Couldn’t get enough after part one of our interview with #bicon Mara Wilson? Neither could we!
In part two of our interview with Mara, we spoke with the Twitter favorite about her recent works and bi advice, including why she loves voiceover gigs, the future of podcasting, and a theory or two about the obsession with turtlenecks on Succession. Read on to find out more.
JENNIE ROBERSON: You’ve made your mark in the podcasting world as well — my editor is a big fan of your work on Welcome to Night Vale, by the way.
Mara Wilson: Oh, thank you! Please thank her for me.
Editors Note: Huge fan! Everyone go listen to it.
Since you’re so well-known for The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, what’s one of your favorite aspects of playing that character?
MW: I think she has her own code of morality that completely makes sense to her, but not to anybody else. That is really interesting to me because I feel like some people have their own kind of code and their own way of going about the world, and you look at them and you’re just like, “How do they operate?” But to them, it just makes sense.
So I think finding this character for whom the disturbing things she does seem perfectly natural to her or make sense to her. That stuff is really interesting stuff to me. She’s just like: “Of course you should be made to swallow spiders in your sleep.” “People not changing their sheets is as bad as people leaving a rotting carcass of something somewhere.” I think that’s fascinating because people who behave strangely sometimes, it’s about there [being] things they don’t know what they don’t know. But I think she does know the things she does seem weird to other people, and she definitely kind of relishes in that.
Oh, she revels in it, for sure.
MW: Yeah, revels in it, yes.
Right. Eh, we go both ways around here, it’s fine.
MW: [Laughs]
So what does the future hold for The Faceless Old Woman?
MW: I’m reading the audiobook for The Faceless Old Woman Who Lives In Your Home, by the writers of Welcome To Night Vale. It’s such an amazing book. It’s a fantastic adventure story that David said is kind of like Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1846), but I’m less highbrow than that, so I was thinking it was more like The Princess Bride (1987). [Laughs] Except it’s scarier and darker and terrifying. It’s [got] stories of love and revenge, violence and adventures on the high sea, and all kinds of wonderful and scary, terrifying things.
And it’s really beautifully written. I had a wonderful time recording it; I love playing that part so much. So I’m very excited for the audiobook to come out.
It’s available for pre-order now! You can pre-order the audiobook.
What do you think is so appealing about the platform of podcasting, and where do you see it going from here?
MW: I think it’s a really intimate thing. It is basically storytelling. It does feel like there is a connection one-on-one with you.
I know a lot of times when I’ve tried to do comedy nights and storytelling shows, I knew a lot of people who would want to provoke. But that really wasn’t my thing. My thing wasn’t to placate audiences, either, but I did want to entertain them and make them feel welcomed.
I always feel like when I have an audience, I feel like I’m talking to someone cute, and it’s going well and I want to try and keep that up. Like I asked somebody cute to a dance and they actually went with me, and now I’m trying my hardest to entertain them - which didn’t actually happen a lot during my teenage years. I feel like, “Wow, you’re here to see me? I’m going to try to entertain you as best I can.”
There’s an element of that with podcasting. Being told stories is something that everybody likes
The Night Vale guys started something really small. It started with the New York Futurists, which is a very small DIY theatre company. [Their] whole thing is about representing yourself on stage and being honest, telling true stories from your life and trying new, experimental things. It’s fun and exciting, and it’s one of the best things I ever saw in New York. I did a little work with the people who’d worked with the New York Futurists and then I found Night Vale randomly, and eventually put together that it was being written by friends of friends.
Ohhhh! Small world!
MW: The New York theatre world is very small.
But yeah, I think the intimacy of it, I think the ease of it - I think there’s something for everybody in it.
I’m interested to see where more podcasts go from here in terms of fictional podcasts. I worked on a show called Passenger List. It’s a mystery story about a plane that goes missing and a girl trying to investigate it. There were wonderful actors working on it, I had such a great time recording it. And when we recorded it, we recorded it like [we] were doing a site-specific play. We had a scene where everybody was eating dinner, and we actually had them sitting down around a table in somebody’s house, and we brought out food and had them eating.
Oh, so that way you get diegetic sound and stuff. That’s cool.
MW: Yeah, it was really cool. It was really fun to work on.
I’m wondering if there’s going to be more fictional podcasts. I think that since Night Vale was so big, a lot of people saw that that was so popular and tried to make stuff that was weird in the way Night Vale was, but it’s not about content — it’s about form.
But I do think you can get into fantasy and speculative fiction really interestingly. Lauren Shippen — who worked on Passenger List with me, she was actually one of the co-workers — created The Bright Sessions. It’s recordings of therapy sessions with people who have superpowers. But it goes deeper than that. She’s a really great writer. It is kind of fantastical, but it’s also just really interesting.
