‘Dying for Sex' Changed Everything for Jenny Slate
Jenny Slate has been busy. The multi-hyphenate star — actress, writer, stand-up comedian, former 'SNL' player, prodigious voice performer, SAG winner, and so much more — has not only done a little bit everything, but continues to do so at an admirably high level. When this writer last caught up with her it was (somehow?) eight years ago, on the occasion of her 'Landline' reunion with her 'Obvious Child' compatriots, director and co-writer Gillian Robespierre and writer Elisabeth Holm. Even Slate couldn't believe how much time had passed.
'Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wow. What have I been up to? My life has changed drastically since that time, and luckily I'm all the better for it,' Slate said with laugh during a recent Zoom with IndieWire. (She's not kidding either, in addition to the myriad professional changes she details below, she's also gotten married and had a daughter.)
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'I've made a lot of my own work: two standup specials, I've written two books of little pieces about emotional states,' Slate said. 'Those four projects have been really, really important to me. Those pieces of work helped me to really understand what I'm like as a writer or performer or artist when I'm alone. Our 'Marcel the Shell' movie came out, and there's so much of me and my own sensibility in that character, but that was made, of course, in teamwork with Dean Fleischer Camp. I think it was important for me to understand what I really was like when I was not working in a team, or not doing someone else's material.'
Her own recent works, Slate said, helped her to more fully 'understand my voice and understand myself as someone who has a real preference for hard-hitting, but loving beauty.' She continued, 'I enjoy, in a way, ripping open my heart for everyone and hitting everyone in the heart, but with kindness? [I'm someone] who is very much concerned with turbulence and intensity, but someone who has no instinct for destruction or appetite for that at all.'
Those early indie hits with Robespierre and Holm helped further crack open those desires for Slate, while also letting audiences closer to her particular brand of heart-ripping (but still very funny) comedy.
'My work with Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm was so formative for me, because I really started to understand myself as an actor and to feel the first blush of legitimacy [with them], or I wouldn't even call it legitimacy at that point, just a wobbly feeling of permission to be here and do this,' she said. 'I have so much joy and so much deep gratitude for being able to be an actor, because I've always wanted to be an actor, and I don't remember a time when I didn't want that.'
But, for awhile there, Slate didn't feel like she was making the kind of progress in her acting work that spoke to that long-held desire, or that matched the satisfaction she felt with her other work. Part of that was just life, like the onset of the pandemic or having her first child, but part of it was also preparing herself for that next step in her career.
And then 'Dying for Sex' came around.
The FX limited series was created by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, as adapted from Molly Kochan and Nikki Boyer's podcast of the same name, which was itself inspired by real-life best friends Kochan and Boyer's experiences dealing with Kochan's terminal cancer diagnosis. As the title implies, much of Kochan's journey follows her desire to achieve the kind of sexual pleasure she's never experienced before, but the central relationship revolves around the stalwart BFFs. And, yes, it's funny and sexy and sad and intense. Sort of Slate's whole thing, right?
'I arrived at the point of making 'Dying for Sex,' feeling like I really, really needed to get back on an acting path that feels good to me,' Slate said. ''Dying for Sex' came at just the right time, when I felt a worth in myself that had been personally defined and came from so many different things being woven together. I sort of felt like, 'Well, how do I stop making compromises that don't serve me? How do I really step out of that pain that one can feel if you're trying to be an ingenue, that feeling of desperation?' It can feel kind of good too, to be hungry that way, but it just didn't feel appropriate to me anymore.'
So much of what creators Meriwether and Rosenstock made spoke to her (and viewers and critics alike, who adored the show, now a strong contender for plenty of Emmys hardware), including the ability to be funny again ('I was just dying to be funny again in a character, not as myself') even in this serious story. The attachment of Michelle Williams as Molly? That was its own kind of treat, too.
'What really floored me about Michelle was just how much she met me eye to eye, how sensitive she was, how open, and she herself seemed anxious to make sure that these characters could be there, could be alive,' Slate said. 'She can do anything, and she will continue to surprise people forever. Part of that is that she challenges herself to experience that surprise as well. I've heard her say she really tends to leap before she looks, and that's something that I relate to and that I find to be a loving act for myself. I don't think it's reckless. I think it's something that artists need to do.'
