The first day Maya Erskine started physically training for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, she started to cry. She didn’t feel like herself—didn’t like the idea of pushing herself, didn’t see the endgame. But she didn’t stop. “Have you ever seen videos of people pushing those weights and pushing people across the room?” she asks on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen or read below). “It was like that.” A few more tears were shed, but by the time she got to filming, she felt like a new person.
This is still the Maya Erskine of Pen15, a physical and deftly silly performer of expansive emotional range. Erskine also helped create, produce, write, and direct that Hulu show, which earned her several Emmy nominations and showcased her unique comic sensibility. Going from that to Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a portrait of a marriage opposite Donald Glover that ranges from dramatically nuanced to action-packed, felt like a leap, but one that didn’t scare Erskine. She loved seeing herself as part of these massive setpieces, and enjoyed focusing on simply acting, as opposed to the half-dozen hats she had to wear at any given day on Pen15.
Erskine is now on the other side of a hit first season, winning both critics and audiences over and poised for a strong Emmys run this summer. What does she make of the show’s cliffhanger ending (yes, spoilers to follow), and is she ready for a potential season two? “I know things,” she teases. “It’s very exciting.”
Vanity Fair: Which part of taking on this role felt the most daunting?
Maya Erskine: Really it was more the practical side of filming every day extensively after having had a kid. It was my first child, and I was nervous about working and being away from my kid for that many hours a day for that extended period of time. In terms of the role, none of it scared me except the physical stuff. I just had to get really strong, and that was a big challenge for me because my body felt like I had gotten in a car accident. I couldn’t feel what it was like to be in my body. It felt very foreign to me, and I’m such a physical actor—that’s how I approach roles, from external to internal—and so for me to get to a place of being realistically able to play Jane, a spy? I tend to want to lie down a lot, so that was challenging for me.
Can you walk me through what that work looked like, exactly?
It started slow because when they approached me, it might’ve been six months or eight months before we started filming. So I had a slow intro into “getting fit,” but I wasn’t getting to a place where I needed to. So I joined this gym that Donald was training at, where a lot of actors get fit very fast. I cried my first day because it felt so foreign to me. It felt like, “I’m not this person. I don’t want to push myself there.” And I did end up pushing myself, and I did inevitably feel better and stronger and healthier.
This is such a fully rounded character. How did it feel to step into such a juicy part with so much production support around you?
I felt so fortunate that they saw that in me and that they wanted me to step into that role and that they believed that I could. I think for any actor, it’s a dream to be able to have a large swath of things to do, to have a place to go, to have an arc that feels fulfilling. This almost felt like just a joy ride. I got to go to all these places, and my challenge is always self-doubt. But that accompanies every part of anything I’m part of. So that’s just what I’m realizing might be my process. [Laughs] That didn’t go away. I also hate watching things I’m a part of because I focus on negative things that I find in my performance, and it just totally defeats the purpose of watching the show. But I was able to watch the show and enjoy it just as an audience member because they did such an incredible job.
I wonder if watching yourself during Pen15 was an agonizing process at all, given what you just said.
It was agonizing not just for me, but for the people around me, because I was such an annoying editor at first in that sense: “There should be a better take. That’s horrible.” And I had to learn how to see outside of myself and see what was the bigger picture of what was the best for the show, for the scene, for the story. So it did teach me to care less, I guess, about how I come across. I had to do that.