Maya Erskine has spent a lot of time questioning her impulse to act and to have all eyes on her, after a childhood in which she desperately wanted to blend in – or even disappear altogether. “In therapy I’ve talked a lot about why I’m someone who’s drawn to that,” she says. “It can seem like it’s about, ‘Look at me! Like me! Approve of me!’, but I think it’s really about finding your people. It’s about connections, especially when you grow up feeling different and like you don’t have a community. Through art, you’re able to find that community, which is a wonderful thing.”
Erskine’s PEN15, a deliciously uncomfortable autobiographical comedy about the agonies of teenage life, certainly succeeded in creating a community around its star, despite a questionable premise: Erskine, then 31, played her 13-year-old self struggling with puberty, boys and her Japanese-American parentage opposite a cast of actual teenagers. The show was lavished with critical acclaim and generated a passionate cult following: “It was such a big and lovely surprise to have these people reach out and say: ‘That exact thing happened to me.’ So it wasn’t just about me making them feel better. It made me feel better, too.”
Erskine, now 36, is talking from her home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. “We’re in the [San Fernando] Valley and it’s nice here because it doesn’t feel as Hollywood-y as other places. Before this we were in the Hollywood Hills and I didn’t love that.” Dressed in a slouchy sweatshirt, and with her dog curled up in an armchair next to her, she explains she is slightly broken from jetlag, having just got back from a trip to visit family in Japan with her husband, the actor Michael Angarano, and their two-year-old son, Leon.
Tomorrow she is due to fly again, this time to New York and then on to Europe to promote her newest project. Erskine is starring in Mr & Mrs Smith, a wildly entertaining and properly funny TV reimagining of the 2005 movie about two spies masquerading as a suburban couple. She plays Jane Smith, a part previously played by Angelina Jolie, while the series co-creator Donald Glover steps into the Brad Pitt role as her husband, John. It is not only the biggest role of Erskine’s career, but also the most expensive production that she has worked on.
“Oh yeah, it’s biiig money,” she confirms, with delight. “There were these incredible international locations in Italy and this crazy cast [Michaela Coel, John Turturro, Alexander Skarsgård and Sharon Horgan are among the guest stars]. I’ve never known anything like it.” In the movie, we met Jolie and Pitt several years into a stagnating marriage; it was only when they each learned the other was an assassin that they rediscovered their spark (the film famously led to the pair becoming a real-life couple). By contrast, the TV version begins with the protagonists’ separate recruitment by a spy agency known as “the company”, during which they agree to give up their old lives and enter an arranged marriage. We then watch the Smiths’ awkward first meeting in their new home, a swanky New York City brownstone, where they pledge to keep their relationship platonic – you can guess how long that lasts.
While preparing for the role, Erskine found herself feeling anxious about her appearance. “I’d given birth the year before, I hadn’t exercised and I wasn’t really taking care of my body,” she says. “You look at Angelina Jolie in the film and she’s a total goddess, and I was thinking: ‘Well, I can’t be her.’ I knew I was never going to push myself to get Marvel ripped and turn myself into this fucking babe.” So Erskine gave herself a talking to. “These were not helpful thoughts, so I really had to accept that I was going to be a real woman, I’m not going to be perfect and that’s OK. I decided it would still be sexy, but in a different way.”
Glover and Erskine never got round to doing a “chemistry read”, in which actors playing a couple are tested on camera to see if they have the required va-va-voom. This was presumably due to having joined the production late in the day (Phoebe Waller-Bridge was originally cast as Jane, though she left the project six months in due to “creative differences”). “So the first time we had to do a sex scene it was really intense because we had an intimacy coordinator and there was all this buildup [of it] as the “first time” being John and Jane together,” says Erskine. “And suddenly it felt like we were kids not knowing how sex works. It was like: ‘Uh oh. Guys, this isn’t good. What are we gonna do?’ But it works because it was meant to be [their] first time and, you know, that’s real.”
When a teaser for the series dropped late last year, there was online harrumphing at what many assumed was a straight remake of the film, prompting co-writer Francesca Sloane to pen an open letter in defence of the project. In it she noted how she and Glover had asked each other: “What would a series feel like if our heroes weren’t the two most beautiful people on the planet, but instead were two lonely people, two underdogs, wanting more from life than what they currently had?”