Williams had been interested in the project since 2022 and officially signed on in 2023, so when Slate auditioned for it in late 2023, her eventual co-star had long been settled into the series. But, she said, she was struck by how well their energies and aims matched.
'When you're auditioning for something, you're like, 'Will I get the part?,' but if you get the part, every day after that, you're like, 'Will I be able to be the person to perform the role that they need to be there? Am I going to be able to stand it up?,'' she said. 'I noticed in her a feeling that I felt myself, which was, 'I really want to do this. I really, really want to do this.' It's this beautiful sensitive energy of like, 'Hey, man, I want to do this as much as you want to do it.''
The audition itself was exciting for Slate, who didn't just love the work with Williams, but the way it left her feeling, like she'd really given her all.
'The scene work [in the audition] was so fun, and I felt that I could improvise and I was really limber and I just never wanted it to end,' she said. 'I left [the audition] being like, 'OK, I definitely liked what I did, and if they don't like it, then I'm not the right person, because I gave exactly what I intended to give.' But I also felt like, 'Oh my God, I want this job.''
When she was offered the role of Nikki, Slate felt a level of kismet that, funnily enough, is also present in the actual show itself. Sometimes, both life and art were telling Slate, things happen exactly when they're meant to.
'It just felt like this weird golden door appeared in my life and I was like, I would like to go through,' the actress said. 'That's a thing that's in our show that I've also experienced in a totally different way, maybe only a couple times in my life, which is that kismet, that moment of fortune has arrived. And sometimes it arrives in a weird, dark wagon, a scary, dark doorway. Sometimes the packaging is really intimidating and really threatening, like the packaging of Molly's opportunity is cancer. Her opportunity comes in the most extreme package that something could arrive in. But it is the parcel that it is. If you want to take it, you can take it, but you kind of have to be at a growth point or a breaking point or at least a point of combination between dissatisfaction and hunger that you'll take that opportunity to get what you want.'
Boyer was also involved with the project as a producer, though Slate was initially unsure if she'd want to talk to Slate, or if that would even be useful for the actress playing a version of Boyer during one of the most trying times of her life.
'I emailed her right before I started filming, and I didn't know if she wanted to hear from me or not, and I think she probably felt the same way, but she wrote back right away,' Slate said. 'Then she came to set during the first couple weeks of the shoot, and it was just a very warm meeting.'
After they wrapped that day, Boyer was still around, so Slate asked if she might want to go get a drink and chat. 'And, of course, stayed there for a long time. Both of us ended up crying. I asked her a lot about Molly and what it was like now for her,' she said. 'We became close pretty quickly. I never let go of the fact that Nikki was a real person. It's an honor. The stakes feel good, feel right, feel high. I felt properly emotionally, professionally outfitted for those stakes. That intensity is what I'm asking for.'
And 'Dying for Sex' is about as intense as it gets. While Molly's journey toward sexual fulfillment plays a major role in the series (it is, after all, from where it gets its cheeky title), the incredible bond between Molly and Nikki is its heart. It's not just a story about best friends dealing with disease, but about soulmates forced to reckon with the inevitability of permanent separation. Nikki, who can be messy and loud and immature, doesn't always handle that intensity with grace.
'I, as a person, don't really have a problem with intensity, and I don't have a problem with quick-paced variation in emotional output or emotional timbre, so to speak,' she said. 'I felt that this is what I've been asking for, I'm good at that. In my life, I'm OK with it, too. I'm OK with letting a big, hard thing happen and then hoping for happiness. I'm not really a person of stasis, and I'm also not a person who can't look at what is happening. I'm very different than the character of Nikki, I am more of a gentle creature, and I am more thoughtful and more purposefully thoughtful, even though I can be rather filter-less.'
Asked how the series impacted the way Slate thinks about sex, she was characteristically thoughtful and honest in her answer. It changed everything.
'It highlighted how sex-negative I was as a younger woman in my teens and twenties,' Slate said. 'Michelle has talked about how, when she was growing up, it was like sex is something you should never do, and if you do do it, don't do it, you're going to get in trouble or whatever. In my own way, I also had a fear instilled in me, 'promiscuous' is such a bad word, and just sort of this weird unconscious slut-shaming.'
