Jemima Kirke came to her acting career with some reluctance. She had grown up in proximity to fame: her father was the drummer for the rock bands Bad Company and Free, and her mother’s celeb-magnet boutique supplied outfits for Carrie in “Sex and the City.” But unlike her sisters, Domino and Lola, who became a singer and an actress, respectively, Kirke had little interest in the spotlight—she wanted to paint. She had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design when Lena Dunham, a childhood friend, asked her to appear in “Tiny Furniture.” Kirke agreed, despite misgivings, and was hailed for her naturalistic performance. Buoyed by the film’s reception, Dunham developed a series for HBO about four young, privileged female friends living in Brooklyn, which she titled “Girls”; again, she wrote a part specifically for Kirke and begged her to take it. Kirke had planned to return to painting—she had a solo show at a gallery in Manhattan the year before the series premièred—but with the overnight success of “Girls,” her life surged in a different direction.
Kirke’s character, Jessa, was a loosely wrapped bohemian who tossed off lines like “You know what the weirdest part about having a job is? You have to be there every day, even on the days you don’t feel like it.” Impulsive, self-indulgent, and direct to the point of cruelty, Jessa embodied qualities that Dunham had observed in Kirke herself and among their wealthy Brooklynite peers. (Among other things, she shares the London-born, New York-raised Kirke’s international air and indeterminate accent, which heightens her cool-girl mystique.) From the outset, the character elicited strong reactions. Some viewers applauded her magnetism and dry humor; others found her personality grating and her lack of boundaries unforgivable. Kirke’s own ambivalence never disappeared, either: days before production began on Season 2 of “Girls,” she had to be talked out of jumping ship. But after the show’s six-season run concluded, in 2017, she continued to seek out roles in films such as “The Little Hours” and “Sylvie’s Love,” which probed the knotty relationship between sex and power. Last year, she returned to TV as the unyielding headmistress Hope Haddon in Netflix’s “Sex Education.”
Her latest project is “Conversations with Friends,” an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s début novel, which premièred last week, on Hulu. The story, set in and around Dublin, hinges on the shifting dynamics between four acquaintances: Melissa and Nick, a married couple in their thirties, and the college-aged friends (and former lovers) Frances and Bobbi. Kirke, who might once have played a Frances—the precocious twentysomething embarking on an affair with an older man like Nick—now finds herself on the opposite side of the equation, as Melissa.
I met Kirke on a recent Sunday morning at a bakery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, not far from her home. She is a loose conversationalist, given to frank observations, full-throated laughter, and rambling, philosophical asides. Speaking about her early roles in “Girls” and “Tiny Furniture,” she said, bluntly, “I wasn’t really cast for a skill set as much as a je ne sais quoi, or an energy. It’s not something I ever worked on. It’s not something I was necessarily conscious of until they made me conscious of it.” She went on, “It was a weird spot to be in, in the beginning, because I felt, like, Am I an actor, or am I a personality?”
Between cups of coffee and the occasional cigarette, Kirke spoke about channelling authentic emotions onscreen, the state of the sex scene, and the pleasure of an ambiguous ending.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Your part in “Girls” was written with you in mind. How did it feel to be playing to someone else’s perception of you?
I think I got confused. The more I learned about what people were responding to in my performance, the less I understood about how to do it. In “Girls,” I had to do it for every episode and every scene in season after season—and of course I’m going to change as a person, so the person they’re wanting me to “naturally” be might not be appropriate for the character.
Jessa was partly based off of who I was in college and partly based off of people we knew, or mutual friends, or people in the media that we could make fun of. . . . There was a certain amount of creativity that went into the role on my part, but I was being encouraged to be “natural.” People would say, “You have this special thing,” and “Don’t squash that by trying too hard.”
I feel like that feedback would give me a lot of anxiety about how to proceed.
Absolutely. How can you be totally natural without knowing what you’re doing? Everything around acting—you know, the preparation and press and hair and makeup—that stuff starts to shape your life. I had to decide if I enjoyed the acting enough to want to engage in all of that. I think I didn’t really have a choice in that moment. I was, like, Well, I’m contractually obliged to do it. So let’s make the most of it—and fuck this “natural” bullshit. I don’t understand what that means. I’m going to figure out how to make this nourishing and fulfilling for me.
