Gillian: ‘People are disappointed when they meet me. I’m not funny and I don’t party’

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/gillian-jacobs-interview-i-used-go-here-community-love-netflix-b457471.html

It also doesn’t help that the roles regularly conflate with one another: enigmatic late-twenties to early-thirtysomethings who are outspoken to a fault and blundering through life by way of alcohol and chain-smoking. As Jacobs puts it, her characters are “having a hard time”. In the pantheon of self-destructive, shambolic libertines, Jacobs is the ne plus ultra. She’s the it-girl of the sad-com – a thriving subgenre that finds humour in life’s inevitable despair. Such is her gift for these parts that director Judd Apatow hired Jacobs for Love without an audition; one interview hailed her the “Patron Saint of Messy, Flawed Roles”.

So it is almost laughably ironic that Jacob’s characters should feel relatable to so many people, and yet least of all to herself. “I think sometimes people are disappointed when they meet me. I’m not funny and I don’t party,” she says down the line from Los Angeles. To use a Community comparison, she says: “As a person, I’m closer to Alison [Brie’s] character Annie than I am Britta. I’m a good student who likes to follow the rules.” Annie is Britta’s goody-two-shoes foil. It’s a similar story with her character on Love, the critically-acclaimed Netflix series that pairs Jacobs’s erratic boozehound Mickey with Paul Rust’s bonafide nerd Gus. “Same thing with Mickey,” she says. “I am much more like Gus.”