It’s impossible to sit on the streets of New York alongside Ilana Glazer without attracting some notice. We’re only three minutes into our coffee on a breezy morning in May when a woman in a black sundress stops mid-stride to stare. “Sorry—I just want to say…yeah, you’ve definitely changed my life,” she says nervously. “Thank you.” Glazer chirps back, “Thank you. Appreciate it. Bye, love ya,” She politely laughs and remarks on the bystander’s “cute energy” before sinking back into our conversation.
Sidewalk adoration is to be expected for the comedian, producer, and writer who cocreated and starred in the hit Comedy Central series Broad City. The show premiered a decade ago, in a simpler time—back when you could lose yourself in a Bed Bath & Beyond and Hillary Clinton was only a lighthearted cameo away from an assumed presidential win. Across five seasons, Glazer and her creative partner Abbi Jacobson attracted a devoted fan base by reflecting the 20-something New York experience as they’d lived it, complete with sweaty subway rides, surreal detours through seedy St. Mark’s Place, and schemes to acquire that month’s rent. By the time Glazer and Jacobson pulled the plug in 2019, they’d generated oft referenced memes and introduced the concept of a JonBenét Ramsey Beanie Baby.
Long Island–born Glazer was in her early 20s when she and Jacobson started playing fictionalized versions of themselves via a web series that spawned their show. In those days, she says, fan interactions skewed intense. “When Broad City was on TV and people would see me, they would think I wanted to smoke with and fuck them,” she tells Vanity Fair. “And it was just like, ‘No, dude. What? I’m truly looking at these grapefruits. This is a really aggressive energy.’ It’s been so nice to get older, where people seem to understand that I’m not my character. I’ve had clarity and understanding that I’m not my character.”
After closing the door on Broad City, Glazer released her debut comedy special, 2020’s The Planet Is Burning, appeared in Apple TV+’s The Afterparty, and cowrote and starred in the 2021 A24 horror film False Positive. The latter project, she told VF at the time, was “a container for some of my anxieties about growing up and moving on and letting go.” Glazer’s new movie, Babes—which she cowrote and stars in alongside Michelle Buteau—is a comedic reckoning with what happens next. “In having a child myself, I gained so much, but I also lost,” she says.
Over the course of our hour-plus chat, Glazer continuously steers us back to the perspective she’s gained since becoming a parent to her nearly three-year-old daughter with husband David Rooklin. “I don’t know if you have this experience of identifying older than you are,” she tells me between sips of her cortado, “but I’ve always been a nerd. I’m 37, and I’m so happy to be 37. You know what I mean? I felt like when I was a teenager I wasn’t doing enough teenage stuff. When I was in my 20s, I was building my comedy career and focused. And now, I feel so aligned.”
On her latest album, Taylor Swift sings, “My friends all smell like weed or little babies.” In Babes, Glazer’s Eden comfortably occupies the valley in between. After discovering she’s pregnant while on a mushroom trip with her best friend Dawn (played by Buteau), Eden decides to raise the baby on her own.
Those looking for echoes of Broad City will find them. Eden runs a yoga studio out of her fourth-floor walk-up apartment that feels like an elevated version of Ilana’s SheWork. There’s a breast-pump-burning scene in the film soundtracked to Shania Twain, who was a recurring gag on the sitcom. And then there’s the fractured bond between freewheeling Eden and the more practical, settled Dawn, which parallels what might’ve happened between onscreen Abbi and Ilana if we’d seen them move into their 30s.
Was Glazer hesitant to pen another project centered on the complexities of female friendship after Broad City? “Nope,” she says without hesitation. “Not a shred of doubt, baby. Not a shred of damn doubt.”
“I don’t want to watch bad shit about female friendships that’s fake or boring or not funny and not heartfelt,” she continues. “But good shit, really quality, deep, funny stories about female friendship with stakes, that feels like it comes from a seed of authenticity and has retained that genuineness? I’ll probably be doing it for the rest of my life.”
The comedic indignities of pregnancy and its many bodily fluids are “the sauce” of Babes, says Glazer, which she cowrote with friend Josh Rabinowitz when she was newly pregnant. But the way friendship morphs with motherhood, “that’s the meat.”
Glazer is painfully aware of how few films about parenthood are told from an authentically female perspective. “Three Men and a Baby—three men, three? I don’t really even need one to tell this story. The movie Nine Months is about Hugh Grant. Knocked Up, it’s Seth [Rogen]’s face. It’s wild. And nobody cares to change the way the story is told.”
So here she is, with a film that hopes to fill that void. “Particles of our souls are all in there,” Glazer says of the script. That includes a scene where a woman must crawl on the hospital floor to her own childbirth. “Real life is so much more magical than what we do to try to capture it. Can you imagine the crown of a head coming out of your pussy in the car and you were driving? My God.” (I’ll admit that I cannot.)
Glazer lights up when she speaks about Pamela Adlon, who makes her feature directorial debut on Babes after helming more than 40 episodes of her Emmy-nominated FX series, Better Things. When they met over Zoom, Adlon had taken impassioned notes on the script, “and she’s screaming them at us, cracking up. I’m laughing thinking about it. Then she’s like, ‘Come on,’” Glazer says in a pitch-perfect Adlon impression. She and Buteau were bowled over by Adlon’s ability to thrive in the industry while raising three children. As if on cue, Glazer’s phone rings. Her face curls into a disbelieving smile. “Oh, it’s Michelle,” she says before answering: “I was just talking about you, bitch.”
