival. That’s not my vibe. We wanted to have fun with it — the times when I was crazy broke and running around, hustling. The whole wear-and-return thing? I did that for years. I would get a cute outfit for an event. And then I would be like: “OK, no one spill on me. No one sweat. Because I’m going to return this later.” We just mix it all up together. TV Phoebe is certainly messier than I ever was. She’s smart and funny and lovable, but she operates with whatever feels good in the moment. I like to believe I’m a bit more mindful than that. She’s just living her life.When I think of comedies about young women being trash, I think of “Girls” or “Broad City.” Have Black women felt as free to be trash?We know that the answer is no. But there are a lot of great shows out there — “Insecure,” “Abbott Elementary,” hopefully my show — that show people just living their lives. I didn’t create this show thinking about respectability politics. It wasn’t even a topic of discussion. We really just wanted to make a show that was hilarious and honest, and based on stuff that’s happened to the writers in the room. I will always fight for the right to be silly, to be messy, to make mistakes. I don’t want us to get to a place where we aren’t showing characters being human.You were a podcaster, and your character podcasts, too. Is the podcast in the show a version of “2 Dope Queens” or your other show, “Sooo Many White Guys”?It’s invented for the show. But this idea of, “Yeah, I have a podcast that’s successful and I don’t have any money in the bank,” that’s ripped from the headlines, as they say on “Law & Order.” I really just wanted to have fun with it. I love podcasting so much; it’s such a great medium. It’s oversaturated now, so I’m glad that I was able to do it when I did.You’ve joked about being a “melanated Carrie Bradshaw.” But on “And Just Like That,” Carrie Bradshaw has a podcast now. So is she actually the white you?She’s doing her thing. I’m doing my thing. But when I saw that, I was like, Oh, that’s a cute evolution for her character and also feels true to life that she would — I love that I’m talking about her like she’s a real person — that she would be a podcaster now.“I will always fight for the right to be silly, to be messy, to make mistakes,” Robinson said.Donavon Smallwood for The New York TimesA lot of shows that are set in New York aren’t made in New York. This one is. And Brooklyn looks great in it. Why was that important?I’ve been here since I moved out at 17 to go to college, and I really fought for the show to be shot here. Initially, there was some discussion of like, “Maybe we could do it in L.A. on soundstages …” and I was like: “No, no, no. New York is in its DNA.” I’ve lived in Crown Heights, Kensington, Clinton Hill, all those areas. I love all those areas. I want to show actual Brooklyn, not just the parts that have been gentrified.Is there a message you want people to take away from the show?I just want people to embrace where they’re at. We’re always so focused on, Oh, I have to get this next thing and I need to improve in this way. This is a celebration of people who aren’t in a rush to change who they are. They’re just like: “OK, this is who I am. This is my truth. This is my journey.” I hope that when people watch, they laugh a lot, but then maybe apply a little bit of that to themselves.You’re going to see different kinds of Blackness, you’re going to see beautiful Brooklyn, you’re going to see people make mistakes and try to figure [expletive] out and hopefully get more things right than wrong. People just get so down on themselves because they think they’re not doing enough or they’re failing in some way. And I’m like, You’re doing fine.One of the things I really fought for: I didn’t want it to be like, Oh, Phoebe’s so messy, and then by the end, she’s going to settle down, move to Connecticut, have kids. I don’t know how her journey is going to end, and she doesn’t either, and I think that’s OK.I look at you now: You have a production company, a publishing imprint, an apartment with color-coordinated bookshelves, a Peloton. Are you still trash?A Peloton doesn’t make you Mother Teresa. Come on! I’m always 10 to 15 minutes late for stuff. I can be stubborn. I can be forgetful sometimes. Of course I’m trash. Listen, everyone’s trash. M.L.K. Jr. was trash. Let’s be real. He was great. He did a lot of great things. He was also trash. More

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      Adam Scott on His First Emmy Nomination for ‘Severance’

