Dearest Andrew Rannells, please forgive us for that headline.
The Girls star, so good and fun and sassy and the gay best friend we all wish we had (or were), is a candid delight during a recent interview about his role as Elijah on the HBO comedy. He’s so candid and game, in fact, that our interview about his scene-stealing arc on this season swiftly—and entertainingly—devolves to the finer points of pantomiming a handjob.
But when you’re a colleague—and more so when you’re a friend—of Lena Dunham’s, you really have no choice to embrace frank discussions of such blush-inducing sides of life, including but not limited to: homeless women fisting themselves, jacking off frat boys in bathrooms, and Allison Williams having her ass eaten out.
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All, of course, are references to the first few episodes of Girls stellar new season, which on Sunday night’s most recent episode, found Elijah following Hannah to Iowa, like a flamboyant and bored lost puppy.
Elijah’s surprise arrival in Iowa is a two-fold joy. For one, it provides the occasion for yet another spectacularly wasted dance party—this time featuring Elijah and Hannah drunk out of their minds at an Iowa rager, the two dancing together to Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” and Elijah giving an undergrad “straight boy” a handjob in a bathroom. But Elijah’s appearance also serves as a focusing of the creative lens, providing a benchmark through which we can measure the actual growing up of Hannah, and how crippling her arrested development in Iowa might actual be.
When Rannells and I start talking, it’s days after he and Dunham—great friends in real life as well as on-screen—had just returned from walking the Golden Globes red carpet, where they may or may not have been mistakenly identified by the E! channel, hilariously, as “Liza Minnelli and Guest.” He also had not only just wrapped the fourth season of Girls, but a sensational run on Broadway as Neil Patrick Harris’s replacement in Hedwig and the Angry Inch and a movie shoot opposite Anne Hathaway in a hotly anticipated Nancy Meyers flick (playing a character who supposed to be a woman, to boot).
We discussed all that and more. Like handjobs. And coke parties. And ass eating. Sorry, Andrew Rannells.
Before we chat about Girls, I have to ask about the “Liza Minnelli and Guest” thing at the Golden Globes. Did E! really label you guys as that or was it Photoshopped?
[Laughs] Well, I don’t know. Somebody sent that to me as allegedly a mistake that happened live on the air. I don’t know if it was actually that. Now somebody is saying that it’s something The Soup did. So I don’t know if it’s real or not, but it brought Lena and I a lot of joy regardless. Part of me hopes that it’s real, and part of me doesn’t care because it’s hilarious either way.
It’s cool that you got to be Lena’s date to the Globes, too.
Oh my god, I’m so happy that she asked. The tickets to that event are pretty scarce, even if your show is nominated. So to be included in that group, I was very touched that she did that. She’s a good friend.
I’m curious what it’s like to walk a red carpet with Lena Dunham and bear witness to the questions that she’s asked. I can imagine they veer towards absurd.
Oh yeah. At that event at least—because I’ve been with her elsewhere where people ask the most batshit things possible—people were mostly just so excited to see here. And I think the overall tone of that event is light and fun and respectful. Plus, we got to do shots with Mario Lopez.
That’s good to hear. Because I could see it easily going, “Lena! Hi! We love Girls! What are you wearing? What do you make of that rape controversy from your book?”
I know. I know. But there was none of that. Everyone we spoke to was great and on topic. I think she obviously has to field a lot of questions about her work and about her life. But that particular night, the mood was pretty light.
So in the first few episodes of this season of Girls, there’s the resounding theme that the girls are at least trying to grow up a little bit. Do you think that’s true of Elijah, too?
I think so. I think he’s still behind the girls, though. Girls mature faster than boys do, as we were always told in middle school. I think that’s true this season, too. Hannah’s making these great strides towards pulling her shit together and going on this grad school adventure. I think Elijah just wants to have something to do. I think he co-ops her experience a little bit and thinks he can join her. He doesn’t need his own thing—he’ll just take a little piece of Hannah’s. He’s still behind, I think. He’s looking for what his next move is, and what his goals should be. But I have hope that he will figure it out.
