Why did Love Life click with you? The first season felt more nuanced than a typical rom-com meet-cute with a bunch of foibles and then everyone rides off into the sunset. It felt like a character study of a woman in her 20s [AnnaKendrick] dealing with life in New York, and a large part of that is, who do you date? It leaned away from the feel-good aspect and dived into the stuff where it gets a little thorny and uncomfortable. Marcus is a bit of chameleon, isn’t he? In certain rooms he adopts a certain style of communication, and then in other rooms he adopts another. But I don’t think that it’s a huge put-on or a shift. It’s just, “I want to be able to communicate my ideas to this group of people, and what’s the best way to do that?” How much of Marcus in Love Life is based on your own experience? It’s not based on my own experiences so much as it’s loosely inspired by some awkward experiences I’ve had. There are little grace notes that are thrown in that echo things that have happened in my life, but the story in and of itself is pretty much its own thing concocted by the writers. You’ve said you aren’t the most romantic of men, so do you believe in soul mates and “the one”? Or is that something that you have in common with Marcus? I don’t believe in soul mates or the one. When I think of a soul mate or the one, it’s like lightning strikes. As soon as you see this person, that’s it, you just know from the moment you see them. And I don’t think that that’s necessarily the way it works for me. I think it’s more of a you find a person that does something to your guts, where you’re just like, “Oh, I’m really drawn to you. I’m not 100 percent sure what this is exactly, but there’s something that draws me to you more than other people. I’m not sure exactly what that feeling is, but I’m attracted.” And then you want to spend the time to develop that relationship with that person and to figure out if that’s something that can change into a lifelong partnership. Some people you can be drawn to very intensely, but you really should not be building a partnership with them. And then there’s people that you have that intense draw, the intense attraction to, and then you probably should. It’s an exercise in figuring out what is beyond the attraction, what are the qualities that really complement your life and turn into something that is sustainable. This is your first time producing a project, what has that experience been like? It’s been different. It’s a lot of fun in a lot of ways to be able to help craft the story and to weigh-in in a way that I haven’t been able to before. And so, that’s been great. A lot of time in TV, things move at a faster rate than theater. I come from the world of theater where you spend a lot of time working on the script—weeks and weeks, months and months, and sometimes years—really refining everything, so by the time you get into rehearsal, what you have is pretty much what it’s going to be. Minus a few tweaks and changes here and there. Sometimes there’s some big shifts but the story is what the story is for the most part. And with TV, because you’re only reading it maybe a week or a couple of days before you shoot it, sometimes you don’t really know how things are actually going to play when people are on their feet doing it until the cameras are rolling. And then you have to reconfigure. So it’s been really nice to be able to be an actual partner in reconfiguring these things when they need to change. It’s like being in a workshop of a play in that respect, where you’re asking some weird questions and trying to, while on the spot, find the most unexpected but inevitable way for a scene to go. That’s been a lot of fun. It doesn’t split your focus when you’re on set to juggle the two jobs? Not really, because usually when something’s not working in a scene, as an actor you bump against it a little bit. It’s like you’re having a hard time making a moment work. Usually [creator] Sam [Boyd], he’s very in tune when something is hitting in an awkward way, or it feels like we’re not dropping in. And so he’s very proactive about coming in like, “It seems like this is a little weird and you’re having a hard time digging into this. So why don’t we tweak that and change that and see how we can make this work a little bit better and feel a little bit more organic?” Marcus’ friend Yogi gives him good advice, which he doesn’t take. Do you have someone in your life that you can turn to for sage wisdom? I’ve got a few of them. I don’t find myself as frequently sunned as Marcus is, but I definitely do have some people that I go to. Especially when I’m all over the place and I really have no idea how to handle something, I have my friends that I go to for advice. What do you miss about The Good Place? I really miss my castmates, I really miss the crew. It’s just a great group of people to work with. It was my biggest job up until that time, and so I was delightfully surprised at how kind everyone was, how much fun it was to work on that set, how low-stress it was just because everyone was so great. If you had to pick, do you more resemble Chidi from The Good Place or Marcus from Love Life? Marcus, easy. Chidi is hyperverbal and he likes to talk out his neuroses. I don’t. There are times where Marcus