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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's a big day for Zoe Lister-Jones who has two projects that you can check out starting today. First, she stars in Ari Aster's latest freak-out film Beau Is Afraid as the controlling mother of Joaquin Phoenix's Beau, played later in life by Patti LuPone. The film opens wide across the country today. And then there's her new series Slip and I mean, it's all hers.

She wrote, directed, and starred in every episode. The series follows a museum curator named Mae, who is unsatisfied with her life and in a marriage that she feels really meh about, which leads to a one-night stand. When Mae wakes up from her very satisfying, shall we say, romp, she finds herself in a completely different version of her life with a new partner, and she tries desperately to figure out what is going on. After finding herself in this new reality, Mae returns to a coffee shop she went to in her other one.

Mae: Do you remember me? I was in here three days ago. I'm morbidly depressed. Stiffed you on a tip.

Waitress: Ma'am, you're describing every white woman that comes in here.

Mae: No, no. You asked me how I was and I went on this diatribe about every day leading into the next.

Waitress: Listen, lady. I'm in here working while all these other branches are protesting all over the city because I can't afford not to. So what, did you come back to give me a tip?

Mae: Yes, sure.

Alison: Mae finds herself transported again and again to new lives. Once as part of a queer couple. Once married to a rich bro banker. We watch as she tries to figure out how to get back to her old life, warts and all. You can check out Slip on Roku starting today. Zoe Lister-Jones joins me in studio. Hi, Zoe.

Zoe Lister-Jones: Hi.

Alison: You're from Brooklyn?

Zoe: I am.

Alison: Tell me you're from Brooklyn without telling me you're from Brooklyn.

Zoe: [laughs] Oh gosh. How do I do that? I don't know. Brooklyn. I was born in the city, actually on [unintelligible 00:02:07] Street, and then moved to Brooklyn when I was two in '84. I've seen a lot of changes in Brooklyn over the years but I'm still very proudly identified as a Brooklynite.

Alison: Proud New Yorker. Good to see you on WNYC. [laughs]. I want to talk about Slip. I have to be honest, I thought, "Okay, it's Thursday night, I'm going to watch one or two episodes," and then I ended up watching them all.

Zoe: Aw, thanks.

Alison: I binged it. I was making dinner, [laughs] everything. It's really good.

Zoe: Thank you so much.

Alison: It's really, really good. Journalism 101 question. Where did the idea for the series come from?

Zoe: I think whenever I'm writing something, I start with a central question that I am personally struggling to contend with. I think when Slip was born, at least the conceit of it, I was feeling restless in my own life. I was wondering how to contend with those voices that get a little louder at those moments in a life around the what ifs and what we do with our desire for more in a life at whatever stage or station you're in.

Then quarantine hit and in lockdown, all those voices got even louder. I just knew that it was the thing that I had to write. Especially I think in quarantine, we spent a lot of time self-reflecting and there was a huge element of nostalgia where we were looking back at the people in our past especially, and the paths not taken. The sliding doors effect was something that I thought would be so fun and also resonant to explore in series.

Alison: Is there a particular moment in your life where you thought, if I made that decision, my life would've been so much more different? Are you comfortable sharing one of those?

Zoe: Well, there was an Eric character. For those who haven't watched the show, Eric is this very successful rockstar [laughs] and he is really seductive. When we meet Mae, she's the breadwinner in her marriage. Then when she's thrust, so to speak, into this new marriage in her parallel life, she's now taken care of by this very sexy successful rockstar. There was a figure like that in my past [laughs] who my friend invited me to meet at a bar. I remember I was standing on a subway platform and there were two paths I could take. I could get on the subway to go back to Brooklyn because I was in the city, or I could reroute and go to the bar. I for some reason got on that subway and I do think about that one moment. [laughs] There was a juncture where that could have been my life.

Alison: That was just the answer to my first question, I think.

Zoe: Exactly.

Alison: Mae, we hear this and it stays with you through the whole series, is that she grew up in foster care. How do we see this? How did it shape her and how did it shape her relationship with other people, as you were starting to write her character, and as her character starts to evolve, and we get to know her better?

Zoe: Well, I think for Mae, she's jumping from relationship to relationship and she's constantly wondering if her only means to safety is to go backwards, is to go back to the relationship that she understood to be her home for the majority of her adult life. I think her being raised in foster care is a parallel in terms of the sense of trauma and uprootedness that she's reliving as she's bouncing from world to world. At the top of the series, she and her husband, Elijah, who's played by Whitmer Thomas, have a discussion around having kids and it's a very loaded discussion. It's the first time we learned that Mae comes from a foster background. I think just the idea of home was one that was very interesting to me and I wanted to explore in all of its various facets, especially with the history of that kind of trauma.