She continued, 'I think I grew up with that threat and I internalized it and then spent a lot of my twenties and thirties being confused by [it], when actually what I feel as a sexual person is that there's a lot of joy and goodness and excitement in sex. I was confused about those dueling voices. It took me a long time to realize that I could just kick the first one out. It was startling to me to start to think about these things.'
On the last day of shooting the series, Slate was understandably beset by a wide variety of emotions. 'I remember feeling we were sad, and also feeling like it was natural and right for the project to come to a conclusion and that it would be wrong to try to make it go on forever or to fixate on it,' the actress said. 'I felt really prepared for the ending of the project and then the continuing of the personal relationships, that felt really good to me.'
And then something kind of, well, perfect happened. 'I remember there was this weird upswing of energy between me and Michelle, and we felt weirdly hyper,' Slate said. 'And I said to her, 'Oh, my God, it's the rally. It's our rally.' And Michelle was like, 'It's the rally! Oh my God, it's our rally, right? Because we're about to end.' I feel a little chilled even thinking about it now.'
In final episode of the series, Molly experiences a so-called 'rally,' a surge of both energy and clarity that can come when someone is approaching their final moments on this mortal coil. It's a beautiful way to see the end of something.
'I felt really good, a real feeling of leaving it all out there on the field, of being satisfied, personally satisfied, and knowing for myself that I came here to do something and I did what I intended to do,' she said. 'I felt that I grew exponentially as a performer, and I just felt like, wow, there's a lot of goodness for me right now, and that's something to mark. I felt like, oh, I'm finally old enough to allow myself the full life of a certain goodness, not just looking at something that is currently good and smashing it down because things will eventually be hard again or something. This is a flame that I'm going to let burn for as long as it wants to. For me, it continues, it's definitely there. I haven't really experienced that before.'
There are other burning flames in Slate's life, too. When she spoke to IndieWire, she was just days away from heading to Cannes to see the world premiere of her screenwriter husband Ben Shattuck's much-anticipated first film, 'The History of Sound.' The Paul Mescal- and Josh O'Connor-starring period piece has been long in the works, and the already-bubbly Slate lit even further up when asked about her expectations for it.
'My husband is so brilliant, and this is the first screenplay he's ever written,' Slate said. 'Everyone that read the screenplay would just be crying their eyes out. I was watching him go through this experience, and I wasn't surprised at all because, of course, I know how smart he is and how beautiful his thinking is, just what he sees and how he describes it. Watching him do this work and watching him be so successful and feel so much joy in the work and have an experience that he truly deserves is just really refreshing for me. It feels like some sort of benevolent, heavenly body is shining its weird, silvery light onto our little life. We're still ourselves, but we're both experiencing, in different ways, these moments of success that feel well-earned. And that's really rare.'
(And, yes, she's very excited to go to her first Cannes Film Festival this week for the film's premiere, though she did confess, 'I'm also afraid that I'll fall down the stairs.')
After her life-changing experience with 'Dying for Sex,' Slate said, she wants to continue to seek out projects that feel this good and true and real. She expects they will come in many forms.
'It sets a really high bar in a lot of ways, in terms of the writing, director. I just want to make choices that feel as good and uncompromising as this choice felt,' Slate said. 'I don't care what kind of project it is. I want to do so many different things, I want to do niche, beautiful indie dramas, and I also really, really wish I could be in a movie with Will Ferrell, like a big, big, big, big, just booming, hilarious comedy.'
Mostly, though, Slate seems eager to keep embracing evolution and reinvention, with just a dash of real-world worries thrown in for good measure. An experience like 'Dying for Sex' will do that to a girl.
'Every actor, unless you're just getting pelted with offers, you have to grow, you have to climb, and you have to sometimes make compromises because you've got to pay your mortgage and stuff,' Slate said. 'I understand that, and hopefully I continue to pay my mortgage, and that allows me to stay in this decision-making process where I feel as legitimate and satisfied by the work as I hope to. That's a thing that I learned on this project, and once you learn it, I don't think you unlearn it.'
All episodes of 'Dying for Sex' are now streaming on Hulu.
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