I’m wondering if fictional podcasting is going to become more of a thing. I also think there’s also really interesting stuff out there for audio documentaries. There’s been a lot of things like The Dream, which is fantastic — it’s about MLMs. Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This … Those things are fascinating.
I think audio documentaries play well as well. These things are good for commutes, they’re good for driving, they’re good for taking the train or subway or whatever. I think a lot of people might like them and need them. I don’t see them slowing down any time soon.
You’ve recently done a lot of voiceover work, including characters in Big Hero 6 and BoJack Horseman. What would you say is your favorite facet about voice acting?
MW: I love that you can be anything. I love that you are not limited by the way you look, which unfortunately is a problem I’ve had in Hollywood because they definitely want people to look a certain way, a very specific kind of look. That’s something that’s really frustrating for me.
I’ve always had a lower voice since I was very young, and I’ve always wanted to do things with it. I’m five feet tall and probably not very threatening in real life, but [with voiceover work] I can play villains and intimidating people and powerful people in animation and on podcasts and live shows, and I love that. I love that I can be old, I can be sexy, I can be scary, I can be powerful. I can be a tall, hot blonde, or I can be a spider. That I really love — that I can be anything.
Something you and Matilda have in common is your love of reading. Have you read anything spectacular in the last year, or anything that you’re currently working on?
MW: Oh, let me think. I haven’t read a lot of fantasy or speculative fiction recently, but I read a book called Spinning Silver that I thought was really interesting because it had stories in there about a Jewish family living in a fantasy world. Which kind of makes sense; there are a lot of stories about Christian families living in fantasy worlds, but you don’t ever see anything about Judaism. But the idea of being Jewish in these other worlds, and what it would mean to still have to be persecuted in a world where there’s also fantastical things and creatures going on as well, and having to [still] live that life. I thought that was really interesting.
I read the book about Fosse after I watched Fosse/Verdon (2019), which was fascinating.
I read The Wild Shore (1984) by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I really loved; I’m a big fan of Robinson. He always has a female scientist in his books that is perpetually pissed off, and everybody looks up to her and trusts her and is terrified of her, and I love that about his books. They’re much more diverse and queer-friendlier than a lot of other speculative fiction that I’ve read.
Right now I’m reading Trick Mirror (2019) by Jia Tolentino, and it’s amazing.
Oh my gosh, what else have I been reading lately? I’m always reading, like, five books at once.
My sister has been trying to get me to read Debt: the First Five Thousand Years (2011). She’s been reading excerpts to me, and it’s fascinating.
Whenever I can’t sleep, I re-read Rae Earl’s My Mad, Fat Diary (2007) and the even funnier sequel, My Madder, Fatter Diary (2014), which is about her being a teenager with OCD and being bullied for being plus-sized in rural England in the 1980s and early ‘90s. But it’s absolutely hilarious; she has such a great sense of humor and it’s her actual teenage diaries. It’s the basis for the TV show My Mad, Fat Diary (2013-2015). Which is one of my favorite teen dramas of all time. And that’s saying something because I love teen dramas. [Laughs]
You recently joined Instagram.
MW: Yeah, I did.
That sounds like a lot of regret in your voice about that.
MW: No! It’s actually been fun, it’s just a lot of things to keep up with.
What are your first impressions of the platform, other than it being a great repository for cat pics?
MW: People are nice on there; they’re a lot nicer on there than Twitter, which is nice. Mostly right now [my account] is kind of cat photos.
It’s funny to figure out what pictures I’m just gonna show to my friends I post on Facebook, [or] that I’m going to give to post on Twitter. I think it’s better to have things separate to be doing these kinds of things. Because it really is a good feeling, I think, to be able to have like a separate life, and it’s something I’ve been trying to figure out how to do in the past ten years since I sort of re-emerged into some facet of the public consciousness.
But sometimes my sister and I will take a stupid video and I’ll be like, “We should post this.” And sometimes we take a stupid video, and I’m like: “… this is one we just text our friends. This is just for the group chat.”
Yeah, it’s important to compartmentalize those kinds of things. Speaking of Twitter, you’ve gone viral multiple times with your tweets.
MW: Dear God. [Laughs]
It seems to be your social media outlet of choice. What, if anything, is the most appealing thing to you about Twitter?
MW: The good people on it. The terrible people on it are the worst. The thing is — I feel this way about Twitter and about most social media platforms, honestly — they are a means to an end. They are the freeway. They are the subway. They are the road. I don’t care about that aspect of it; I care about what’s on the other side. I care about connecting with people I like. I’ve made a lot of friends through there. I’ve dated people from there. Technically I adopted one of my cats through there. That’s really what’s important, is connecting with the good people there.
