Can Jenny Slate Make Cancer Funny?
Mere days after she wrapped Dying for Sex, Jenny Slate chopped off all her hair.
She’d had basically the same style all her adult life, but through the process of filming the FX cancer comedy, her locks began to take on new meaning. “I felt that my long hair held the sadness, and I just needed to reboot my physicality,” she says, explaining how she got what was left of her character out of her head. “Usually an extreme haircut means, ‘Oh hey, looks like you’re getting divorced!’ ” she notes. “But this was the first time I’ve changed my appearance because something good happened to me.”
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And really, Dying for Sex should be very good to, and for, Jenny Slate. It’s the sort of sure-to-get-noticed prestige limited series — debuting April 4 — that can potentially alter an actor’s career trajectory. Not that Slate, 42, needs much of a course correction. Over the past decade or so, she’s stolen scenes on Parks and Recreation (as Mona-Lisa Saperstein), appeared in Marvel superhero films (as a scientist studying symbiotic life forms in Venom), voiced Harley Quinn in a LEGO Batman movie (and a slew of other animated characters, including a bunny named Judy in Zootopia) and, most recently, played Blake Lively’s sister in the most-obsessed-about drama of 2024 (Slate declines to comment on the ongoing It Ends With Us feud or any of the accusations and counter-accusations her co-star and director Justin Baldoni have been flinging at each other).
Her role in Dying for Sex, though, definitely feels like new ground. The miniseries, co-created by Liz Meriwether (New Girl, The Dropout) and Kim Rosenstock (GLOW, Only Murders in the Building), is based on the life of the late Molly Kochan, played in the show by Michelle Williams, a podcaster who received a terminal cancer diagnosis, decided to leave her unsatisfying marriage so that she could pursue as much life-changing sex as she could physically handle, and then died with her best friend, Nikki — Slate’s character — by her side.
“This show is a love story about a lot of things — a woman and her body, a woman and her neighbor, a woman and her vibrator,” Rosenstock says of the series. “But ultimately, it’s about two best friends. And how friendship can be a life force.”
For Slate, an actress who cut her teeth on laughs, it’s a role that could open dramatic doors. She began her career in the Brooklyn comedy scene in the late aughts — after growing up in Milton, Massachusetts, and attending Columbia University — staging a weekly stand-up variety show called Big Terrific, creating and voice-starring in the short film series Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (which she later voiced and produced as an Oscar-nominated feature-length animated film) and even, in 2009, spending a season on SNL.
Her first big acting break came in 2013 when she landed that part on Parks and Rec, which was quickly followed by a role in Gillian Robespierre’s well-received indie drama Obvious Child, in which Slate starred as a comedian whose one-night stand leads to an accidental pregnancy and then an abortion (it won her a Critics Choice award). She describes the rest of her career — which has also included two stand-up specials and two best-selling memoirs — as more or less a series of serendipitous events.
“I am a person of many appetites and curiosities,” she says.
About a year ago, though, Slate came to a decision about her future. She called her agents and told them that, going forward, she only wanted to participate in creative endeavors that allowed her to go, as she put it, “full wingspan.” Whether a daylong job or a starring role, she wanted the experience of truly unfurling herself in front of the camera. She had no regret or resentment toward what she’d done up until that point — she says she was never unsatisfied with any of her roles — but the colliding factors of turning 40 and becoming a mother (she has a young daughter with husband Ben Shattuck, a writer and painter; they shuttle between homes in both Massachusetts and Los Angeles) altered her brain chemistry in a way that made it impossible to continue as she was.
“I just got to a point where I felt like there was something in me that I’m trying to work out,” she says of her thinking. “There was a new development that I urgently wanted to take for a spin.”
Just a few days after that call with her agents, she got to take that spin. Meriwether and Rosenstock had been working on the Dying for Sex package since before the COVID-19 lockdown, and finally all the pieces were coming together — except for one. They still hadn’t found an actress for the role of Nikki.
“We needed someone who could draw out Michelle and bring her to life in ways she didn’t know she was capable of, who could be really kind and tender and also bring comic relief,” says Rosenstock. “We needed a unicorn.”
