It is 9am in Los Angeles and Jenny Slate is smiling – or is that grimacing? – over Zoom. When I ask how she is, the comedian and actor is brutally honest. “I’ve been up since about 4.30am with my two-year-old,” she explains. Slate adds that she and her husband went out at around 7am to get coffee, thinking a change in location might soothe their wailing daughter. It did, but by this point it was too late for Slate. “I was so tired when we got there that I just started to silently – not sob – but just leak tears out of tired eyes … But I think I’m all right! I didn’t, like, walk into the canyon or anything …”
Slate’s brand of openness doesn’t just extend to telling strangers about the trials of parenting a toddler; a radical kind of honesty has long permeated her stage and screen work. After graduating from Columbia University, the Milton, Massachusetts-born comic spent years honing her craft as a standup in “shitty dive bars” across New York. From the start, her comedy was intimate and revelatory. “I’ve always just shared really personal stories,” she says, “many of them about my body.”
Without YouTube or Instagram to help promote her work, she did things the old-fashioned way, with regular, exhaustive gigging across the city. It was a slog, but she never thought to give up. “Any time I would get to perform, even if there were only five people there, to me it was still a performance,” says Slate. “To give up would be to be spiritually deceased. But did I have heartbreak about not being able to have a professional job? Did it feel like heartbreak in love and romance? It felt exactly like that.”
Her approach paid off. By her mid-20s, Slate had started to make waves and was spotted by a commercial agent, who put her in adverts selling everything from “energy drinks to dishwasher detergent”. Then, in 2009, she joined the cast of Saturday Night Live where she would only appear for one season before moving on to off-kilter US sitcoms such as Parks and Recreation and Girls, as well as beginning a rich run of voiceover work thanks to her distinctive vocal talents, starting with Bob’s Burgers. Constantly pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be a comic actor, her movie break-through came in 2014’s acclaimed Obvious Child. An indie hit about a woman seeking an abortion after a one-night stand, it not only set Slate out as a compelling dramatic force, but gave her a platform to discuss her passion for reproductive rights.
This month sees the UK release of something entirely different for Slate, who has often described her own career as “random”. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is the Academy Award-nominated animation-meets-live-action tale of an endearingly existential, anthropomorphic seashell. Slate and her former partner Dean Fleischer Camp first conceived of the character in a 2010 short film, with Slate providing Marcel’s relentlessly cute voice and Fleischer Camp directing. The pair married in 2012, and in 2014 it was revealed that a movie about Marcel was in the works. Slate and Fleischer Camp then had more news: they were separating and seeking a divorce. Despite this huge personal upheaval, the Marcel movie managed to weather the storm.
“Sometimes when you’re hurt, you might be compelled to just throw everything away in despair, but I’m proud of the way we unconsciously sorted what could survive and what couldn’t,” Slate says, matter-of-factly. That’s not to suggest continuing a working relationship in the midst of a romantic separation is easy. “I’m sure that there are a lot of people that wouldn’t have done this. I wouldn’t suggest it. Not because it was painful, but I don’t even really know how we pulled it off!”
Although the plot had been decided long before Slate and Fleischer Camp split, the film’s themes suddenly felt extremely close to home. Marcel has been separated from his large family, leaving him living with his grandmother, Nana Connie – who is suffering from a dementia-like illness – in a house which is being used as an Airbnb after the couple who own it break up. Fleischer Camp, in an additionally meta touch, plays a director called Dean who, fresh from a breakup of his own, moves into the house and starts to make a film about Marcel.
The moral of the story – and of Slate and Fleischer Camp’s breakup – is clear. “Life relentlessly goes on, and people get lost, and they fall away, and you continue to be alive, and you have to decide how to do that with some sort of grace and curiosity,” says Slate. Bet you didn’t think you were going to get all that from a movie about a pocket-sized mollusc!
Nana Connie – who is voiced by Isabella Rossellini – is a tender amalgam of Slate’s own grandmothers. Named after one, she took further inspiration from the other: a holocaust survivor called Rochelle who was born in Havana, Cuba, and travelled with Slate’s great-grandparents to Paris in the early 1930s. “As Jewish people, they went the wrong way,” says Slate of her relatives, “and they found themselves eventually in Nazi occupation. Some of my family was never found again.”
Rochelle, alongside her brother Marcel, survived only by hiding out in the centre of France. Slate remembers the original Nana Connie as having an “exquisite” accent, something Rossellini’s Nana Connie shares, but hers is the result of travel on a more mollusc-appropriate scale. “She emigrated from the garage,” says Slate with a smile. “She travelled by coat pocket.”
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When we speak, Slate is staying in her old LA home for the Golden Globes – where she is not only representing Marcel, but also a memorable turn in the sci-fi smash Everything Everywhere All at Once – but she spends most of her time in semi-rural bliss back in her home state of Massachusetts. The small seaside town by Cape Cod where she now lives is a world away from where she was raised, just outside Boston. Living the homespun life, her second husband – the writer Ben Shattuck – runs a general store that has been in his family for generations, while Slate has made various attempts to live the good life, including a successful experiment with a kitchen garden, and a less than successful one with chickens: “They were obsessed with my husband and weirdly aggressive towards me. And they only laid, like, one egg every four days. So we just sort of gave up.”
In lieu of animal husbandry, Slate has plenty to keep her occupied, including a return to standup. In 2019 she released her first Netflix special, Stage Fright – in which the original Nana Connie also played a part – and she is currently working on a brand new hour of material. “I still get something out of it, but it’s harder and harder to do,” she says of the life of a touring standup. “I’m not a road comic. I don’t enjoy being away from my family. I am a real homebody.”
After almost a decade in movies, the ever-confessional Slate has now managed to move past the fears that plagued her after the success of Obvious Child. “I needed to learn how to stop participating in useless self-criticism,” she says. “If there are more people looking at you than you’re used to, that can be wonderful, but while the sun can warm you, it can also burn you.”
Now 40, Slate will be the first to admit that she is thriving, despite those occasional early morning tears. “A feeling of peace comes with maturity. But I’m in a really good spot right now, for sure. I know I feel it.”
Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is in cinemas on 17 February.