Alia Shawkat Gets Bolder
The actress is forging new creative pathways for herself, starring in her first stage play, You Got Older, and The Wrong Girls, a stoner comedy with Kristen Stewart.
Each of Alia Shawkat’s characters has a distinctive look. There’s Maeby in Arrested Development, decked out in black chokers and graphic tees. Dory in Search Party goes from millennial everywoman in a pinstripe shirt to culty saint in white, flowing gowns. Then there’s Mae in You Got Older, who Shawkat has been playing in her stage debut at Cherry Lane Theater since February. Schlepping around the stage in windbreaker sweatpants and red ankle socks, Mae is the picture of late 20s aimlessness and ennui.
Waiting for Shawkat to arrive at our breakfast interview, I wander the block, wondering which of these people will greet me. I forgot that none of them exist, that acting requires transformation, and that the real Shawkat is a person I don’t know. When she strolls up to the corner of Fort Greene Park in a sundress, a yellow cardigan, a baseball cap, and tinted glasses, I have the sudden urge to facepalm. Of course she’s not in sweatpants. She’s a fucking actor.
It’s 10 a.m., and Shawkat has to leave by noon to prepare for her next show. After we hug, I recover my social graces, and we walk inside where the host tells us we can’t take one of the booths in a restaurant that is — no exaggeration — entirely empty. We look at each other. Then around at the vacant seats.
We’re off, walking through a perfect spring day like allies, having escaped a stilted, silent lunch for a new adventure. Shawkat knows Fort Greene well; she lived here while shooting Search Party a few months a year for five years. She suggests Evelina down the block from her old place. We’re seated at a table outside where she orders the grain bowl and a glass of unsweetened iced tea.
“ I have a lot of close friends here,” she says. “Sometimes even more than L.A. So it feels really good when I come back.”
Of course, things are different now. For one, You Got Older is — improbably for someone who’s been an on-camera mainstay for two decades — Shawkat’s first play. She’s on a grueling off-Broadway schedule of eight shows a week.
“It’s very athletic in a sense,” she says. “Physically and as an actor, I’ve had to be in really good shape. You try your best to stay present, to really drop in and let go of whatever happened that day, whatever you’re thinking about for tomorrow, and I’m just listening to Peter Friedman — who plays my dad — listening to him talk.”
For another, she has a kid now: a two-year-old son who’s in school nearby. On account of both of these changes, she’s trying to quit smoking. (On set, a prop cigarette hangs jauntily out of her mouth.) I ask how it’s going.
“Not great,” she sighs. “I mean, I don’t ever smoke around my son. But every now and then I can’t help it.”
Take it as a sign of the times, a conversion from the preternaturally chill indie darling she once was to the still-chill-but-slightly-more-neurotic young mom she’s become. As we walk by the playground, my pink helmet rattles against my bag, and she praises me for wearing one while I bike. She’s taken up knitting, which started as part of her preparation to play Mae and became a nice way to keep her hands moving in the hair-and-makeup chair. On shoot day, she shows up in a mohair scarf of her own creation and sets about finishing a thicker version for Friedman.
In this way, this new phase hasn’t so much changed her life as expanded it. During our lunch, a new friend and fellow toddler parent recognizes her and comes up to say hi. They talk school dropoff, and he mentions wanting to come see her play.
“ I’m very excited and thankfully did not know much about you before—”
Shawkat was raised in Southern California and knew she wanted to act from a young age. Although her maternal grandfather, Paul Burke, was an Emmy-nominated TV cop, growing up, her parents weren’t so much in “the business” as adjacent to it. They ran a strip club in Palm Springs.
“ It’s not a seedy place by any means,” she tells me. “It’s just a funny thing that my family’s always been like, ‘It’s a business.’”
Despite her family’s proximity to the industry, Shawkat says they didn’t talk about sex much at home. “Not in an abnormal way,” she clarifies, just in the way that it’s awkward to talk about sucking and fucking around the dinner table. It was in part that dance of sexuality and repression in the domestic sphere that drew her to You Got Older, the story of a burnt-out, horny, depressed young lawyer who goes home to care for her dad during his cancer treatment. In Mae, Shawkat found a parallel life with its own set of parallel dynamics.
“ 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.”
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).
