Pamela Adlon got teary-eyed rewatching a scene from “Better Things” featuring Mikey Madison. Madison, who played one of her character’s daughters in the much-loved FX show and recently won an Academy Award for “Anora.”
“You mean, I’m the kingmaker? Or a queenmaker?,” joked Adlon.
“I’m emotional watching it because it’s triumphant for me to be able to make people laugh and then bring it back around to the heart of it. When I was casting the girls in the show, they were all babies. They all had something that was special. Mikey, I mean, she looks like she came out of my vagina. She looks like everybody on my dad’s side of the family.”
She also talked about her breakout role in “Californication.”
“Am I naked [in the clip]? I went from being a scrappy boy to doing sex things.”
“When I read the pilot for ‘Californication,’ I didn’t get it. I was at gymnastics with my daughters, sitting on a cold, hard, metal bench. Years I’ve spent there and not one of them is a fucking gymnast. I was like: ‘This is dark’. Then I found out it was a comedy. With sex.”
But it wasn’t just about sex.
“The writing is brilliant, that’s the difference. And acting: I’m still best friends with David and Natasha. This was before intimacy coordinators, so I kind of became the intimacy coordinator of the show. I think I invented being an intimacy coordinator. Honestly,” she laughed.
“Once we had to do a threesome with Charlie [played by Evan Handler], some weird sex thing, and I was telling this girl: ‘Honey, come here, let’s go see the showrunner and we’ll tell him what we don’t feel like doing’.”
Adlon “grew up on soundstages,” shadowing her writer/producer father.
“I would pick up a script and put it under my arm – I was 9 years old – and throw a scarf around my neck, because I thought that’s what ‘producers’ did. I never really thought I was going to be in front of the camera.”
Following a commercial for Jack in the Box – “I had a catchphrase: ‘Do it with chicken’” – she ended up voicing Bobby King on “King of the Hill,” which won her an Emmy.
“They said: ‘It’s a little 12-year-old boy from Texas’. ‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘I should have watched ‘Badlands’ or something.’ Being able to do this part for 13 years was unbelievable. Another bonus? I learnt so much about writing and realized it was my favorite thing,” she said.
“This allowed me to take care of my children. When my youngest was two, I realized I don’t know how long this show is going to last. It’s this survival instinct. My dad, jobs dried out for him as a writer when he turned 50. I saw a window closing and said: ‘It’s time to get another job.’ Everything in my life is about windows. When you feel one closing or one opening, you have to react to it.”
Despite her experience – “I’m 150 years old. I was on ‘The Jeffersons’!” – Adlon, currently presiding over the international jury at SeriesMania, didn’t think she could be the lead of a show.
“I didn’t think anybody would be interested. I didn’t have the confidence to ‘sell’ myself as a lead. I was guest starring on a TV show that was literally circling the drain – like a toilet. We started Friday morning and went until like four o’clock Saturday morning. I remember sitting there, going: ‘I could do this better’.”
She started by writing a scene called “Girls’ Night Out” for “Better Things.”
“It was all these moms going out to an Italian restaurant. They end up snorting rails in the bathroom, talking about their lives very intimately. That was the tone of the show, but I didn’t use it in the pilot. I used it in Season 3, because I needed her to be able to get out of where she was in the show to even go out at night.”
At first, she didn’t want to go personal.
“When we started, I was like: ‘I’ll be a manicurist and I’ll have one boy, and I adopted him from China, and then I’ll have a gay brother who lives in the back house. I just kept going away from my life. The biggest muse is my mom, who is 89 years old now and she would drive me crazy. I was raising my girls by myself, my mother lived next door and one day I realized: ‘Oh my God, she’s funny. This is funny,’”
She added: “It just kind of all fell together with all of those pieces that are me, but it’s not a reality show. My mother loved to be part of the conversation and that she inspired me, and then she became even more of a handful. I went and said: ‘I don’t need any more material. Just stop and be a person.’”
She also opened up about the famous menopause monologue from Season 4, shown at the fest to thunderous applause.
“I had actually emailed all the women I knew. I called the email ‘bellies and beards,’ and many wrote back, saying: ‘Please don’t tell anybody I told you this, but my vagina is dry.’ Sorry, guys, you gotta go with it. They were ashamed. I went to my gynecologist and there were those grouse green leaflets, like a dirty magazine in the corner. I ended up hanging that on my writing board,” she recalled.
“When my heart starts beating and I start feeling uncomfortable, I know it’s gold. I know it’s going to work. You have to write like you are the 8-year-old version of you, alone in your room, writing a diary, and you think nobody’s ever going to read it.”
While a reboot of “King of the Hill” sitcom “Mid-Century Modern” and her next feature are on the horizon, Adlon’s wish for the future is simple:
“I just want to keep working. It’s not some lofty ambition. I would like to survive, I would like my mum and kids to be O.K., and keep working,” she said.
“My duty is to art, comedy, cinema and walking that hairy edge and not having all the teeth taken out of what I am doing, because people get afraid now. If you do it with the best of intentions, it’s going to work. If you do it with fear, it’s never going to work. My superpower is the confidence I have now. I didn’t have it when I first started.”