Erskine says her interest in the role was piqued both by the idea of the underdog and “because it was Donald and Francesca, who had worked together on Atlanta, so I knew it was going to be different. It was so nice to have them say from the beginning that it was as if we were the reject versions of [Pitt and Jolie]. And that’s always a happy, safe space for me.”
It is a space Erskine threw herself into with gusto in PEN15, which she co-wrote with her friend, the actor Anna Konkle. The pair met when they were drama undergraduates at New York University – they started out at the Experimental Theatre Wing, which focused on physical theatre – and were drawn together by a shared impulse to “find humour in the dark things about ourselves that we felt ashamed of”. They spent several years working in local theatre before finding their route into TV by posting comedy sketches on the Will Ferrell and Adam McKay-founded website Funny Or Die, and through a web series called Project Reality.
For PEN15, they originally imagined their characters as having escaped a cult, though when the plot became too convoluted, they decided to simplify matters by basing it around 13-year-old schoolgirls, also called Maya and Anna, who they would play themselves. Casting their fictional peers was a challenge, with actors’ parents often reading the scenes shortly before the audition and discovering “that their kid was going to be fingering Maya at a party or something, and then cancelling. They’d be all: ‘I’m absolutely not sending my kid to do this.’”
More challenging still was casting Maya’s mother, Yuki, who needed to be a Japanese immigrant and whom we see, among other things, walking in on her daughter masturbating. The solution? Erskine hired her real-life mother, Mutsuko. So how was it pleasuring yourself in front of your mother? Erskine laughs and drops her head in her hands. “Yeah, it was horrific. The worst thing was to film that episode and have her know that it was based on something true. But I ended up having conversations with my parents after [the series] came out and I was surprised because their response was very loving and sympathetic. I thought they’d be all: ‘Oh Maya, I can’t believe you masturbate.’ But they said: ‘I’m sorry you were going through all that.’”
Erskine’s father is drummer Peter Erskine, of Weather Report and Steely Dan – she has hazy recollections as a small child of jumping around on a tour bus singing Steely Dan’s Bodhisattva. Peter met Mutsuko, then an interpreter, while touring in Japan; after getting married, the pair settled in California. Growing up, Erskine says, she “felt ashamed of the Japanese side of me. I felt ashamed of the cultural smells inside of my kitchen when kids would come over, or the fact that in Japan you all take baths together, and so they were like: ‘Ewww.’ Even in Japan, I didn’t feel fully accepted there because they would make fun of me for having an American accent.” In her teens, her insecurities were compounded by watching movies and looking at magazines where the beauty standard was willowy and white. “So I was like: ‘OK, I’m ugly, I need to hide this side of myself and I need to look like them instead.’”
As an adult, Erskine embraced her differences; although, rising through the acting industry, that feeling of otherness has never quite gone away. “There was one audition, and I forget what it was for, but one of the producers kept saying to me that I was the violinist from this Spider-Man movie he’d worked on. He was talking about this older Asian woman [who had played that role] and I was in my 20s at the time. So I said, ‘I assure you, sir, that was not me,’ but he would just not let it go. So there are still those microaggressions, even though it’s better than when I started.”
Having now experienced the intensity of a glossy TV drama, Erskine says she is hoping to do a film next, largely because of the medium’s brevity. “I don’t want to say I don’t want to do TV again, but I feel a bit burnt out from the saga and the process of it, and how long it lasts and how fast it is. Doing Mr & Mrs Smith was like doing four movies back-to-back, which is a lot, especially when you’ve got a kid.”
She is also on tenterhooks having just turned in an early draft of a script based on Leïla Slimani’s book Lullaby (published in the US as The Perfect Nanny), in which she is slated to star alongside Nicole Kidman. Even now, Erskine can’t quite fathom how she has reached a point in her career where she, the perennial outsider, gets starring roles in shows with bottomless budgets. She recalls being in New York’s Tribeca on one of the first nights of filming Mr & Mrs Smith, in the middle of “this massive set with big lights and cranes. We’d basically taken over the neighbourhood, and I couldn’t believe that we were in it. Me, Donald and Francesca were walking the streets hand in hand just gazing at it all, giggling to each other and saying: ‘How did they let us do this?’”
Mrs & Mrs Smith will be available on 2 February on Prime Video.
