Rachel Bloom's Mission is to Unravel the Stories Women Tell Themselves
You have to enter through a doughnut to arrive at the place where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend gets made. From the parking lot, the enormous frosted, rainbow-sprinkled entrance to the outdoor coffee-shop set looks like a magical portal separating real life (or a particularly grim section of North Hollywood, anyway) from the fantasy world of the show. Crossing the doughnut threshold feels especially symbolic now that the series is about to enter its fourth and final season. It makes me think of crazy dreams come true, girly powerhouses, the miracle of (creative) birth, and other things that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would craft into songs at once filthy and ingenuous.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which airs on the CW, is the inspired, serendipitous love child of Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom, the Golden Globe–winning actress who stars as the titular crazy ex. The two met five years ago when Brosh McKenna stumbled on Bloom’s music videos while procrastinating online and emailed her to see if perhaps there was a show idea in the videos somewhere. Bloom, now 31, was a musical-theater kid a few years out of college who had moved into sketch comedy and comedy writing. She’d also started making humorous music videos like “Pictures of Your Dick” and the insanely catchy “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” Brosh McKenna, 20 years Bloom’s senior, was a successful producer and screenwriter best known for a string of studio rom-coms and career-girl-coms (27 Dresses, Morning Glory, and The Devil Wears Prada, among others) in the ’90s and 2000s. Bloom loved musical theater, but she’d begun to feel it was weirdly retrograde and antifeminist. Brosh McKenna was coming to a similar conclusion about rom-coms: that they were “a little synthetic and out of touch culturally with where women were.” Creating a show together would be a chance to subvert both genres. It would also be a chance to tell a genuine story.
Bloom came to the duo’s first meeting armed with ideas, but Brosh McKenna had a vision for something more ambitious. “I’d pitched other shows in a much more episodic, sitcom-y format,” Bloom tells me when I meet her outside the writers’ room and offices, which are decorated like a fun shared apartment. Brosh McKenna knew that she didn’t want to make a show that spit out copies of itself; instead, she told Bloom, “I want to make a show that has a real plot. I want to make a 60-hour movie with you.” Bloom latched on to this idea immediately. Knowing where the characters were going, and what stages they were going to have to go through to get there, felt like an opportunity to say something emotionally real.
Brosh McKenna hadn’t gone to the meeting with the intention of pitching her Crazy Ex-Girlfriend idea to Bloom, but she soon realized she was the person to make the show with. From its inception, it was a story that wanted to examine how love makes us crazy, but also ask why it makes us so. “Aline had wanted to do a movie exploring what it’s like for the person who’s in the throes of extreme infatuation,” Bloom says. “My music videos had always explored kind of a heightened state, but then there was always a moment of realness and sadness. Aline busted out, ‘Well, I have an idea for a movie called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Yep! That!’ ” By the time they reached the parking lot, they were already talking about the characters.
Bloom plays Rebecca Bunch, a Harvard- and Yale-educated real estate lawyer who impulsively quits her job on the day she’s going to be made partner after suffering a panic attack, running outside, and bumping into her first love from camp on the street. Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) tells her that he’s been living in New York but has decided to move back to his hometown of West Covina, California (“two hours from the beach, four in traffic”). Then he jokes that he wouldn’t have dumped her if he’d known how well she’d turn out-which is enough for Rebecca to quit her high-paying job and move out to the sticks, where she gets a position at the Whitefeather & Associates Law Offices, befriends a crafty paralegal named Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin), and starts plotting how to pry Josh away from his girlfriend, Valencia (Gabrielle Ruiz). In different hands, this premise might have been played for laughs at the expense of the delusional Rebecca. Instead, the show smartly interrogates assumptions that other shows would have confirmed, and explores gray areas they would have ignored. It draws out the complexities of supporting characters who would have been rendered as types. It looks at the way we assign blame to some people and let others off the hook, but also at the way romantic love is used to justify terrible behavior. “We wanted to talk about the stages of being obsessed with someone,” Bloom says. “And how it’s not about the person, it’s about you.”
