It’s 10 p.m. on a Sunday evening in December and Jemima Kirke has just managed to get her 13-year-old daughter, Rafaella, to go to sleep. If the actress, writer, and painter—best known for playing the hipster vagabond Jessa on Girls—is exhausted, she doesn’t show it as she waves me into her cozy home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. We exchange hushed hellos, not wanting to disturb her kids—Kirke’s son, 11-year-old Memphis, is sleeping upstairs too. (Her ex-husband, Michael Mosberg, lives elsewhere.)
She points out the explosive pink color of the flowers in the classic melodrama that’s playing on the TV above her fireplace. Kirke is obsessed with confections; girly things. A vintage dollhouse has pride of place in her furnished basement studio, and an enormous bow-shaped headboard leans against the wall of her vestibule. She told me she hasn’t figured out how she’s going to use it yet.
Our interview was three weeks in the making, with Kirke postponing several times before (jokingly) texting to confirm the late-night hang: “Drink coffee or something. Or bring cocaine. See you then!”
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As she putters around her kitchen, dressed comfortably and wearing her blond hair unkempt, Kirke’s light is undimmed by the casual domestic setting. The daughter of English creatives—a rock drummer and a vintage boutique owner—Kirke, 38, exudes the hyper-productive energy of a person raised in New York City. As a child, she met her friend and eventual collaborator Lena Dunham, with whom she’s still close.
“We stay in touch,” Kirke said. “Text messaging has always been a good platform for our jokes. It can get pretty showy, one-upping each other with who can do the shortest, sharpest line. It’s like writing dialogue. I know both of us have gotten some decent material from those exchanges.”
Soon after Kirke graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, Dunham asked her to play one of the four leads in the HBO series she was developing. Kirke wasn’t into the idea at first—painting was her priority—but she grew into her role as Jessa Johansson, a Venusian intellectual capable of monstrous cruelty and unexpected tenderness.
For the six seasons that Girls aired from 2012 to 2017, it was heaped with critical praise but also extreme derision; viewers scoffed at the privileged characters and ripped into what they perceived to be narrative blind spots on diversity. Some viewers hated Dunham’s narcissistic protagonist, Hannah, and at times they hated Dunham too.
This year, though, something shifted. Millennials embarked on a Girls rewatch en masse, as though collectively in agreement that the time had come for a reevaluation. Podcasts praising the show for its humor and humanity—and questioning why it had been savaged so much in the first place—popped up like daisies.
“I love it. It’s great,” Kirke says of the Girls resurgence, and the HBO Girls Rewatch podcast in particular. “I love when they talk about my character. I love it. I feel so special.”
As the proudly wayward Jessa, Kirke stood demonstrably apart from her onscreen friends. Hannah was an infuriating neurotic, Marnie (Allison Williams) a lost WASP, and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) a career woman in training. When Kirke’s Jessa lobbed a wine bottle at asshole partygoers with zero hesitation, it felt right. Later, when she cried to her largely absent father, whimpering, “I’m the child,” her almost whiny vulnerability felt equally true.
Kirke developed her proclivities for performance early. She tells me unapologetically that she loves attention, and learned deftly how to command it at a young age.
“The thing about growing up in New York is that you sort of skip the high school parties,” she explains. “You go to the parties being thrown by much older people, and you have to carry your weight, because you’re standing in a room with celebrities and, you know, you’re kind of being exploited, because it’s like, ‘Oh, look at that young little thing, that’s so funny that she’s here and it’s 3 in the morning.’ They’re gonna ask you questions and talk to you, and you have to sound unique, because you’re a teenager and you also want to be unique.
“I remember some of those nights being so treacherous and difficult,” she continues. “So I started watching movies and just borrowing from movies. Borrowing attitudes and lines and outfits. I saw And God Created Woman, which is Brigitte Bardot’s big hit. I hadn’t had sex yet, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of how you dance when you’ve had sex. It’s different.’ And I was like: that. That’s the hair. That’s the outfit. It’s casual, but it’s easy-access. It was fucked up, but yeah, I did all that stuff.”
Kirke also used to write papers for her high school classmates at the prestigious St. Anne’s School in Brooklyn for $50 apiece. She was especially adept at deconstructing Nabokov’s Lolita. She brings up the director Adrian Lyne and his 1997 adaptation of the story: “If you watch Lolita and Fatal Attraction closely, it’s clear that he thinks very low of women, but really, the point of Lolita is that [Humbert Humbert] was a pedophile and she was a child. Everything was completely non-consensual and she died in childbirth.”
Kirke can talk endlessly about movies but finds her own life far less interesting. “I would never do a memoir,” she says. “I’m not like Julia Fox; not that that’s bad. I just don’t think that much of my life.”
“I’m sure there’s interest there,” she allows. “But maybe I don’t have enough separation from it yet. I’m not processing any of it, maybe that’s the problem. There’d be a lot of lies if I had to write it, you know?”