Alison: My guest is Zoe Lister-Jones. We're talking about Slip which is out on Roku today. She wrote it, directs it, stars in it. Mae switches realities through sexual encounters, specifically through orgasms. She has sex and then the next morning she wakes up and she's in a relationship with the person with whom she's had sex. Was this always part of the story from the beginning?

Zoe: Yes. I think when I was contending with all of those larger existential questions, I also knew that as an artist and as a writer, I wanted to create a narrative that had women's pleasure at its center, or a woman's pleasure specifically at its center, and that sex and sexuality were integral to the narrative. I think I've always been interested in subverting some of the paradigms that we see, or have seen too often in the history of film and television around women's objectification. Even so, how much women have been objectified in the history of media.

A woman's pleasure is very much off the table even when our bodies are on the line. I wanted to play with what that looked like, especially narratively, and an orgasm as a portal to another universe as a means of her transportation, meant that we were really going to be putting that at the forefront of the story, not just in terms of character but in terms of I think larger themes that I was looking to explore.

Alison: I also wondered if it was partially because it's a moment when you can't think of anything else. She has to be out of her own head. It's just this moment of clarity whether you want it or not.

Zoe: Totally. I think to be a woman, she's 37 in the show. I think a woman having a sexual awakening at 37 is something that's actually quite common but we don't talk about enough, the changes that happen at that age and the embodiment. I really wanted to explore what that embodiment might look like and how terrifying it might be to experience it for the first time so late in life.

Alison: When you were sitting down and really thinking about writing this, because we've seen this a lot lately, which is interesting how these things come in waves, Everything Everywhere All At Once and Russian Doll. When you sat down to write this, when you were editing yourself and critiquing yourself, how did you keep it integral to the story and not just a device, not just a gimmick? I almost didn't want to say the word because it's loaded, but sometimes you can find yourself leaning on things. Everybody does it in their work and then sometimes you're like, you know what, I shouldn't be doing that.

Zoe: I think because Mae's journey emotionally was paramount to anything else. I think her sexual escapades were always in service of a larger emotional arc and that arc was very personal to me. I was experiencing some similar issues in my own life and facing similar crossroads and --

Alison: Weren't we all?

Zoe: Weren't we all? Yes, I was careful though, I didn't want it to feel like a crutch. I wanted to feel like it was organic to her emotional journey.

Alison: Obviously, there's a lot of sex in the show. Did you work with intimacy coordinators on set?

Zoe: Yes, we had an amazing intimacy coordinator named Mackenzie Lawrence. Because I wrote it and directed it, when I'm writing, I'm also directing and by the time I get to shortlisting, I've gotten everything already shortlist in my mind. That was particularly helpful when it came to the choreography of the sex scenes themselves because, in pre-production, those conversations with the intimacy coordinator are really about getting hyper-specific about exactly what body parts will be seen, exactly what body parts will be touched.

All of that is then communicated to my fellow actors and their teams, and consented upon before shooting, so that by the time we get to production, there's already been so much communication and consent, which was really important to me. I think also because I wasn't just the director but I was also in those scenes with them and feeling all of the fear and vulnerability and naked alongside them, really in the thick of it all. It did, I think, engender a trusting and safe environment and thankfully so, because we are really pushing the bounds I think of the kind of sex and sensuality we generally see on television.

Alison: My guest is Zoe Lister-Jones. This show is called Slip. She wrote it, directs and stars in it. It's on Roku starting today and people are like Roku? Okay. You very gamely took this on on your Instagram. I'm going to play a little bit of this clip. It's you talking to some friends. I don't know if they're real friends or actor friends.

Zoe: They're real.

Alison: They're real friends. Let's take a listen.

Zoe: Hi.

Speaker 3 Hi, Zoe.

Speaker 5: Oh my God, wait, when does your new show Slip come out?

Zoe: April 21st. So soon. It's crazy.

Speaker 4: What's it on?

Zoe: It's on Roku.

Speaker 3: Girl, you know we don't know how to watch stuff on Roku.

Zoe: It's actually super simple, you don't need a Roku TV necessarily. You can actually stream it for free at the Rokuchannel.com on literally any device. Or if you have a Samsung TV.

Speaker 5: Oh, I got that.

Zoe: Or an Amazon firestick.

Speaker 3: I have one of those.

Zoe: See? Or just like literally on a laptop.

Speaker 3: Lovely.

Speaker 4: Oh my God, that's so great. We can't wait to watch it.

