Alice and Steve stars Jemaine Clement, Nicola Walker, and Yali Topol Margalith spoke to ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese about the new Hulu TV show. The trio discussed their characters, the show’s handling of age-gap romances, and more. It’s now streaming via Hulu on Disney+.
“Alice is devastated when her best friend, Steve, starts dating her 26-year-old daughter, Izzy. She’s going to lose her best friend and her daughter in one fell swoop. Alice tries everything she can to end the relationship. Unfortunately for her, Steve’s more than ready for the attack, and what begins as a perfect friendship devolves into an all-out feud,” says the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Jemaine, this show doesn’t work if you don’t buy Steve and Alice as best mates. All throughout that first episode, you see the bond these two have from just decades of friendship. How is it finding that chemistry with Nicola and then turning it on its head completely for the rest of the show?
Jemaine Clement: I think both Nicola and I have talked about that — the friendship part — being the most difficult part, like just going out and doing triple jumps when there’s actual real people walking down the street, you can see you being a total idiot. We’re not really drunk. Like, you’re just totally self-conscious. You go past, wait for those people to go, and then we go, “ugh,” and be idiots, and then sing karaoke together, which, perhaps fortunately, they can’t
So we actually bonded over. This is quite hard to just have fun. To be ordered to have fun, and then immediately it’s broken. Then we can fight, and that’s easy.
Nicola Walker: Yes [laughs].
Nicola, we really see these characters’ lives unravel throughout this show. Alice just loses control. There’s a hilarious scene with a printer later on that had me really laughing hard. How is it staying true to the character while also making this breakdown funny?
Walker: You trust the script. You trust Sophie’s words. Really, honestly, that’s what you do when writing’s this good. You just give yourself up to it and think, all right, I’m gonna buckle myself in, and I’m gonna trust that that Sophie knows the destination. As long as I am in the scene and available to my other actors, and I say the words, this is gonna work because it works so well when you read it.
The printer, I’d forgotten about the printer scene. She’s a little bit drunk in that scene as well. And she’s eating a burger. That’s the printer scene. And everyone was a bit disgusted by how much I was eating. ’cause Obviously we did, you don’t just do one take. So I ate quite a lot of hamburger that day.
Clement: And you committed to eating.
Walker: I know. And at some point, you think, “Why did I decide to do this?”
Clement: If you’re drunk eating a hamburger, it’s not gonna be dainty little [thing].
Walker: No, it wasn’t. It was hanging a bit. Yeah.
Yali, I feel like there’s a new discourse cycle on age gap relationships every month online. What really interested you in this chance to explore it and understand the people that get into these relationships?
Yali Topol Margalith: I think what attracted me to the script in general is watching these people do all the good and the bad sort of together. And I was attracted to the challenge that it brought to this community of people.
It didn’t feel like I had to explore much of it because the script explored it so deeply. Again, I could just rely that the script was gonna take me in the right direction. It’s really interesting you say that because, of course, we had a week of rehearsals where we got to talk about it, not as the characters, but we got to talk about the whole idea of that age gap.
So, it meant that when we were being the people, we didn’t have to think about it. We just had to do what those people did, and they do what they do without that much forethought. Like what we often do in life. We sort of jump in and do something and then deal with the carnage afterwards.
Jemaine, I wanted to ask you about the format. It’s six 30-minute episodes. You get to spend more time with a character than in a movie, but you get to work with the same director from start to finish. That sounds ideal for an actor. What did you like most about this format?
Jemaine Clement: Oh, I’m used to the format. We have this in a similar way in New Zealand, six half-hour episodes for a comedy. When I’ve written American things, I’m so jealous when people get to write six episodes, and then they’re finished. But then we can really concentrate. We actually had a lot of time to film each episode. I think it was two weeks per episode, which is twice as long as you usually get. So it didn’t feel like a marathon, and it was fun the whole time.
Nicola Walker: And with drama… I was so shocked on the first day when I looked at the call sheet, and I realized we were doing four and a half pages. And if you’re shooting a drama, it’s not you know, it’s not unusual to do between 10, 11 pages a day. I was just blown away by the amount of time we had. So it meant that we could try different things.
Clement: Yeah. And still you wanna do it more. Still, you want more takes and more ideas and things like that.
Nicola, you have some great scenes with Marcia Warren, especially in the last episode. She’s a legend. What stood out about her was still being such a great scene presence and partner in her eighties?
Walker: Yeah, I mean, I think we all look at Marcia and think you are working with someone who is absolutely at the top of their profession. Her skill as a dramatic and comedic actor is visible to us as actors because we know how we look at her and think, “that’s so hard what she’s doing.” But the point is, she’s on it. It is different but precise every single time.
Clement: Yeah. And from the read through, she was getting a laugh on every single line, every laugh, even when it’s sad.
Walker: She finds a laugh on a line. She’s never looking for the laugh for the sake of it. It’s a character-based laugh. And she will never lose that laugh. Once she’s found something that’s made everyone, the crew, and all of us laugh, she just pockets that and then she’ll find others. So she builds.
Clement: What amazed me yesterday watching her in the second episode, is people laughing at her so much in the scene she’s asleep. How do you do that?
Yali Topol Margalith: It’s like, she’s really not afraid to fail. She’s really bold, and she actually never fails because she trusts what she’s doing so much. You’ll just go with her. She’s amazing.
Thanks to Jemaine Clement, Nicola Walker, and Yali Topol Margalith for taking the time to talk about Alice and Steve.
