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“I wish that I could say I’ve always been a super political person, but it’s more like I’ve heard the call of the wild and now there’s no choice. My husband has always been the one out of the two of us that reads every article and watches CNN—and Fox News, with their blatant lies! But he wants to know what the enemy is saying. After 2016, I started to feel the call. Then we got further and further into [Trump’s] first four years, and it continued to get worse. Even pre- COVID the world started to feel like it was unraveling with all the fires in Australia and California; as if they were gearing up to something. And this year I was like, ‘Everyone and their grandma and their dogs get on board because truly we need every bit of help.’

“I think that the arts are often a place that we see the change we want to see in our society before it happens. Everything that has gone on in our world has made the industry that I work in take a really hard look at itself and change in a massive way. I definitely see a shift in what people are looking to create and how it’s being created. That’s something I was very lucky to experience on the very front end of the movement: I was on [Girls] for six years, a show that was run by women, created by women, and directed almost entirely by women. Sometimes I read parts and I’m like, This character is a throw blanket! She looks pretty and serves no purpose! I don’t want to play a ‘furniture’ character…

“This country’s history is not perfect, whatsoever. You have many, many dark spots. But I think at the end of the day, this country was founded on an idea of escaping tyranny—of coming to this new place to create a system in which we all had our voices heard and have our opinions be counted. We’re still struggling with so much homophobia and xenophobia and anti-semitism, and I mean there are so, so many problems in this country that need to be addressed. If we’re gonna really change this country, we need to be informed about what’s happening on our state and local level. So it’s like, ‘Who’s your congressman, who’s your senator? Who’s on your school board?’ Those things matter, too.”

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