Zoe Lister-Jones Is Ready to Get Weird—and Entertain You

In Ari Aster’s new film Beau Is Afraid, Zoe Lister-Jones plays a young version of Mona, the titular Beau’s mother, who viewers see in flashbacks throughout the epic, divisive, and raucous three-hour film. She’s a character that adds emotional heft (and terror!) to a film that critics are calling “a cinematic panic attack.” Oh yeah, and the older version of her is played by theater legend Patti LuPone.

Lister-Jones, a 40-year-old multi-hyphenate whose resume includes acting roles on network sitcoms (New Girl, Life In Pieces), and writing and directing gigs on feminist films (Band Aid, The Craft: Legacy), fell in love with all 250 pages of the script when she read it in one sitting, but it’s not the only project that has her attention this season. Slip, a new sorta-sci-fi TV series she wrote, directed, and stars in, will premiere on The Roku Channel on April 21, ushering in a new era of her already genre-spanning career.

Slip follows Mae, a woman who begins questioning all of the choices that led her to a life she shares with her nice but boring husband Elijah. But as she strays from her marriage, Mae finds herself dropped into multiverse after multiverse, trying on new lives and partners as she attempts to make her way back to her husband. “It’s really about a woman who’s restless in her marriage, who ends up fucking her way through a multiverse,” says Lister-Jones on a Zoom call from Los Angeles, where she had been working on the show’s potential second season. Full of sharp humor, visually arresting color palettes, and a subversive take on female pleasure, it’s also about a woman whose “pussy is a wormhole,” as Mae says in an early episode.

Ahead Lister-Jones discusses how the pandemic and her divorce from her partner of seventeen years informed Slip, what it was like to read the script for Beau Is Afraid for the first time, and how she approached working with LuPone.

Where did the idea for Slip come from?

Many years ago, I was grappling with the age-old questions of how to contend with that eternal sense of restlessness and that nagging feeling of wanting more, regardless of how much you have. All of those questions came into hyper focus once we went into quarantine and we were forced to face a lot of the “what if”s that might have been quietly plaguing us. The pandemic was such a time of self-reflection that once we went into lockdown, I hunkered down and wrote the entire season as a means for myself to answer some of those questions. Whether you were in a relationship or not, those questions about romance and love and life being short and who we want to spend it with also became very loud.

You worked with Dakota Johnson’s production company TeaTime Pictures for Slip. How did that collaboration come about?

It was very dreamy. I had another project with Dakota and her producing partner, Ro Donnelly, and this script came up casually in conversation. They were like, “We must read that,” based on the log line.

I hope “her pussy is a wormhole” is the log line that really got them.

It was. As soon as they signed on, it was a very fast moving train and we brought it to Roku. Within two months of Roku getting on board, we had a green light for all seven episodes with not one script note. They were just like, “Let’s do it,” which is unheard of.

This content is imported from youTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

You’re in almost every frame of this show, but you’re also directing every episode. How did you approach doing that?

It is super challenging, don’t get me wrong. But I love directing from within a scene. You’re removing some of the barriers that directors have between them and their actors. I think the really wild thing is directing from within a sex scene. It’s one thing to run around in a costume while directing. It’s another thing to run around naked.

What was that like?

I would robe, but that was actually one of the more empowering experiences I’ve ever had in my life. Obviously women on screen in sex scenes have been problematic in the history of cinema in terms of the subject, object, and who’s behind the camera. Sometimes those experiences feel exploitative. For me to not only be a woman filmmaker in charge of those scenes, but to be the body that is the subject, it was really thrilling because I wanted the show to be pushing the bounds of what we’re used to seeing when it comes to female pleasure on screen. I wanted the viewers to feel that they were inside of the sex scene rather than watching from a distance.

You’ve talked about how this is the most personal project that you’ve written. How much of you is in here?

I’m going to go with most to all parts of me. It’s hard for me not to put a lot of myself into the work. It’s just who I am as a filmmaker. Obviously, there are fictionalized elements to this story. It’s fantastical, and that helps me lean into deeply personal elements if I have some lens that is wildly different from the one that I live in. When writing this, I was going through a major life change and had been with my partner for 17 years. [Editor’s note: Lister-Jones filed for divorce from her husband Daryl Wein in September 2022.] There are definitely elements of that in the story—those moments of crossroads that we face in a life, and what path we choose to take when we’re faced with a threshold to cross, and the bravery it takes to really dive into a new life.

I was really interested in exploring a sexual awakening from a personal place too. Women, especially in their thirties, enter into a different relationship with their sexuality. We don’t talk about it that much, but I wanted to see a woman at that time in her life get to really explore sex and sexuality in an unapologetic way. Mae is looking to come, man. It’s her mode of transportation. She can’t travel without coming. Sex as a transporting act was something that I wanted to explore and play with and have fun with and have an irreverent retelling of.

I’d love to shift a little bit towards Beau Is Afraid, which is… totally different.

Also a comedy.

Also a comedy! What did you think when you first read this script?

I was such a fan of Ari’s work, so when I got the script, I perished. The script was 250 pages, and I read it all in one sitting. I was laughing out loud more than probably any script I’ve ever read. The bleakness of his humor is so singular, it speaks to me so deeply as a neurotic Jew.

You get to play a young Patti LuPone.

My checklist of dreams.

Did you have any conversations with her about who this character was when you played her versus when Patti played her and what her progression was like? Was there a conversation about how to mimic one another or not?

You’ve got to take Patti’s lead. I’m not coming in with too many hot takes. I was like, “You tell me where we’re going and I’ll follow you to the end of the earth.” And she did. Before we both got to Montreal, which is where we shot, I spent a lot of time studying her, watching YouTube videos to get her cadence. Even her facial expressions, the way she moves her mouth is so singular. Once we got to Montreal, we started to rehearse scenes together. I recorded her saying all of my lines so that I could try and get her as best I could. I have incredible photos of us in the same outfit with the same wig that I don’t know when I’ll be able to share them, but they are framed above my bed.

People are having such strong reactions to the film. What has it been like for you to see the early reception?

So exciting. There was no question in my mind that it was going to be incredible and epic. It’s a movie that lives inside you for weeks to come after you see it. It’s even just a test of endurance; to make the audience sit in a seat for three hours is such an amazing thing to do at this moment in history.

And that is all it is.

“Jewish boy goes to find mom.” It’s canon for our people.

It is. It’s what we’re going to be watching on the high holidays now. It was one of the coolest experiences. Second to Slip, I would say.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jessica Goodman is the New York Times bestselling author of The Counselors, They’ll Never Catch Us, and They Wish They Were Us. She is the former op-ed editor at Cosmopolitan, where she won a National Magazine Award in personal service. She has also held editorial positions at Entertainment Weekly and HuffPost. Follow Jessica on twitter @jessgood and Instagram @jessicagoodman.