Zoe: Thank you.

Speaker 3: Just a really quick question, are you [inaudible 00:13:11] in there?

Zoe: Yes, almost all the time.

Speaker 3: Oh my God.

Speaker 4: It's the Rokuchannel.com?

Zoe: Yes.

Alison: I'm glad we had the grown-up conversation about nudity before that. How did you wind up at Roku?

Zoe: Well, Dakota Johnson has a production company called TeaTime Pictures and they came on as producers, along with our studio Boat Rocker. I had written all seven episodes in quarantine by myself, which is an unconventional approach. Usually you have a writers room, but this was something that just felt deeply personal and I think I had come off of writing and directing a studio film, and my response to that as an artist was I wanted to put myself into something that felt entirely mine.

Then I handed all seven scripts to TeaTime and they brought it to Roku and Roku read all seven and within a month had given me a greenlight to series without one script note, which is also unheard of, and for me a dream, to be given that much artistic freedom and to be trusted that much by a network. Then we were really off to the races. I think the beauty of Roku being a new platform is that they are willing to take risks and they took a big one on me and I remember --

Alison: Well, they might see it as an investment.

Zoe: An investment, yes.

Alison: Because there's always a breakthrough show. All of these platforms had a breakthrough show. Netflix wasn't always Netflix until House of Cards showed up.

Zoe: Right. Yes, even you'll get like AMC, everyone's like what is that? Then we all watch Mad Men and we're like now we know. It does require education on my part to tell people how to watch Roku. Surprisingly Roku is in like 70 million homes across the country, so hopefully, the word will spread and people won't be afraid by a new platform, because they're doing cool stuff and this show is hopefully one of those cool things.

Alison: There's this wonderful reoccurring theme in Slip where even though Mae is going across the different versions of her life, and I don't know if it's time traveling, what we call it or she's just going to different versions of the world. Two things remain the same, her best friend, even though she's got different circumstances in her life, and these white loafers. What do the loafers represent?

Zoe: I would say friends and shoes are the most important elements of my life. The loafers, a shout-out to Rachel Comey, one of my favorite New York designers. They are by Rachel Comey and they're cool as hell. I was coveting them as a person. I think I wanted little pieces of Mae's original life to show up as reminders of what she had left. Also, shoes are obviously a means of transportation also. It was like a creature comfort that was propelling her forward as she was being pulled to go back. In every life, we played a lot with wardrobe because she's thrust into these new wardrobes and her new clothes and accessories are clues into who she is in each life, but the shoes being the constant keep her grounded, so to speak. Creating that pastiche of who she was, and who she's becoming, I think, was an interesting character study.

Then Gina, her best friend who's played really brilliantly by Tymika Tafari. I think that in life, as we are on our romantic misadventures, the anchors are always, if you're lucky, great friends, and friends who can keep you honest and reflect back to you. Also, the ways in which you might need to change in order to grow and Gina very much serves that purpose for Mae. She's also just hilarious and an amazing sidekick for Mae as Mae is trying to sort through the madness of this new adventure.

Alison: Before I let you go I want to know about Beau is Afraid. It's nearly three hours long. It's an Ari Aster, which means you're going to get scared and freaked out. There's supernatural elements and suspense and violence. My producer saw it. I was too scared to see it. When you got the script, what was your reaction?

Zoe: Well, I needed a long time to read it. I will say though, I'm not a big horror person. I have seen Ari's previous films, Hereditary and Midsommar and those are scary. I would say you shouldn't be too afraid of this film. It is three hours long. Ari described it as a Jewish Lord of the Rings. It's really more of an anxious adventure. One man just trying to see his mother and it's brilliant and, of course, has demented elements. It's really a dark comedy. When I first read the script, the thing that I was most surprised by was how many times I laughed throughout it.

Alison: All right, I'll think about it. It has all the actors I like so much, so I'll think about it. Are you working on anything right now you want to shout out?

Zoe: Well, Roku hasn't given us an official greenlight to shoot season two, but they did greenlight a writer's room for season two. The people in that Roku promo that you asked if they were my friends, those were my three writers on season two. We have all seven episodes written and we're waiting for that green light, so fingers crossed.

Alison: You just put it out into the world. Zoe Lister-Jones, you can see her in Slip, she wrote, directed, and stars in it. It's on Roku, it drops today. Beau is Afraid is in theatres now, wide release today. Alison is afraid but maybe I'll go see it.

Zoe: You can stream it for free on the Rokuchannel.com so there's no barrier to entry.

Alison: There you go. Zoe, thanks for coming to the studio.

Zoe: Thank you so much for having me.

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