How did you take that call to “be natural” and formalize it into an acting process?
It wasn’t about formalizing—it was just about finding a way to create something when it wasn’t convenient, or when I wasn’t feeling inspired to do it. It’s a skill set just like any other, and that’s what I had to learn.
In the beginning, I would just play to my first reading of the scene, and I wouldn’t really do any studying. And I’m someone who loves to study! I love to pull things apart, and I love literature. When I learned that I could use that skill on scripts, that’s when things got really fun for me.
For the most part, what I’m trying to do is to make something real happen onscreen. So if you have two characters who hate each other, that hate is really happening. Or if two characters are falling in love, it’s really happening for those few minutes. That’s why we get invested, when we’re watching those scenes. I think audiences should be given more credit for knowing when something is bullshit.
If, as you’re saying, you want to create real emotion, how do you create healthy distance for yourself in those moments? How do you put it away when the scene is over?
We’re taking something that’s real and zooming in on it and making it bigger for that scene. Alison [Oliver]—who plays Frances, the younger woman sleeping with my husband—was perfectly cast, because of some real aspects of our relationship. She’s new to this world, and in comparison to her, I’ve been in it for a much longer time. So there’s a power dynamic. When I’m working, I’ll think about that and milk it in a scene.
I’ll ask myself, What is it about Alison that I’m jealous of? In reality, it might not be something I’m jealous of enough to think about in my daily life, and maybe it doesn’t bother me on the day-to-day, but it’s in my subconsciousness. And if we’re functioning as our “highest selves,” it’s not something that dictates how we behave or feel, but, in that moment, and in that scene, it’s my job to let it dictate how I act.
So you’d use that self-interrogation to inform your acting.
I also interrogate the things I wouldn’t tell anyone or talk about or reveal to them—and I don’t have to. I just have to reveal them to myself. And then I get to respond to that for a few hours.
I like the idea of taking a small reaction and expanding it into the driving force behind a scene. I appreciated the show’s depiction of the mundanity inherent in most relationships.
Mundanity is a really key word in this story, because it is very slow. When I first read the book, one of the things I loved about it was the fact that the content of the scenes was so unremarkable. If we just give what’s on the page, there would be nothing to watch. Everything would have to come from the performance. Even when they’re having sex—in a way, that’s also a mundane thing.
That’s a significant challenge.
It was exciting. It felt like I was being given a big job as an actor.
In your two most recent TV roles—Melissa and Hope Haddon on “Sex Education”—you don’t have any sex at all.
Yeah, I’ve just done two projects in which I’m particularly unfuckable, which is a huge jump from “Girls.”
The way a character has sex can reveal a lot about their personality.
I love the idea of an intimacy coördinator. People like them for safety reasons and comfort. I like it for the choreography and the character study. I’ve seen so many sex scenes done without regard for the characters.
Sometimes people onscreen have sex in such a generic way.
Yeah, you get the sense that the people in charge are, like, “Just have sex. Just do it the way you’d do it.” But then you’re in a particularly vulnerable position, because no one is calling attention to the fact that you’re having sex as a character, and that might feel really vulnerable, because maybe you’re then exposing how you would respond or act in a sexual situation.
In reality, sex scenes should be done with a lot of specificity and acted with the same attention as any other scene—the same attention to impulses and motivations and sounds and movements.
In “Conversations,” Melissa is actually the only one of the four central characters whom we never see have sex.
Well, right, and we wouldn’t. This is something I’ve thought about a lot. The show is all from Frances’s perspective.
Showing Melissa in bed would’ve been such a departure from who her character was in the book.
Melissa is the only main character that we see so little of, because Frances isn’t involved with her romantically. The other characters are much more fleshed out as a result, which was part of the challenge for me. How do I make her less of a one-liner person and more of a real person?
But the writers did make other changes, right? In the book, all four characters are Irish, but, in the show, you’re from England and Bobbi is American.
It gave my character and Sasha’s character another thing to connect over—being outsiders. And it also connected Frances and Nick.
I also liked that they emphasized Melissa’s writing career. That made for an obvious parallel between Melissa and Frances.
That was a bold move, and I questioned it throughout. It rewrote the story in a big way, whereas making us both foreigners is just a supportive detail. But changing her to a writer is a big deal, because it makes Melissa more of a threat.
