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Jenny Slate likes being the one to ask questions. The writer, stand-up comedian and actress tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast that after nearly two decades of working in Hollywood and taking on a wide range of roles, she’s learned a pretty simple way to get out of her head when taking on something new: “It’s a waste of time to make assumptions when you have the space to ask questions, even if it’s uncomfortable.”
In the case of Dying for Sex, the FX limited series based on the podcast hosted by friends Nikki Boyer and Molly Kochan, Slate, 43, had a lot of very detailed questions for the real Nikki, an executive producer on the show. The podcast offered insight into the pair’s friendship and how it evolved after Molly was diagnosed with terminal cancer and embarked on a journey of sexual discovery. (Molly died in 2019.) The TV adaptation, where Michelle Williams stars as Molly opposite Slate’s Nikki, is perhaps an even more intimate portrait of their relationship, and it meant that Slate had to ask her real-life counterpart about a lot of things you might not usually ask a new colleague.
“ Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m being too familiar with people,” Slate said in our Zoom call, during which I was the one asking nosy questions. “I want to know a lot, but I don’t want people to feel that I’m invading their privacy. And in the case of Nikki, I didn’t want her to feel that I was mining her for information to help me be a better performer.”
Series creators Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, whom I spoke to earlier this spring, hadn’t specifically asked Slate to imitate the real Nikki — but it might have been that freedom that allowed Slate to take so much inspiration from her anyway. “I think it’s a great privilege to know any one true thing about someone, like whatever their favorite food, their favorite song is,” Slate, now a Gotham TV Award winner for her performance, tells me. “It’s actually quite hard, I think, to share ourselves, especially today.”
Slate managed to share a lot with me in our brief conversation, from the unexpected moments when shyness overtakes her (“It just seems impossible to me that I’ll ever say anything again”) to what might be the true definition of an actor’s instrument. Hear it all in this special bonus weekend edition of Prestige Junkie, and look out — there’s more coming on Sunday too!
