Jenny Slate, Like Her Emmys 2025 Dress, Is in a Moment of “Vibrant Bloom”

After Jenny Slate wrapped shooting for Dying for Sex, in which she plays Nikki, a freewheeling thespian taking care of her best friend, who has terminal cancer, she cut her hair short. “Emotionally speaking,” she tells VF, “there’s just so much going on for me all the time, that I don’t like a lot of fuss anymore around my physicality.” At Sunday night’s Emmys 2025 ceremony, where she received her first nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series, her hairstylist Jordan M gave it a middle part and a face-framing bend. The new style is the kind of dramatic change one might expect of a classic breakup haircut—and in some ways, it is. The show, she says, helped her let go of some deep-seated self-criticism and emerge with a newfound self-understanding. “I can’t contort myself or over-adorn myself to try to send a message to anyone before I send a message to myself about what’s going on. I actually know very well how I like to feel and what I like to look like.”

Slate, whose work has long explored a childlike curiosity toward the weirdness of the world, delighted in the fact that her Emmys dress, by Rosie Assoulin, is the silhouette she sketched as a kid when she was drawing “fancy people”: strapless, with a sweetheart neckline. “I had one of those moments that people sometimes have with their wedding dress where they’re, like, Whoa,” Slate says. (She had it, in fact, with her own wedding dress when she married her husband, the writer Ben Shattuck, in their living room.) Still, the dress was all grown-up, Old Hollywood glamour. Its sculptural black bodice contrasts with a billowing and slightly sheer white skirt, a tonal echo of the monochrome Slate, with the aid of her stylist Jordan Johnson, has been drawn to recently. (Her stand-up-special tuxedo and the gown she wore to accept her award for outstanding supporting performance in a limited series at this year’s Gotham Awards, for instance, both by Thom Browne.) It falls, she says, into the perfect combination of structure and comfort. But the big red flower on the sternum, which reminds Slate of when “a pie wins first prize,” is pure pleasure. “The dress is an exact expression of how I feel about myself and my work right now,” Slate says. “I feel strong. I have a preparatory process. I am structured. I feel matured, but I also feel like it is total fucking party time for me, and that I am really, really in a moment of vibrant bloom.”

For the Emmys she kept her jewelry (“little, tiny things in my ears”) and makeup similarly minimal. Kirin Bhatty, her makeup artist for more than a decade, mixed a Chanel Water-Fresh Tint with moisturizer for a light, unencumbered finish. “I used to do lashes,” Slate says. “Now I’m just starting to pare it down.” But, in a trait she shares with the real-life Nikki Boyer she portrays on screen, “I love a lip.” After mulling a couple options, she went with Chanel Rouge Allure Liquid Velvet in Énigmatique. To foreclose pre-carpet nerves, her getting-ready soundtrack includes Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief, Aldous Harding, and—to invoke the feeling of her grandmothers, of true love and “soft, cushy feelings”—Chet Baker.

Slate seems comfortable dwelling in places of contrast. When we speak about her look, a few days before the ceremony, she’s in Cleveland, wrapping the shoot on a not-yet-announced film, and living in a football-themed rental apartment provided by the movie’s producers. “It’s just a ton of team spirit in here,” she says. “The sconces even say Cleveland Browns.”

Slate, consummate team player, has been thinking a lot about the ways outward appearances can mirror or support inner change. Her onscreen persona experienced a style evolution of her own. A few minutes into the first episode of Dying for Sex when, outside of a Brooklyn deli, Nikki learns from her best friend Molly (Michelle Williams) that the cancer she kicked into remission two years ago is back, metastasized, and incurable, Nikki is a study in muchness. Her plaid coat and mustard crushed velvet bag are oversized, her hair is loose, she wears a tangle of gold necklaces, and her hands glint with bracelets and rings. She moves through most of the Kübler-Ross grief stages, and then some, in mere moments, shifting from a stunned recitation of everything Molly’s done to keep the cancer at bay, to body-shaking sobs, to glorious, cathartic anger channeled toward the shop owner telling her to keep it down. “She’s an actress,” Molly tells the man, gravely. “Her emotions live very close to the surface.”

