Mae Martin is not into chit-chat. After the soul-baring series Feel Good, the Netflix stand-up special Mae Martin: SAP, and hit podcast Handsome, fans think they know the real Mae and want to dive straight in. “People come up and trauma dump — and I’m into it,” they say. “I’m not good with small talk anyway, I want to get deep.”
Martin speaks with a mix of humor, warmth and livewire energy. Their work has dealt with, and often found the funny within, life’s awkward or existential moments. “With stand-up, it was such a huge turning point in my career when I started talking about real stuff — my life and addiction and pain,” they say. “People were suddenly totally engaged and laughing more. It’s really gratifying and validating to say the things that you’re embarrassed about and then have other people say, ‘Yeah, me too.’”
Deadline talks to Martin in Toronto where they grew up, and it’s a full circle moment. Years before, they were filming outside the movie premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival with a camcorder, or they were getting autographs from stars such as Liev Schreiber. This time Martin was on the other side of the barrier at the festival for the world premiere of Wayward, the Netflix series they created, exec produced and starred in. “We filmed the show here,” Martin says. “It’s really about adolescence and I associate Toronto with my teens. That was the backdrop for all my misadventures.”
The limited series is about the multi-billion-dollar troubled teens industry, and specifically the Wayward Pines Academy in the town of Tall Pines. It is an institution that promises “to solve the problem of adolescence.” Donning some formidable glasses, Evelyn (Toni Collette) runs the school and, it transpires, maybe the whole town. The viewers’ entry point is through Abbie (Sydney Topliffe), whose parents send her to the school, and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind), her best friend who attempts to rescue her; as well as via Alex (Martin), a newly arrived cop, and his heavily pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon).
The Abbie-Leila relationship is modeled on that of Martin and their childhood best friend, who was taken to a school for troubled teens. The memory served as inspiration for the series. Martin describes Wayward as “at heart a love letter to teen friendship.”
The school’s origins are cultish, an area that fascinates Martin. “Cults are a useful metaphor for the complicity that we all have and what we’re willing to turn a blind eye to in order to have a comfortable life.”
Martin’s previous series Feel Good, for Netflix and Channel 4, was semi-autobiographical and over two seasons traced the relationship between Mae and George, played by Ghosts star Charlotte Ritchie. It also delved into Mae’s past and their own teen years. If Feel Good was comedy with a powerful dramatic arc, Wayward turns that formula on its head and is largely a drama with some lighter moments along the way.
“I was keen to properly build tension,” Martin says about that radical gear-shift. “I really wanted to make sure that the funny moments were character-driven and truthful, and that any horror and pain was really earned.”
Given Martin has had a successful career as a stand-up comic and comedy writer, was it hard to reel in the laughs for Wayward?“I feel like my inner clown is very close to the surface,” they say. “As I get older, I think, ‘Is it just a series of coping mechanisms? Am I funny really, or is that just a way of interfacing with the world?’ I’m still figuring that out.”
Action Points
When pressed on their dream role, Martin says they want to be the next James Bond. Maybe the clues were there all along. In Feel Good, Martin’s character tells their agent: “I’ve always wanted to be John Wick.” In Wayward, a pumped-up Martin plays cop Alex Dempsey, who cracks some heads and is seriously deep in the action. “I’m clearly living out some fantasy and I don’t know who keeps letting me do it,” they say. “I have perpetual imposter syndrome about acting, but I really fell in love with it making this show and getting to work with Toni Collette, Sarah Gadon and the cast. I gave myself license to really go for it. It was really fun to get out some aggression and to play that character with all his flaws.”
Martin was urged to dye their hair darker so that Alex could be taken more seriously. And that character is a serious one. He has a darkness and yet also yearns for a happy family home in a picture-perfect setting, which Tall Pines, ultimately, is not. For Martin, this role felt like more of a traditional acting gig where they are inhabiting a fictional character, as opposed to Feel Good where they played a version of themselves.
Martin pinpoints a crucial scene just over halfway through the season. “It’s a sex scene between a trans cop [Alex] and his eight-months pregnant wife [Laura]. That representation would have meant a lot to me when I was young. It’s such a different thing to see: An eight-months pregnant woman who’s fully clothed and this trans guy.”
For Martin, the fact that Alex was a trans man and “that wasn’t the most interesting or important thing about his character” in the series, was significant. “What that means is that, if you’re not preaching, or making it such a linchpin of the show, you can actually be more subversive. Narratively, there is so much going on in this scene.”
Martin shares a chunk of screentime with Collette, who serves up a masterclass in chilling villainy as a school and community leader who majors in manipulation. In the wrong hands, Evelyn could have been a pantomime baddie, but Collette delivers something more complex. “She really got the assignment,” says Martin. “Where it could have been a sort of mustache-twirling villain, I think you feel that Evelyn really believes in what she’s doing and just lacks self-awareness and is some kind of narcissist.”
Wayward Adolescence
Feel Good and Wayward are both produced by Objective Fiction. A creative through-line from those shows, via the SAP stand-up special, is a focus on teenage years and their legacy. “In Feel Good there was an adult processing their teens and then with SAP I was similarly driven by nostalgia and trying to make sense of it all,” says Martin. “I’m trying to make sense of how visceral those years were for me; all of those firsts are so intense. In your teens everyone is a mess, but you also know who you are.”
With Wayward, Martin is hopeful that audiences will reflect on their own adolescence. “I’d like people to think about their own teens. We should absolutely be listening to young people more. I don’t think we’ve ever really known what to do with teenagers. We sexualize them, we market to them, we deride them, we treat them like children, but we expect them to be adults.We so desperately need that next generation to save the planet that it’d be good to empower them a little bit.”
For Martin, it was important that the young cast of Wayward such as Topliffe, Lind and others felt empowered amongst seasoned performers such as Collette, Gadon and Patrick J. Adams.
“We were already editing the show when I watched [Netflix’s U.K. drama] Adolescence. There is an episode with around 200 kids in that school, but if you give them that responsibility, or trust people with their characters and their intuition, then they really step up. It was important to me, that [the young cast] felt like they had ownership over the emotional worlds of their characters.”
Next Steps
Post-Wayward, Martin has a stand-up tour in the offing and projects with Feel Good co-creator Joe Hampson in the works. “I miss working with him and we’ve got a couple of things in development that we’re pitching because we’re desperate to write something funny again,” they say. “We have some good ideas and I’m just trying to lure him out to LA.”
Martin is also eyeing roles in work created by other writers. “I’ve never been in a movie and I’d love to act in someone else’s thing and to play someone really different.”
They continue: “I’d love to do an Elliott Smith biopic and play him or even play River Phoenix. I’d also love to play a villain or do a kids’ movie.” That might be called keeping your options open, but considering Martin has written comedy and now drama, releases music, writes books, co-hosts a popular podcast and has also started selling their artwork, these ambitions don’t feel lofty. Maybe Bond isn’t such a stretch.
The post From ‘Feel Good’ To ‘Wayward’: Mae Martin On Teens, Trauma & Truth appeared first on Deadline.
