It was “batshit insane,” Konkle says of the series, but it got them an agent, despite having “200 views.”Īt the time, Girls had just come out, so Hollywood was hot on female creators. Using that as a jumping-off point, she and Erskine created fake pilots for each webisode, outfitting their characters in kooky wardrobes from Goodwill. Konkle never opened the cabinet, but she liked imagining what was inside. The resulting web series, Project Reality, grew out of an internship Konkle had at VH1, where there was a file cabinet stuffed with rejected reality-show pitches and spec pilots, many sent in by D-list celebrities. They discovered they were ideal collaborators, both with an offbeat sense of humor and a rip-the-Band-Aid-off forthrightness. and Konkle was ready to quit acting that they decided to make something together as a kind of last hurrah - the classic moment when the heroes say to hell with what we’re supposed to do, let’s do what makes us happy. It wasn’t until Erskine had moved back to her hometown of L.A. They weren’t writing partners right away, just friends and confidantes as they struggled through their postgrad years in New York, going to auditions, waiting tables, and doing free-theater gigs. Konkle and Erskine have been sharing their mortifying stories since they became close as students in NYU’s experimental-theater program. I think some people maybe just choose to repress it or block it out of their minds.” So every experience that’s traumatic, or any experience at all, is there forever. I cannot get rid of it.’ Because your brain is forming at that time.
“I’m like, ‘That shit is imprinted in my brain. “It’s so funny, because a lot of people say, ‘How did you guys remember that? Did you look at journals?’ ” Erskine says. That texture is what allows them to dig deeper when they recreate the experience of being bullied at a slumber party or fumbling through a first kiss. Konkle and Erskine are meticulous about everything, from the outfits they wear to the cabinets in their characters’ kitchens.
#Maya pen15 Patch
Your bad fashions may have been tie-dye, not stone-wash, your toys Cabbage Patch Dolls, not My Little Pony, but the desperate first crushes, the melodramatic lashing out at parents, the withering self-loathing are the same. The degree of specificity woven into the show is what makes it so visceral, even if you weren’t 13 in the year 2000. It’s a cliché of acting (and writing about acting) to call a performer “brave,” usually for things like gaining 30 pounds or wearing a prosthetic nose or, for women, being “unlikable.” But dressing as yourself in seventh grade and furiously masturbating on a set that looks exactly like your childhood bedroom, that’s brave. But more people seem to appreciate the secret-telling, the stuff that we were told not to talk about.” He was, like, mining for gold.’ The more shameful was the funnier stuff to us, and we thought that would not be accepted. I was pretending I liked it, and then I walked around with a waddle for a day, because he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. It felt like, ‘I want to talk about the first time I was fingered. You’re experiencing sexual things, and your brain is changing, and your body is betraying you. “You’re not a child, and you’re not a teen.
“There are so many funny and fucked-up and sad memories within the in-between time of childhood and high school,” says Konkle.
So, Anna came over to see the house, and we touched each other’s bellies, and it was like - we almost bawled.” We’ve been able to talk on the phone about our pregnancies, but not hang out or hug. “We saw each other for the first time the other day, socially distanced.
#Maya pen15 full
She stands up and turns sideways, cupping a flowy top around her midsection to give me the full view. “It’s so embarrassing, like, ‘Oh, yeah, we do everything together,’ but also magical,” says Erskine, Zooming from the sunny office of her new home in Los Angeles in January. A coincidence, but somehow an unsurprising one. In real life, the masters of preteen trauma are self-assured, engaging, quite beautiful, and, as of mid-January, both very pregnant. Their Pen15 characters, middle schoolers Anna Konkle and Maya Ishii-Peters, are so comforting in their awkwardness, such perfect avatars for the 13-year-old that lives inside all of us, that meeting them as grown-ups, with their hair down, a little lip gloss on, wearing normal clothes, is kind of like finding out Batman is Bruce Wayne, or seeing a teacher at the mall. To see Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine without braces, slumped shoulders, and their signature hairdos - bowl cut for Erskine, strategic strands rigidly framing her face for Konkle - is, for the first few seconds, a little disorienting.
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