He seems to even immediately validate his decision to go to Iowa just because someone at the airport mistakes him for Blake Lively’s husband. Like, that’s enough for him.
[Laughs] I mean, please. That would be enough for me! I’d be thrilled.
I loved the little bit where he said that he fled New York because he saw a homeless woman fist herself on a stoop.
That is a real story.
Stop. It isn’t.
It’s not my story. April, who is one of our hair and makeup people, she told Lena and I that story, that she saw a woman fist herself on her stoop. And while we were skeptical of its validity, we still included it in the episode. I think that would make anyone flee the state.
After Elijah said that I started racking my brain for the most grotesque New York experiences I’ve had. I don’t think I’ve had anything to rival that. Have you?
No that. But when I first moved here I watched a woman, who appeared to be homeless but you never know, on the subway hike up layers and layers of coats and a skirt and god knows what else she had on and just piss on the train. That was a month after living here. Like, “This is New York. That woman is urinating.” I was 19, and that is still the craziest thing I’ve seen.
Then there’s other fun part of Hannah’s move to Iowa, where she’s marveling at how big the apartment she’s looking at is and that it’s only $250 a month. Have you ever had that experience, of moving out of New York City and realizing you could buy a palace for a quarter of what you’re paying for your shoebox?
Oh hell yeah. I mean I love that Zillow app on my phone that shows you what’s for sale. Whenever we’re traveling my boyfriend and I are like, “What can we buy here in Baton Rouge? What’s available?” But I really experienced it the first time I went on tour. I was on tour with Jersey Boys years ago and we would get to St. Louis or Cleveland, and I would share an apartment with this girl. We would just get these obscenely large apartments just because we could. They were in these huge-ass buildings with multiple bedrooms that we never went into. We just wanted the space, because I lived in a studio apartment in Midtown at the time. So the idea of having multiple doors in a place was exciting.
The other funny thing about moving from the city to the suburbs, which you see in Hannah and Elijah, is that you adopt this mindset that you’re wiser or more cultured or feel like you have something to share than everyone around them.
Yeah, absolutely. Which is such bullshit. I’ve certainly made that mistake, not recently, but in my past. That you come from New York and you feel like you’ve got an edge and a leg up on everyone else in the world, which is not actually the case.
So the big cornerstone of this week’s episode was the Iowa rager that you guys go to, giving us another glorious montage of Hannah and Elijah dancing in slow motion.
So much dancing. I know. She’s a good dancer, that girl. You know? I love it. I love getting to dance with her, so I always get excited when I see in the script that there’s a large party like that. And when you shoot those scenes and you’ve got all those background dancers who are there and want to have fun and want to be good and everybody is excited to dance with Lena Dunham, it’s a really crazy atmosphere to work in.
Were they actually playing “Get Low” when you were shooting the scene?
Yeah, they played that. For that sequence they actually got to play the song the entire way through. Normally, technically speaking, what happens is that they’ll play the first couple of seconds of it and then, because of the dialogue, they can’t play the song over it, for editing purposes, so they just cut it out and there’s a click track playing. And then there’s just hearing beats that you have to dance to with no music. It’s the most awkward and humiliating thing.
That sounds like the strangest experience, dancing to clicks.
For this one we got to dance to the actual song, but in Season 2 when we did the coke episode and Lena and I are lipsynching to “I Love It”—that was one of the crazy ones where the song would drop out and there was just a beat. Everyone in the Green House had to pretend to be dancing to it.
And you had to pretend to shout over the music that’s not actually playing.
Yeah. [Adopts whiny baby voice] Our job is so hard! Playing pretend is hard!
So now is the time that we talk about the handjob scene in the bathroom.
[Laughs] Ok.
People always ask women about shooting graphic sex scenes, about what it’s like to shoot something like that. But is it different when you’re a guy doing a scene like this, which is played for laughs? Is it silly? Or awkward?