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      Scott earned first Emmy nomination on Tuesday, for best actor in drama for “Severance.”To stay afloat and avoid disappointment, Adam Scott said he doesn’t anticipate big nominations. It’s a healthier state of mind, he said, and he’s become accustomed to not hearing his name called.“I did not think I was going to be nominated,” he said. “I was just trying to focus on everyone else and take a walk and put it out of my head.”After learning he received an Emmy nomination for best actor in the Apple TV+ drama “Severance,” Scott said it was an honor to be named next to actors like Brian Cox, nominated for “Succession,” and Jason Bateman, nominated for “Ozark.”“Severance,” which is also nominated for best drama, presents an eerie picture of workplace culture in which employees of an enigmatic, vaguely sinister corporation named Lumon Industries undergo a surgical procedure that severs their work memories from their personal memories, in an effort to keep company secrets confidential. Scott plays Mark Scout, who after losing his wife, Gemma (played by Dichen Lachman), in a car accident, substitutes monotonous shifts pocketing numbers into digital boxes at Lumon for proper healing.In a phone interview on Tuesday, Scott discussed the show’s cliffhanger ending and how he used a personal loss to build his character. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Where were you when you first heard of the nomination?I was in the middle of walking the dogs when I got the phone call and was surprised and just couldn’t be more flattered and honored. It was really a unique feeling, to say the least.Why do you think the show was so successful?It’s a good question because when we were making it, we, if not daily, very often would stop and look at each other and just be like, “This is really [expletive] weird. Is anyone going to connect with it?” We didn’t know, and then we would just kind of shrug our shoulders and put our heads down and keep going.What were the most challenging scenes for you to film?I was going through a grieving process, because my mom had died before I went out to New York. I walked into that apartment and realized I wasn’t done grieving at all, because my family kind of cushioned me from this at home. And that’s what love is for in a lot of ways, is to help you through a process like that, and we were locked down in Los Angeles so I was able to kind of make it through. But then I got to New York six months later, closed the door and I was by myself and I realized immediately I was not done absorbing this loss. The show was right there, and so I processed my grief through the show.What does “Severance” hope to teach about how to cope with grief?For outtie Mark, that’s what the season was about: grief, and how is he going to handle it? And is he going to handle it? Or is he going to continue pushing it away? And I was asking myself the same question. So, I decided to deal with it, but deal with it along with Mark.There’s a scene where I’m on the side of the road where my wife had a car accident in the show, and we just happened to shoot that scene on the one-year anniversary of my mom passing away. It was just a sheer coincidence. But I was kind of carrying it around with me all day and trying not to kind of zero in on it. It really, again, helped me with my grieving process.What does the show aim to tell viewers about how to manage what happens at work and what happens at home, particularly amid a pandemic when many people have had to work remotely?Work is something that you do to achieve one thing or another. A job is a place where you go, if you can define it like that, and I think people started re-evaluating their relationship with those things. I think we all found out that home and your life, and your life at work, they all started to blend into sort of one thing.How did the cast and the director Ben Stiller compose the last moments of the season finale?The moment where I call Mrs. Selvig “Ms. Cobel” accidentally — while we were shooting, I remember saying to Patricia [Arquette] and Ben, “OK if we have them, if they care at this point in the final episode, if we’ve laid the bread crumbs properly, this moment is going to be so fun and so huge.”But that’s a delicate process, getting to the point where that actually has impact. It’s not easy to put it all together so that actually happens. It could just as easily be a shrug if you’re not invested in the characters or the story or whatever. So, hearing that people threw things at their television or got up and walked out of the room or just screamed at the end of Episode 9 is delightful. We really had no idea if anyone would care. More

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      Sydney Sweeney Scores Two Emmy Nods, for ‘Euphoria’ and ‘The White Lotus’

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      Sweeney discussed her first two Emmy nominations as well as some of the controversy surrounding her “Euphoria” character, Cassie.Sydney Sweeney was leaving a fitting when she found out she was nominated for two Emmys Tuesday. Speechless, the first person she called was her mother.“There weren’t many words,” Sweeney said. “It was more of crying and saying how proud she was.”The 24-year-old actress earned nominations for two HBO shows: “The White Lotus,” for supporting actress in a limited series, and “Euphoria,” for supporting actress in a drama. She attributes her success in the shows to creating elaborate books for each character that include their individual back stories and emotional memories.“I’m able to just jump into who they are, and I know how they will react to something because of what has happened in their past,” she said. “I’m able to flesh out these fully vivid characters because I’ve given them life through the work that I put into it.”As Cassie in Season 2 of “Euphoria,” her character sacrifices her friendship with Maddy (played by Alexa Demie), and employs intensive beauty routines and country-music inspired wardrobes to win over Nate (Jacob Elordi), Maddy’s ex-boyfriend. (Zendaya, who plays the troubled Rue, was nominated again for best actress in a drama.)Sweeney’s character Olivia on “The White Lotus” had it easier, vacationing with her friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady), and passing scathing judgments at a luxury resort. The limited series racked up 20 nominations, including five just in the best supporting actress category.In a phone interview, Sweeney discussed the thrill of her first Emmy nominations and what she hopes viewers will gain from Cassie’s transformative arc. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.How did you feel when you heard that you received two nominations?I was definitely in shock, because I was not expecting to get nominated, especially not for two awards. I appreciate the characters that I get to play, so the fact that people have been touched by my character — that’s what means so much to me. It’s an amazing feeling, and I’m very appreciative.Cassie underwent a significant transformation in “Euphoria” last season, going from a sympathetic character to a more questionable one as she complicates her friendship with Maddy by falling for Nate. What was that metamorphosis like for you?It was a fun challenge. I was also very nervous, because I know that Maddy’s character is such a force and people love her. You don’t want to cross Maddy, and Cassie crossed Maddy. So I was a little nervous to see how people would react.Olivia, in “The White Lotus,” was a much more comic role. Was that challenging?I was a little scared because I’ve never done something on the more comedic side, and I was going to be surrounded by such comedic geniuses. But whenever I’m scared, that means I’m going to be challenged. I’m going to try and push myself even further. So I was really excited to be surrounded by these people.Some viewers complained that “Euphoria” hypersexualized Cassie last season. What did you make of that criticism, and what do you hope people take away from the character?I hope people can look deeper inside of Cassie and see the struggles and the trauma that she has gone through, and why she is who she is. Because there’s a reason behind all of it. Does she want to put herself out there all the time? No. She does it because that’s what she thinks other people want from her, and that’s the only way that she’s going to be able to get what she wants from people.I think that shows how women feel and how they’re treated today. I hope that it raises awareness for others, and they’re more aware of how we’re being perceived, how young girls are being raised. And there’s a double side, because I also think there’s strength behind how she feels when she is naked or she’s showing her body. She communicates that way and there’s a beauty, there’s a strength and there’s a sadness with all of it. I hope people can see that. More