It was always clear that Rebecca had problems-that she was prone to depression and anxiety, that she was extremely sensitive and impulsive, that she couldn’t tolerate her feelings. Her eventual diagnosis, borderline personality disorder, grew out of her increasingly erratic behavior. “At first, Rebecca’s actions were based on stuff we’d observed,” Bloom says. “In other people and in my own experiences with anxiety and depression. But as the story demanded that she do wilder and wilder things, we started to think, ‘Okay, well, this isn’t just generalized anxiety anymore. This is something else.’ ” In the end, the show’s handling of Rebecca’s diagnosis was praised for recognizing the importance of naming the problem and addressing it.
When I meet Bloom on the second day of production, she’s just come from a last-minute voice lesson. She spent the weekend at Comic-Con and drank too much, and now her scalene muscles are swollen. I feel bad that the interview is being squeezed in between an emergency voice lesson and shooting episode one, but she quickly puts me at ease. She comes across as genuinely friendly and down-to-earth, as well as thoughtful, passionate, and serious. The next day, when I visit the set, she’s like a kid in a candy shop. She jokes around with the crew and dashes back and forth between the scene she’s shooting and Rebecca’s bedroom set, where the director, the script supervisor, and Jack Dolgen, one of the show’s writers and a member of the songwriting team (which also includes Bloom), are watching the takes on monitors. Then Pete Gardner, who plays Rebecca’s (former) boss Darryl Whitefeather, and Gabrielle Ruiz pop in as well. Soon everybody starts talking about the touring Crazy Ex-Girlfriend stage show they did last spring. They tell me Bloom was so engaged with the audience that she allowed them to call out suggestions. Bloom would do a traveling show again in a heartbeat. She wonders if they could sell out Madison Square Garden.
After a while, Brosh McKenna comes over from the writers’ room and offers to take me back for a tour. The vibe there, as on the set, is chill and friendly. Their old assistant, Britney Young, now a series regular on the Netflix show GLOW, has stopped by for a visit. She tells me that when she found out she’d been cast, Brosh McKenna cried and Bloom screamed. The support is palpable: I’m introduced to more than a writer who has moved quickly up the ranks. I don’t want to generalize about men, to paraphrase a favorite Crazy ExGirlfriend song, but this workplace feels distinctly woman-run.
When the show is on hiatus between seasons, Bloom and Brosh McKenna spend a lot of time at each other’s houses, figuring out the arc of the upcoming season-over dinner, in the hot tub, while drinking wine. Then, before shooting starts, Bloom is in the writers’ room for about eight weeks. Once the show is in production, she’s writing songs, filming scenes, and dashing into the editing room in costume between takes. Brosh McKenna considers it part of her job to manage Bloom’s workload but keep her looped in. “She can’t read all the material. She can’t be in on every conversation. She wouldn’t survive,” she says. “My main concern always, from the beginning- because her workload is so extraordinary-is we can’t kill Rachel or make her sick. That’s job one: to protect her health and her mental well-being. This year, we rented some new space for Rachel to have a place to sleep.” Bloom was especially thankful that her husband, Dan Gregor, was a consultant and writer on the show before he began working on features. It helped that the person she went home to knew what she was carrying on her shoulders.
“We’re so close personally, and we’re collaborating so closely,” Brosh McKenna says. “But it’s also really important for us to have comfortable space, so we don’t meld into one human being. We miss each other when we’re shooting because she’s on set and I’m here. I’ve never had a partner like that,” she continues. “We started working on the show the day we met, which is June five years ago. And this show is a five-yearlong conversation between a young lady and a 20-years-older lady.”
Bloom grew up in Manhattan Beach, a waterfront community just south of Los Angeles, where she felt like a neurotic outsider. She was an only child in what she describes as “a very eccentric family” (her parents had a Homer Simpson multimedia painting that spouted catchphrases when you passed it, and they had a jukebox in the house). Bloom’s grandfather was an amateur theater director, and she started going to musical theater productions at a very young age.
“I think I have a specific fondness for the music and movies of the mid- to late ’90s, because it was the one thing that made me feel like I fit in,” she says. “I really latched on to things, anything from A Goofy Movie to She’s All That, because unlike, say, Annie Get Your Gun, it was the one thing I liked that everyone else also liked. Also the Spice Girls. Otherwise, I was all about Guys and Dolls, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Mel Brooks, ‘Weird Al,’ and Ethel Merman. I also loved Disneyland. We had a year-long pass to Disneyland, so I loved that kind of escapism and fantasy.”
While at NYU, Bloom got involved with a sketch-comedy group that Gregor, her future husband, had also been part of. “Every month, we would write and perform an entirely new show. That was a big influence. That’s where I learned comedy.”