Did that change the way you played Melissa’s character?
I remember saying that I needed to see more evidence that she was a writer—in her questions, in her observations, in her view of life.
You wanted to feel like writing was critical to her motivations and decision-making.
Whenever I do a project, the first thing I do is write down my questions. And my first question for this was: Why is she interested in these girls? Why does she want to hang out with them? You know, there’s the age gap. There’s the class gap. They’re also not, like, particularly interesting, these girls. And there’s something about them that one could exploit.
Did you end up answering that question for yourself?
I think that when we meet Melissa, she’s in a stagnant relationship, and I think she loves attention. She’s in the doghouse because she cheated on him, so she’s having to pull back her personality and not be in the driver’s seat, and then she meets these two girls where she can be in the driver’s seat again and have all the attention.
I read that when you first read the book, you thought to yourself, “This feels like marriage from the perspective of a twentysomething-year-old.”
Yeah, I was talking about Nick and Melissa’s marriage as seen from Frances’s perspective. Well, I was making two points: I was also saying that the book showed marriage from Sally Rooney’s perspective. But I don’t think they need to be separated that much, because she’s writing about Frances, right? What we see is what Frances chooses to see as a twentysomething-year-old.
I think the story would be very different if we saw it from Melissa’s perspective, because we’d see the private moments. But because we’re seeing only the moments that Frances is privy to and the way she chooses to experience them, we see a marriage that is very one-dimensional, and we’re asked to believe that they have no chemistry, that the passion is gone.
When I was reading it, that was something I struggled with. I didn’t believe the marriage. And the reason I didn’t believe it wasn’t due to any bad writing. I realized, Oh, it’s because I’m seeing it from Frances’s perspective.
When you’re younger, there’s a nearly universal belief that a good relationship requires constancy of feeling, or constant attraction, or unwavering support.
Right. What is a good relationship? We don’t know. I think when people say “a good relationship,” they mean a relationship that has the potential for longevity, or will cause the least chaos in your life. But many good things can come out of unsustainable relationships. Even relationships that were explosive have changed my whole perspective on myself for the better because the sex was so connected that it made me appreciate my body more, or I was so passionate about them, or it expanded my capacity to understand someone.
A good friend told me that each person you love refracts and reflects a different part of you, so you learn to recognize and appreciate different parts of yourself.
Absolutely. Who we are has to change depending on who we’re with.
Right.
I think the romantic thing about commitment and about the idea of marriage is the fact that change is a given. The commitment we’re making is that if we fall out of love, or we change so much that it’s making us unhappy, we are committed to figuring out a way to get back to being in love or get back to being happy together. You’re committing to reinventing the relationship. If the effort is too much, or if the other person is not willing to reinvent it with you, then it’s not working, right?
Among other things, the show is a portrait of a marriage during a rough time.
Yeah. I think Frances writes off Melissa’s relationship with Nick as a non-issue, because they’re not having sex, and sex now for Frances is everything. So then when Nick tells Frances that he and Melissa are having sex again, it’s such a kick in the stomach.
It hurts her deeply.
When someone we’re in love with sleeps with someone else, whether it’s an affair or just post-breakup, it feels like they’ve wiped out your existence.
I’m just glad that shows that interrogate relationships in this way exist. The romantic dynamics are fascinating.
It’s the English student in you thinking, Oh, what about this connection, or this parallel? There’s no clear answer in this story, which is what I really get off on—there is no right or wrong. Like, is Melissa really in love with him, or is she just controlling? What’s her stake in it?
People have so many opinions on other people’s relationships, and particularly the question of whether two people really love each other. And I don’t know why it’s so important that we determine whether Nick and Melissa’s love is real or not.
This subject inspires strong reactions, because it’s so visceral.
I like what you said about the show interrogating relationships. It made me think of the ending of the show, which is very provocative for people.
Do you think “Conversations with Friends” takes a stance on whether Frances and Nick’s relationship is a good one?
What does the ending mean? It doesn’t wrap anything up. Frances is doing better when she isn’t in that relationship, so is it good that she’s not in the relationship anymore? Or is it better to be in the relationship and live those highs and lows? The ending isn’t profound, which is what I love about it. Ultimately, it can go either way.