Excerpt from the interview:
“ I’ve been sent plays before,” Shawkat says, “and I’ve just never responded strongly enough to them because it does take more of an uprooting than film or TV. But I really believe that characters come to you for a reason. And I feel like, in some weird mirrored way, I’m going through a similar thing as Mae. So I was just like, I have to work through this.”
This is where I get confused. Mae is, to put it mildly, a loser. For most of the play, she’s jobless, single, completely aimless, and too disassociated to even look her dad’s illness in the eye. Meanwhile, Shawkat’s Search Party has been called the “near-perfect,” “razor sharp” portrait of her generation. She’s coming off a successful collaboration with her friend Hailey Benton Gates in Atropia, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2025, and she’s just wrapped production on a new stoner comedy, The Wrong Girls, playing opposite Kristen Stewart. She has a child and a vibrant art practice outside of her acting career. Mae’s stagnancy feels like the diametric opposite of her life, so full of motion and surprise. I tell Shawkat that I can’t square the comparison.
“ I mean, that’s what’s so funny,” she says. “It’s not what it looks like. There are so many people who I look at and go, ’Oh wow, they seem to have it all together. They have a family and they’re working and they’re an artist and in good shape and all these things.’ But life is never that easy, you know?”
For years after Arrested Development, Shawkat was caught in a churn of false starts, auditions that left her with the sense that she was “too weird” or “too ethnic.” Her father is Iraqi, not exactly the Hollywood default in post-9/11 America, and as the industry changed, she was pinballed by its whims, one minute cast aside, the next tokenized in a parade of “diverse voices.” Meanwhile, her former co-star and close friend Michael Cera was booking major roles in Superbad, Juno, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. She was stuck. It’s disorienting to be pulled in so many different directions by people who don’t actually know you.
“I think overall I’m incredibly lucky,” she says. “I’m really grateful, but I’ll always relate to that thing of feeling like you’re never as in step with the things you want to be doing in your life. You’re always a step behind. You’re trying to communicate something, but it’s not coming across, or your connections are never deep enough, or you’re not having good enough sex, or you’re hanging out with your best friends and then you leave feeling empty and you’re like, ’What happened?’ Life is just that mix.”
“And if it’s not, then good for you,” she adds. “But I’m a highly sensitive person and somewhat neurotic.”
We both laugh. I tell her my dad used to call me a “HSP.”
“ Wow, there’s a name for everything,” she says.
Shawkat has always been drawn to subversive women. As Mae, she fantasizes onstage about being tied up by a handsome cowboy every moment she gets to herself — and even some that she, awkwardly, doesn’t. In one particularly memorable scene, Mae is wrapped in the sheets of her sister’s childhood bed, feverishly masturbating, when her father bumbles in. It’s the first time in many years of covering theater that I’ve seen a woman masturbate onstage.
“ Women’s sexuality is the biggest threat, I think, to society,” Shawkat says. “That’s why it’s always been controlled.”
She’s queer, and even as a teenager, she was delivering performances that pushed against the Hollywood mainstream. Consider the cult classic Whip It, a campy coming-of-age flick centered on roller derby, in which she played opposite Elliot Page. The movie was a gay awakening for so many people in my generation, even if the gay parts were mostly subtext. And this August, Shawkat is back at it with The Wrong Girls, the aforementioned stoner comedy written and directed by Dylan Myer (the prolific screenwriter and director who happens to be married to Kristen Stewart).
“Years ago, post-COVID but right before I had my son, Dylan and I met for a coffee,” Shawkat tells me. “She sent me the script, which she had written like eight years before or something. But no one was ready
In the teaser for the movie, which dropped in April, Shawkat is standing at a cutting board crushing cereal and gummy bears on top of three slices of bread. “What’re you making, dude?” Stewart asks, rolling a joint.
Shawkat tells me that Stewart really had been smoking a joint the afternoon they got together to film the teaser in New York. She’d been worried about getting a contact high before her show that night.
The two play a pair of best friends loosely based on Meyer and her producing partner, Maggie McLean, in a cast rounded out by a list of comedy royalty: Seth Rogen, LaKeith Stanfield, Kumail Nanjiani, Zack Fox, and Tony Hale. The movie follows Shawkat and Stewart’s characters as they take an experimental new drug that endows them with the power of telepathy, setting off a psychedelic romp.
“Alia is an acrobat and, like, a genius,” Stewart says of working together. “When an actor just runs absolute heart circles around you… I dunno if I’ve ever been wrapped in that flavor of warmth on a movie. Making The Wrong Girls was like making a cartoon where everything big and scary or small and boring was fodder for our jokes and our inner world.”
“That girl has been going places since she was a baby,” Stewart adds of Shawkat. “Everyone just needs to keep the fuck up. She is kinda scary in how impressive she is. It’s very hot.”
For Shawkat, the experience was just as transcendent. “It was so fun to play someone so dumb,” she says. “Not to be hyperbolic, but it’s one of the best shoots I’ve ever done.”
