So, we were definitely playing with that nightmare.” “If I had been left alone at that age, in the circumstances that I felt inside, I don’t know where I would be. “There’s definitely something about a friendship - especially at that age, but if you’re lucky, forever - that’s the difference between survival or not,” Konkle said. “Pen15” takes these intense personal experiences and weaves them into a love story between friends. The set for Anna’s house looked so much like Konkle’s home before her parents got divorced that walking into it for the first time really threw her. Maya’s mother is played by Erskine’s real mother, Mutsuko Erskine, whose acting debut here has been so well received she’s now getting calls for auditions. When Maya gets her period, she keeps it a secret, which Erskine also did for an entire year. “It made my face tingle,” Konkle said, which “was like a little treat.”
When the camera pulls back and Brendan walks away, the lower half of Anna’s face is shiny with spit, which was actually strawberry flavored lube. “He put his tongue in my mouth, and he did like a torpedo cat tongue and, like, drilled my mouth,” Anna tells Maya afterward.įilmed in extreme close-up, the excruciating kiss was actually between Konkle and her real-life boyfriend. In the show, Anna has her first kiss with Brendan, a boy she meets in band. Konkle’s abiding memory of her first kiss is of using her whole hand to wipe her mouth afterward. There are other middle school memories that “Pen15” does not try to correct.
It was a difficult episode to film at one point, Erskine broke down on the set, and then Konkle immediately broke down, too. But in the show, with the benefit of a script written by adults, Anna desperately tries to make amends.Īnna’s attempts to solve racism only end up hurting Maya more, and the episode becomes a sendup of a “white person being like, ‘I’m going to fix this for you,’ and that really not being the answer,” Konkle said.Įven as Konkle’s character does a better job of reacting to racism than she herself did at 13, she worried about her performance hitting the right note and not making Anna seem like the victim. At the time, none of Erskine’s friends stood up for her. Erskine, whose father is white and mother is Japanese, was told she had to play the pop group’s sole black member, Mel B, also known as Scary Spice, because of her race. This was especially true of the episode “Posh,” which is based on Erskine’s experience of dressing up as the Spice Girls with her white friends. “We would talk about that, but actually experiencing that was shocking.”
“I didn’t realize that certain traumas that we had written about were actually still as raw as they are in my life,” she said. (Yes, you are supposed to read the title as one word and feel like a middle schooler.) For Konkle, the connection with viewers has been “extremely cathartic and positive” and also “really vulnerable and emotional.” For Erskine, the acting part of the process has been especially illuminating. Pouring so much of themselves into the show has been an intense experience.
MAYA PEN15 SERIES
Six years ago, when Erskine and Konkle started working on the series (which they created with Sam Zvibleman), the only depiction of middle school that seemed to accurately portray their experiences was Todd Solondz’s 1995 film “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” (Today a list of raw middle school offerings could also include Bo Burnham’s “ Eighth Grade” and “Big Mouth” on Netflix.) The show has bullying and divorce and racism. Maya gets her period for the first time, and Anna survives a terrible first kiss. In 10 half-hour episodes, we see Anna and Maya discover masturbation, thongs and second base. Watching the show feels remarkably intimate, like reading a teenager’s very funny diary. Set in a middle school in 2000, the Hulu comedy has the pair playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves in seventh grade, surrounded by actual 13-year-old actors. “The show is our stories and our secrets,” Erskine said.
MAYA PEN15 TV
In a “crazy experiment,” as Erskine described it, they took this openness and made it the core of their first TV show: “Pen15.” The 31-year-olds met as undergraduates studying experimental theater at New York University, and in the decade or so since, they’ve caught each other up on most of their teenage experiences. It’s hard to find something Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine don’t know about each other.
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