I know. It was weird because it was awkward and he was very young. He was of age, but he was a young actor who was fairly new to the city. After our first take, which was rightfully awkward, he said to me, “I’m from Omaha, Nebraska, too.” (Laughs) Which I think was in an effort to, like, bond, but really just made it more awkward. Like, I can’t think about this right now. It was the right amount of awkward, I feel like. Had either one of us been too into it I don’t think it would’ve been as funny.
When you’re thinking about playing that scene how specific do you get? Do you think about how fast to make the jacking-off motion, or what size the penis is that you’re jacking off?
All of those things. I would say my big for question for Lena, who directed that episode, was, “Who gives a handjob?” What am I, a high school girl? Like, who gives a hand job? And she was like, “Well you’re trying to be youthful,” which made sense to me. But that was my biggest question. “Like, shouldn’t I blow him?” Who’s getting a handjob these days?
Then are there more explicit sexual encounters in store for Elijah this season?
Umm, no. Between you and me, that’s it for the sex. I don’t get any more sexy time.
So he doesn’t get his own Marnie ass-eating scene?
No. No, she really took one for the team on that one. Nothing’s going to top that. That was pretty special.
I’m sure when you see that in a script you expect it to cause a stir, but did you expect the reaction to be as scandalized as it was?
I mean I was really shocked. Allison told me after they filmed it. She was like, “He motorboats my butt.” I was like, “That’s not possible.” She told me exactly what happened I was still, like, that’s not possible. And then we watched it at the premiere I was like, “Oh, right. That’s exactly what she explained.” But I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. Good for her. Good. For. Her.
So next you’re in a big Nancy Meyers movie, The Intern.
I know! I can’t believe it. I play Anne Hathaway’s business partner. She runs an Internet startup company and I play her business partner. Her characters faces this idea that the character is expanding really quickly and should they bring in an outside CEO to run this business that she started on her own, and maybe it’s time now to expand and include an outside eye. So my character is there to help her figure out his struggle. That movie was so unexpected, that I got to be a part of that, mainly because that part was written for a woman.
It was written for a woman?
Yeah. [Laughs] I pulled a real Jodie Foster on this one. It was written for a woman, and I guess in the casting process—I had auditioned for another part that fell in between the cracks of ages and types, and then Bernie Telsey, the casting director for this movie who cast me in a few shows on Broadway, suggested to Nancy that since they were having trouble casting that part that maybe they should open up to changing the gender. Maybe if Andrew reads it, maybe that’s it. Luckily Nancy was open to it, and I couldn’t be more surprised that worked out. Her name was Candace, so I thought there was no way I was ever going to book this job.
What did the name end up being?
Cameron. I really was a proponent of keeping it Candace and just making the audience confused.
Like Tilda Swinton in Snowpiercer, who just continued to be referred to as “sir” and “he”?
Yeah, me and Tilda. That’s how it works.
So you got to shoot quite a bit with Anne Hathaway then?
All my scenes were with Anne. She is fantastic and was so much fun. We really hit it off. She’s a big musical theatre fan, so there was some singin’ on that set.
You have the chance now, then, to settle the score on the validity of the Hathahate phenomenon.
Oh it’s nonsense. I don’t know those things come about, or where that wave of negativity stems from. But she’s lovely. So professional and so nice and was so welcoming on that set. And continues to be! Shortly after that—a couple of days after I wrapped—I opened as Hedwig on Broadway and one of the first huge flower arrangements that came into my dressing room was from her, which was so generous and so thoughtful. She was still working 16-hour days on that movie, but the fact that she clocked that and remembered it—she’s the real deal.
Has your body recovered from doing Hedwig yet? It seems like such an assault on the human body to perform that role.
It’s nuts. I had mystery bruises and cuts and things. My boyfriend would be like, “What the hell!? Where is that from?” But it was so rewarding. I felt so fortunate that I was asked to do that. It was so great. It was a great year of Girls and then I got to do The Intern, which was so exciting. But then to get to return to Broadway after all that, I couldn’t have asked for a better show back.