As she watches Nikki, Molly’s expression (fluctuating sadness and amusement, undergirded by awe) is an accurate preview of how viewers can expect to experience Slate’s virtuosic performance in a show she describes to me as “a real wave form of emotion.” Adapted from the true story chronicled in Nikki Boyer and Molly Kochan’s podcast by the same name, the limited series charts Molly’s journey of wresting back control of her body and life despite her terminal diagnosis, and Nikki’s own journey of rising to meet the challenge of her new caregiving role—for Molly, but also for herself. “It would’ve been really bad for Molly, if Nikki had gone down with the ship,” Slate says. “Molly really needed to know that Nikki’s life force was going to be respected by Nikki herself and used properly as she survived Molly.” That transformation is mirrored in Slate’s onscreen wardrobe, which becomes more muted in tone and physically soft.

The show’s costume designer, Melissa Toth, “was really purposeful about having those conversations with us,” Slate says. “It’s not just, like, ‘Oh, I’m sad, so I’m in pj’s.’” Toth and Slate imagined Nikki’s soft sweats and tank tops in muted tones as clothes Nikki dredged up from her movement classes. “Movement clothes are meant to be neutral,” Slate says. “They’re meant to reveal the self as—not to be a douche about it—but the instrument. They’re not supposed to make a statement, and you need to be able to move freely in them, and to be anything in them. And I think that’s also what Nikki had to be at the end.” (Toth and Williams both received nominations for their respective roles.)

The experience of working on the show was profoundly transformative for Slate, not only in her growth as a performer onscreen—the show’s closing shot gives The Graduate’s a run for its money, and mirrors Slate’s first scene in miniature, featuring a close-up, as her expression captures as much heartbreak and grief as it does humor and resilience—but in her own life. “Molly took so many chances at the end to get what she needed in order to hold her own life in her hands at the end. And it’s really turned me into someone who is totally aware of my fears. I’m not without them. I’m not without self-criticism, but they just get so much—I mean, I’m in an apartment decorated in football stuff—so I’ll say they just get so much less playing time.”

Both characters, Slate says, made her think about “the idea that a lot of us, I think unconsciously, are working within parameters that might’ve been set deep inside us; limits or parameters of experience that we’ve set for ourselves based on one impactful moment.” Molly’s mother’s boyfriend sexually abused her, a traumatic experience that impacts her ability to feel pleasure through physical connection. “I started thinking, for myself, what are the things that might be in my very deep-inside personal operating system that I take as a given, or I take as almost sort of my biology, but in fact, they’re personal constructs? And what works well for me? What do I go out of my way to give myself? What am I innovative about in my own emotional experience? What do I stand up for and what do I say “that’s not for me,” even though I want it?”

“The timeline is now,” she says. “The clock is going, and for all of us, there will be an end point where there’s no more later, where every chance we had has passed.”

Slate has spent years working through her own anxiety and depression, both privately and in her writing. “Of course, I feel, sometimes, completely haunted by the narrative of the specific ways that I tell myself really rude personal propaganda: that some treats, some happy things, some easy things, are just not for people like me, whatever that means. The show has really helped me be, like, Well, that’s really based on nothing. That’s just based on a big thing, which is a fear that started before. And you don’t have to give that the whole space.”

This internal shift “shows up everywhere in my decision-making. It shows up in the way I parent, it shows up in the way I prepare my work, make my work choices. It shows up in how I dress myself for my day, and it shows up in how I fill my empty spaces. There are so fewer moments in my day where my mind is filled with needless worry or kind of that brutal running cycle of negative what-ifs, which used to be kind of a private trademark inside me.”

Her daughter, the four-and-a-half-year old Ida, isn’t aware of her mother’s newly minted status as an Emmy nominee. “She’s learning about outer space and caves right now,” Slate says. “I think that’s probably better.”

Like Ida, Slate is most interested in creative growth. She describes being on set as “an influx of nutrition” that complements her self-described introvert-extrovert combination of alternating gregariousness and shyness. “You get to be in the group. You’ve been told you’re allowed to be there, but if you need to prepare, it’s totally normal to go and sit by yourself. It is permissible and, in fact, appropriate to be deep, deep in your thoughts, to be completely connected to any feeling that might rise.”

“I just am fully in love with it,” she says. “I cannot imagine a time in my life when I will become jaded about acting, about being given work to do.”

“I was saying the other night to my director, it’s kind of like—I’m sure this is not what it’s like on the International Space Station—but what I imagine it is when you’re in the International Space Station. You’re there because you’re exploring. We don’t necessarily need to be up there. There’s enough to do down here on Earth, but people are out there because it’s worth it to try to see more. It’s worth it to try to get a little bit farther out into infinity, and understand the power and the beauty that’s out there. But it is voluntary,” Slate says. “I would argue that it’s necessary for the human spirit. But art and exploration, you got to choose to do it.”