bites his tongue and he has some things that are somewhat unresolved, but that’s closer to me than Chidi will ever be. Before you landed the role in The Good Place, you were considering quitting acting. What was the plan B? I had no idea. I was just thinking that maybe I should find a way to have some stability in my life. I told myself if things stayed the way they were, I was going to be an older actor who was still just taking whatever job he could get a hold of while having a ton of roommates who were half his age. And so I was just like, “I don’t know if I want that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t know if that’s what I want.” And so I was like, “Well, what can I do to find some stability?” I really don’t know what the plan B was going to be, but I knew that I couldn’t keep giving the energy to acting and have the return that I was getting. It’d be one thing if I was creating my own pieces and I was like, “Well, I’m foregoing stability, but I’m artistically doing everything that I want to do.” That would be one thing, but that wasn’t the case. I was very much in a lot of respects like a session guy. You come in, someone else has their project, someone else has their vision, and you work to make that happen. Hopefully, you find something in it that really resonates with you, but sometimes you don’t and you’re just doing the job. I just didn’t want to do that and also be struggling. I’d rather try to find another way to make money. So yeah, Good Place came along at the exact right time because it was something that I was really passionate about and really enjoyed, and thought was weird in all the best ways. It allowed me to pay my rent, which was great. After The Good Place, you moved onto The Underground Railroad. How challenging was it to take on the role of Royal, which couldn’t have been more different than doing a comedy? It was really challenging. I was shocked that I even got the part to begin with. I just wanted to get an audition and send it into [director] BarryJenkins and, hopefully, he would watch it and consider me for something later. I didn’t really think it was something that I would actually be in consideration for. But yeah, it was tough. I think that coming from a comedy, at least for me, there’s a clock ticking about how to make the jokes land. There’s a little bit of an outside-in thing, where it’s like, “OK, there’s a way I can do this scene that will be real and it’ll be organic, but I will kill all of the jokes. And then there’s a way in which I can do this where it can be real and organic, but I have to keep a certain timer in my head in order to make sure that these jokes sail, and that they land where they’re supposed to.” And that’s really not the case when you’re working on something like The Underground Railroad. That sort of second outside-in thing, it doesn’t matter. Really what’s important is the truth of that moment, and just leaning into that. And so I think it was just swapping out different tools for approaching a character. It’d been a while since I had taken on a part like that, and so it was a challenge, but I feel like the cast did some really, really great work. Our crew and our designers really did everything they could to make it feel as authentic as possible, and you really felt transported to another place. So the circumstances felt real. It wasn’t like I was having to think about being in this other time. It just felt like I was not in my own world, which informed the character and how that all came together. You have another relationship movie, a rom-com called We Broke Up. What’s the story behind that? It’s about a couple that are going to a wedding, and just before the wedding, the man asks the woman to marry him, and she vomits. And then they head to this wedding together for the woman’s sister. It just gets weird. But I think it’s a grown-up love story where the answers aren’t easy, and it gets really uncomfortable and complicated. But it’s great, I’m really proud of it. We have a killer cast in that as well. It’s on Hulu now. I’m really excited for people to see that one as well. What’s the feeling coming out of the pandemic after the last 18 months? The world isn’t the same place as it used to be. I really don’t feel like we’re out of it yet. I really wish we were. There’s a part of me that’s like, “OK, this thing is here now. This is as good as it’s going to get and we’re just going to live with a certain degree of peril for the rest of our lives.” That weighs on me. But honestly, I feel significantly older. This started around the time I turned 40. It’s only been a year, but I feel like it’s been five. I feel much more easily exhausted by people and by crowds. My social anxiety is on a serious uptick right now. I feel like my desire to engage with the world has decreased quite a bit. But at the same time, I miss doing the regular things. I don’t like the idea of going out and doing stuff as if it’s normal but it’s not. I’d rather just have the world be normal before I actually engage with it again so I can relax a bit more. There’s a degree of peril that surrounds everything now, so I have really complicated feelings. It feels good to be able to work, which helps, but I’m definitely a much more aged head case in a way.