They speak briefly before Glazer hangs up, then starts waxing poetic about her costar. “She’s just juicy—her soul is juicy and wet and you’re feeling it. You know what I mean?” Casting Dawn was a process; before finding Buteau, says Glazer, she was brought lists that reminded her of Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women.” Then Buteau came to her in a dream. Seriously. “I have chills,” says Glazer, showing me her visible goosebumps.
Glazer, Buteau, and Adlon bonded over the way they’d sidestepped such lists by creating their own semi-autobiographical shows. Buteau’s was Survival of the Thickest, a Netflix comedy that borrows from her real experiences. “When it’s your first season, it’s like having your first kid where you’re just unraveled and looking at yourself from the outside in,” says Glazer. “A show about yourself based on you—it’s strange.”
During production, the trio also leaned on one another as working parents. “I was leaving before my daughter woke up and coming home after she went to sleep, so that was just, ugh, painful,” says Glazer. “I felt proud and purposeful, but I did miss her. Oh my God, I missed her first steps. It fucking sucked.” Adlon came to her emotional rescue. “‘Nope, nope, doesn’t count until you see it,’” she told Glazer, who gamely replied, “You know what, bitch? I’ll take that.”
In some ways, Glazer’s journey toward motherhood dovetails with the five years she devoted to Broad City. Although she “started feeling the physical and spiritual need” to have a child at age 27, around the time the series premiered, she also had some growing to do, both personally and professionally.
“Broad City is, I think, us discovering our feminism,” says Glazer. She remembers being shocked when a 2011 Wall Street Journal piece used the F-word to refer to the web series: “Abbi and I are like, feminist?! So blissfully ignorant to the identity politics behind what we were doing. Then as Broad City developed as a TV show, our [characters’] gripes are really us discovering how deeply misogynistic the world is. That’s the ‘fuck you’ of our comedy. I’m not really so interested in that ‘fuck you’ energy unless it means something, right?”
The scope of that internal evolution made it especially painful when their work was minimized. “There was always this infantilizing and demeaning of Abbi’s and my talent [as well as] Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello (now cocreators of Max’s Hacks), where [reporters] were like, ‘Are you really best friends?’” Glazer says. “Why do you fucking care? Are you asking It’s Always Sunny [in Philadelphia] if they’re really best friends? You can’t see us as showrunners because we’re in our fucking 20s and because we’re women? Is that why you need to see us as BFFs? Our episodes were a million bucks. We’re in charge of $10 million worth of production. That’s who I am. You don’t know me as a BFF. Also, you’ll never know me as a BFF. How is this related to this fucking interview about a professional endeavor?”
Glazer gets similarly fired up remembering questions about how much of the series was improvised. “Bitch. Bitch. Bitch,” she chants, emphasizing each expletive more than the last. “Why don’t you take a step back and think about that for a second? We spent 12 hours a day for three fucking months to make 10 episodes of television. Then our writers would leave, and Abbi and I would rewrite all these episodes for production. We’ve had seven drafts of each script, then the edit is going through five versions. But, ‘Is it improvised?’ No, it’s not.”
Clearly, Glazer’s life was deeply entangled with her show—an arrangement that served her less and less as time progressed. “I felt like I was giving parts of myself that I didn’t want to give,” she says now. “I felt empty after certain periods, like I had given it without permission. However, I wrote it. Why does it feel that way?”
After Broad City ended, Glazer began seeing a therapist multiple times a week. “Early on, while I was still so self-loathing in stand-up, so confused and so alone, my analyst was like, ‘Well, the thing about stand-up is it’s impersonal,’” says Glazer. “I was like, ‘Exactly, it’s just so personal.’ And he said, ‘No, no. I said impersonal.’ I was like, ‘Bitch, what? You did? I heard the opposite.’”
That breakthrough shook Glazer, and helped her make a new stand-up special of which she’s deeply proud. “I have never enjoyed stand-up the way I’ve enjoyed it this past year,” she says, attributing her renewed pleasure to “therapy, letting more people into my process, and truly becoming my kid’s mom.” But these days, Glazer has limits to what she’ll share onstage. “I don’t say my daughter’s name publicly,” she says. “I don’t want to be walking around and someone calls out her name. Her and my husband—I check everything that I’m going to say about him and about her with him.” Her stance is strong and unwavering: “I did not have a kid to make jokes about [her]. I’m not extracting from her existence. I find that violent.”
Boundaries have broken Glazer open in a new way. “When I go onstage and I’m nervous, I’m not actually about to go give a piece of my soul to them,” she says. “I’m about to perform stand-up that I’ve been writing, editing, perfecting. It’s not personal. My personal experience, I now know and claim so much more securely than I ever did before.” And with that declaration vocalized, our time is up. “I’ve got analysis,” Glazer smiles. “I’ve gotta go get my guy.”
Hours later, I’ll discover a message Glazer cooed into the phone that was recording our conversation while I dashed inside to retrieve my latte. “Savannah, leaving you a little message. I’m really enjoying our talk, girl,” she says, slipping into the “Ilana” cadence familiar to her fans. “I’m such a freak,” she adds, laughing—sounding like both her Broad City alter ego and the person I was just getting to know.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
Live Updates From the 2024 Cannes Film Festival
Cover Star Chris Hemsworth on Fear, Love, and Escaping Hollywood
Everything to Know About the Worm That Allegedly Crawled Inside RFK Jr.’s Brain and Died
Meet the Mastermind Behind New York’s Celebrity Playground of Choice
The Vatican’s Secret Role in the Science of IVF
Griffin Dunne on the Tragic Death That Reshaped His Family
Visit the VF Shop and Get Our Brand-New Tote (and Much More)
The post “I’m Not My Character”: Ilana Glazer on ‘Babes,’ ‘Broad City,’ and Everything in Between appeared first on Vanity Fair.