The music videos began when Bloom was performing in a sketch show at Upright Citizens Brigade, not long after she graduated. She had a sketch idea to have someone go to sing a traditional musical theater song, but then just sing a song about the movie Space Jam. Next came the thought to write an absurdist song about pining for the sci-fi author Ray Bradbury. She was planning to make it as an indie rock video, but her then-boyfriend Gregor suggested she overlay a familiar trope. “He said, ‘Why don’t you do Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time”?’ And I thought, ‘That’s genius. What’s my twist on that?’ ”
In 2010, Bloom’s Ray Bradbury video went viral. It got her an agent and a writing job on Jonah Hill’s animated Fox series, Allen Gregory, which turned out to be hard.
“I was the only girl, I was the youngest, and some of the people on the staff were really mean,” she recalls. One of the writers in particular made her life difficult. “I think we’re finally coming out of this fetishizing of the writers’ room as a place where you’re just mean,” she says. “You know, like, ‘Well, that’s good comedy. That’s good jokes. You stay till midnight, and you’re just mean to each other.’ No, that’s men who don’t want to go home to their families, who don’t know how to manage their time efficiently. I really love working with moms for that reason. They’re very efficient with their time. There’s some fucking around, obviously. You blow off steam. But they want to go home. They have other things to do in their lives.”
After the success of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the rude guy heard an interview with Bloom in which she spoke about that experience, and he called her. He wanted to make sure she wasn’t talking about him. “I said, ‘It was absolutely you. You made me cry every day,’ and we had a really emotional conversation,” she says. “I could tell he wasn’t really used to it, because he’s very emotionally closed off. I said, ‘You know, my writing is much more about the emotion, and you just come from more of a joke-driven place. It’s still very good, but there’s a limit to that.’ ”
“At one point, he said, ‘Well, your comedy isn’t necessarily my cup of tea.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I think the reason you think that is because it’s about an experience outside your own. You have to understand that this is why everyone’s talking about straight white men. You’ve never had to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. In comedy, you have to pretend to be a straight white dude in order to fit in.’ ” She told him that she had been terrified of him and still was. She added that he had a reputation in the comedy community of being belittling to women, which blew his mind. But in the end, she says, it was actually a lovely conversation.
The writer explained to Bloom that he’d felt insecure. It was one of his first jobs, and he’d just been trying to impress the bosses. “That’s the thing-he’s not telling himself, ‘I’m a villain.’ He’s telling himself, ‘I’m the upstart comedian who has to prove myself,’ ” Bloom says. “He’s not realizing the casualties in his wake.”
All of it, however indirect, has been grist for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. “This show has made me think a lot about the stories we tell ourselves,” Bloom says, sipping her tea. “And how much the narrative we think we’re in affects the decisions we make. I was looking through my old diaries, when I was talking about being in love with someone-the lies I told myself. Like, I wrote, ‘Oh, they just happened to be here.’ Or, like, ‘We’re just buds. He’s so cool.’ And then, ‘He doesn’t realize that we’re meant to be.’ Okay, so that’s my narrative. First, I was in a ‘friends’ narrative. Then I put myself in a ‘lovers’ narrative. Then I was in a ‘woman scorned’ narrative. When you drop the narrative, you just see yourself as a person in this very weird, muddled gray area.… We have narratives to give us structure. Our brains look for patterns. So narratives aren’t wrong, but they’re often very simplistic ways of looking at life.”
The end is in sight for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but it’s also a long way away-18 episodes to go, 25 more songs to write. As for what happens next, after having created and starred in such a personal show, Bloom has no idea. “There’s a lot I want to do, but I have to be passionate about it,” she says. “This show was my dream. This is exactly what I wanted for my life. It’s stunning. I can’t believe this happened.” There’s talk of taking the show to Broadway; there’s a contract with Grand Central Publishing for a book of essays; and of course, there’s the pitching of new shows.
“It’s hard to sell shows now. That’s the other thing about the future-I’m fully prepared to go back to funding my own YouTube videos, because I don’t know what the climate is,” she says. “I’m just lucky I get to do this. Overall, I think the show is about personal happiness and empathy for other people and understanding where others are. I strive to continue to live my life that way.”
This article originally appeared in the October 2018 issue of ELLE.
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