After Girls ended in 2017, Kirke snagged roles on Netflix’s Sex Education, this year’s (now-canceled) crime drama City on Fire, and Conversations With Friends, the Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel about young leftists falling in and out of love. But to a subset of perpetually online fans, Kirke is also something of an oracle, thanks to the off-the-dome Instagram Q&A sessions she began this year that’ve already generated some memorable one-liners.
“Advice to unconfident young women?” one person asked a couple of months ago. Kirke’s reply: “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”
Kirke tells me she’s temporarily paused the Q&As at the advice of her publishers, because giving away quality content for free undermines the book—not a memoir—she’s also working on. “Some of the stuff I’m about to write, I’m like, ‘Oh, I want to post this so bad because it’s just fucking hilarious,’ and I can’t.”
She guides the proceedings to her awning-shielded porch, which insulates us from the frigid rain outside. Presently, Kirke tells me, she’s hit something of a creative lull.
“My thing has never been just acting,” she says, sparking up a cigarette. “The issue is that when my agency sends me an audition, I’m supposed to jump, do the audition, rehearse it and get it done that night, and send it in the next day. A lot of actresses can do that because they’re not working at their job, or a single mom, or whatever.”
She sighs, beleaguered. “Creatively, sometimes it just feels impossible.”
Motherhood is Kirke’s constant and one of her essential projects. “I’m working on some other things I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about, but I can’t…” she trails off. “I’ve gone back to being my full identity as a mother, which I thought I’d escaped after my oldest one was five. I was like, ‘Oh, you know, now it’s one week on, one week off.’”
“If I didn’t have kids I’d be a lot more productive, I think,” she adds. “But that’s OK. I don’t believe you can really make what you want to make fully in the time that you want to make it if you’re a parent, as a woman. So that’s just what it is.
“I’m a full-time mom,” Kirke says. “I’m still figuring it out.”
She guides me back inside, and we descend a blue staircase to reach her basement art studio. The project that’s occupying a large part of her days lately has to do with—to the delight of her 600,000-plus Instagram followers—producing and selling custom screen-printed vintage T-shirts at an assembly line clip. Painting, Kirke tells me, has been tough to find time and sufficient inspiration for lately, so her T-shirt project is filling the void.
“It’s not something I worry about,” she says of the new endeavor. “Like, I don’t really go, ‘Oh, should I, should I, shouldn’t I?’ It’s a fucking T-shirt. It’s not that important. And I wish I could apply that same thing to painting, because it’s just a canvas. If it’s not good, it’s not done. With this, it’s kind of like, if it’s not good?” She shrugs as if to say, “who cares?”
During the two hours we spend together, she churns out several more shirts. The garments themselves are vintage, each one a pastel shade and deliciously soft. Kirke customizes them by ironing on ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s-era decals she’s sourced herself. To some, she also adds cheeky phrases like “BE GOOD” and “DADDY.”
We comb through crewnecks pressed with fawns, tiny rocking horses, kittens, and baby birds. In seconds, she iron-presses a white T-shirt with a stuffed bear design over the word “PET” and models it for me.
“I never thought I’d have a hobby,” she says, gesturing to the piles of clothes stacked around the room. “A ‘hobby’ to me is a bad word, you know? It’s not serious, it doesn’t go anywhere. What’s the point?”
And yet, she’s essentially conjured a lucrative small business out of nowhere. “Are your tops/clothing only for skinny girls?” one of her social media followers recently enquired. “No,” she replied, “they’re for girls with money.” (She’s not wrong; I paid $175 for mine.)
But because T-shirt-making doesn’t fall within the confines of her main pursuits, Kirke still feels stuck, especially as she tries to envision what her future as an actress and an artist holds.
“I don’t think that, as an actor, you should think of yourself on the big screen, or have those kinds of goals,” she tells me, leading me to the front door as our visit wraps up.
“I just want to be good,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that I do a Baz Luhrmann movie or a Tarantino movie. Yes, that would be great, but I’d be more impressed with myself and feel more accomplished if I did an off-Broadway play, and really committed to that.”
“I have a whole list,” Kirke continues, reinvigorated despite the fact that it’s almost midnight. “I didn’t have a manager for a long time. I recently got one and we worked on a list of things I want to make, and it was just wild.”
Her eyes glitter as she recounts the story: “She was like, ‘OK, you want to work with Bette Midler?’ I’m like, yeah, I have an idea.”
Of course, I demand to hear it, but Kirke won’t spill. “It’s very meaningful to me, and if she were to hear it and not get the full picture, I’d be very sad, because I love Bette.”
In any case, she’s already onto the next thought. “I was like, Hermès! Go call Hermès! I have an idea for them. It involves a Super 8, some drawings, and my buddy who’s gonna model.” We both cackle, delighted by her gumption.
“Ha ha ha! Hermès. They’re like, ‘I don’t think it’s gonna work.’”
No matter. Kirke is hardly worried about running out of ideas. “There’s tons of them.”