Slate’s agents sent her the scripts on a Thursday. By Tuesday, she was taking the train down from Massachusetts to New York for a chemistry read. “I truly couldn’t believe she was willing to do that, because to me she’s like a giant movie star,” says Rosenstock. Slate recalls being more nervous for the meeting than she’s been in years. “I haven’t felt like that since before speech team tournaments in high school when I would throw up on the bus,” she says. The sides were from a scene in the first episode, when Molly tells Nikki that her breast cancer has become metastasized and incurable. “At the end of her read, it was one of those moments where you’re like, ‘That’s it, that’s the show,’ ” recalls Meriwether.
Slate began shooting Dying for Sex shortly after wrapping It Ends With Us, a film that’s been mired in controversy for the past several months since Lively filed suit against Baldoni for sexual harassment and orchestrating a smear campaign against her, prompting Baldoni to file his own counterclaims alleging defamation and extortion. Slate has not spoken publicly about the feud — aside from releasing a brief statement in support of Lively early on — and won’t change that policy during this interview.
“I don’t have anything to say about that,” she says when asked to compare the two productions. “Everything is its own thing. I poured my heart into this work, and every minute of [Dying for Sex] was important to me, and I just want to talk about that.
“Anyone can ask anything,” she goes on when pressed about how she’ll maintain boundaries during red carpets and junkets, “but my only responsibility is to speak about the work I’m there to promote. It was so important to me to get this job, so why would I spend time talking about anything but that?”
Clearly, however, the Dying for Sex set felt like a safe space to Slate, even though, as the title implies, much of the acting involved in the production required close-quarter intimacy. One of the episodes, for instance, has Williams’ and Slate’s characters attending a kink party. To make the actors comfortable, the showrunners brought in additional intimacy coordinators.
“The visual of all of them standing there, wearing earpieces, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m in a whole new world,’ ” says Meriwether with a laugh. “We thought a lot about how to portray the sex on this show and how to really make it about the character and the story,” she adds. “We wanted you to know something new about the character by the end of the scene, as opposed to just watching sex.”
To keep the mood light, especially during the darkest scenes, the producers and stars would sometimes call in snack wagons as a treat for the crew. “For some reason, it was very often an ice cream truck,” says Slate. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, there are so many ice cream trucks in this sex cancer show.’ After we shot one of Molly’s final speaking scenes, we were all crying and hugging each other, and through tears I was just like, ‘Do you guys know if you’re going to get the honeycomb or the strawberry?’ “
No amount of ice cream, though, could soften some of the show’s emotional blows. The series forces viewers — and its actors — to contend with a host of Big Topics: How do we spend our days? Who do we spend them with? How do we experience pleasure? What can we take with us at the end? As Williams’ Molly moves toward the final moments of her life, Slate’s character finds herself grappling with her ability to help her friend without abandoning herself. It’s heavy stuff, especially for a comedian.
“She knows when to make a joke or when to sit quietly and rub your shoulders,” Williams says in an email of how her co-star handled the intensity of the project. “Nothing escapes her.”
Slate’s own confidence with the role was bolstered by director Shannon Murphy, who made it a point to compliment the actress on the ease with which she tapped into emotional extremes. “I’ve had a lot of boyfriends say that to me, but I’ve never heard it put in a positive context,” Slate jokes. “I was like, ‘I’m finally wearing this the right way.’ “
Now that she’s on the other side of this potentially career-elevating endeavor, Slate’s agents can probably expect other phone calls: She has a new bar for the type of onscreen role she’s willing to take. It’s not so much about genre, or even content — though she does say she wouldn’t mind making a horror movie, or a thriller, and would be especially interested in any part opposite Grover or any other Muppet — but about the way that a particular project makes her feel.
“I’m really glad about the life I’ve had so far,” she says. “It feels very fortunate and good. But going forward, I’m trying to fly higher. I want to be in something that feels as good as it felt to be a part of Dying for Sex.“
This story appeared in the March 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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