But I think the platform doesn’t really matter to me. I have found different audiences on different places. Twitter has a lot of problems, and they’re problems that … if I could go back ten years, would I have chosen Twitter? I don’t know.
I did spend a lot of my early twenties trying to be pithy and witty - sometimes succeeding, sometimes not — and that made me a fit for it. But there’s so much bad stuff on there. Sometimes I wonder if I’d do it again. But I’ve made so many friends from there. I’ve gotten jobs from there. It’s been a good experience. But I think social media companies shouldn’t be fooling themselves that their platform is the only one and everybody loves their platform. It really isn’t.
Yeah, they’re all hot piles of garbage trying to make you think they’re diamond mines.
MW: Yeah, they’re not. Nobody cares about them; it’s all a means to an end.
So I was going to ask you about His Dark Materials (1995-2000) since you’re such a fan of the books and what your daemon would be, but you just talked about that on your blog and I want to make sure people go read it.
So instead I’d love to hear a few of your thoughts about Succession. Specifically:
1. Who is the more confusing person for the internet to have a crush on — Greg or Kendall?
2. Where do you think the Roys get all their turtleneck sweaters from?
MW: That is a really good question.
I heard once that a lot of millionaires actually shop at JC Penney, which is shocking to me. I definitely feel like Shiv is the type of person who would go to Saks Off Fifth and Nordstrom Rack, or Bloomingdales. She wouldn’t go to Bergdorf-Goodman or Barney’s or any of those places. She wants to fit in more, so she would go to Saks Off Fifth and be like: “This sweater only cost $400,” instead of the thousands [elsewhere].
The rest of them, I don’t know — even when I was my most famous, my money was kept away from me, and even going to NYU I still kind of had culture shock, so I don’t quite understand people that rich function, or what they do.
I think Greg is more baffling. Did you say Kendall, or did you say Roman?
Not Roman. Roman it’s very clear to see what the appeal is there. It’s Kendall that myself and many others are confused by.
MW: Yeah, I think I don’t understand Greg more, because Kendall I think is a product of his circumstances. He’s a product of his environment, and he wants to try to do these things. And he is a handsome guy. I wouldn’t have a crush on his character, but I do acknowledge that he’s handsome.
Greg I guess is handsome, but I feel like a lot of it is because he’s tall. I mean, I’m five feet tall; tall men mean nothing to me. I think the last man I dated was probably 5’7”, and I’m fine with that. Height means nothing to me. But I don’t like that he’s constantly trying to ingratiate himself in [with the Roys], and I don’t get that.
I also don’t get the Tom thing. I think the actor who plays him is hilarious and wonderful, but the character himself? I’m like: Good God, guys, get it together.
The character’s awful. He did, however, play Mr. Darcy, so I think there may be some residual crushes from that role in play.
MW: Oh, okay. That makes sense to me. Because I was like: I do not understand the Tom thing at all. But yeah, maybe there is a little bit of a leftover thing.
Anyway, I ship Roman/Gerri. That’s the only couple on that show I like.
Definitely the most fascinating sexual dynamic, hands down.
Finally: Do you have any advice for those newly identifying as bi or queer, or any advice you wish you could give the younger version of yourself before you came out?
MW: I think to myself I would have said: You know what your truth is. It doesn’t matter what people think of you, and other people telling you that you are this or you aren’t this is not going to change anything.
Also I think there’s something I wish I could tell other people, too: You can’t push other people [to be] out. You really can’t. They might just not be ready for it. And if you’re trying to push people out, they might just resent you for it. Because I felt that way. That really was a struggle for me.
It does feel better [to be out].
And also: it’s not who you’re with, it’s who you are. That I think is really important. Generally I do feel like I am more attracted to … certain qualities that we might assume of one gender more than others, let’s put it that way. But at the same time, there are times when I’m not; there are times when I’m attracted to other people as well. Your feelings can change. For me, sometimes it changes within a month, depending on what time of the month it is. That’s something I feel like we don’t talk about a lot.
I wish I could tell myself that fighting it doesn’t change it. I’ve heard people say: “Have you tried not being gay, not being bi, to ‘pray away the gay?’” The whole conversion therapy thing. And I’ve had friends say: “As if that wasn’t the first thing we tried.” So many of us fought it because it is a harder life, it is a more confusing life for us [but] because of society.
I’d also like to say while I am confused, it’s not about this. I am perpetually confused. Please let me be bisexual and confused. But I’m not confused because I’m bisexual.
*** This interview has been edited and truncated for clarity and brevity.
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