Welcome, welcome, welcome, armchair expert, I'm Dan Shepherd, I'm joined by Monastir Moused. Hello there. How are you? I'm good. Me too. It's rainy here in L.A. and we like it. Well, I like it.

I have seasonal affective disorder. Sad. Yeah, but I enjoying it more than normal.

Yeah, it's nice. You know what else is nice? Carey Mulligan. She is Carey Mulligan.

She's an Academy Award nominated actress and she's talking to us. I fell in love with her in an education and of course, she was in The Great Gatsby wildlife. Shane.

Oh, that's my movie Shamers. That's my move to be chambre.

She has a great new film out called Promising Young Woman.

There's already a ton of buzz about it.

Yeah, I'm so excited to see it. I haven't seen it. And I'm dying to its par excellence. Yes. Set a term. Yeah. OK, I love you. Please enjoy Carey Mulligan.

We are supported by Peacocke, home of comedy. Whatever your funny peacocks got it exclusively stream tons of comedy hits from iconic sitcoms to brand new originals. Beyer's beats the office on Peacock Catch all two hundred and one episodes of the office right now, plus stream bonus extras and exclusives. Whether you're a superfan or nudist Granton, you'll find something you love. And if you're looking for something more classic, let's say you can stream every episode of Parks and Recreation, Two and a Half Men, plus every season of SNL.

In the mood for something brand new, check out Peacock's original comedies, The Amber Ruffin Show, AP Bio and Saved by the Bell, which is certified fresh by Rotten Tomatoes. Don't miss all these hits. Plus so much more get started for free at peacocke TV.com and start streaming today. Peacocke TV Dotcom.

He's in our chat. Hi, how are you doing? Oh, I'm so good, how are you? I'm all right. Yeah, I'm good, thank you.

Whirring Monica will be joining us shortly. Do you know what she's really doing? Yeah, tell me.

She's making us matchers from scratch inside. And I bet it was going a little longer than anticipated.

Oh, that's so nice. Do you enjoy a match? I very much enjoy much, but it's not really working here. Yes, the Brits are kind of slow on the uptake, so we haven't got the much the thing we've got milk. So I feel like we're edging towards much the territory.

It is off brand for England to not have much. And now when I think of England, I think of t well t t that tastes like shit.

That's all to eat. We don't like interesting teas, but no, it's like very exotic to my family that I drink much. Yeah. Like literally like never heard of it until I got a cup out.

I'm going to change your whole life. This was just introduced to us over Christmas. Monica found it and she bought it for a friend, not for herself. We've since now all bought it for each other. It is a massive machine and you put the actual leaves in the top.

No. And carry it turns it into baby's breath.

It's thinner than anything I could describe. When you're watching it drop into the cup, you're just seeing a green mist and then at the bottom of the cup, it's spinning the whole time and it's mixing it perfectly. I've never in my life enjoyed a match as much. So we're going to get you the info on that. Not a sponsor just from the bottom of my heart. Great, great.

Wow. We need these luxuries in this incredibly depressing time.

Yeah. Do you think it's worse there at. Thank you. I brought up to speed about both that you were making a match and the new match, a machine that we need her to get.

Yeah. Sounds amazing.

This may shock you, but much is not a big thing over in London town. Well, we just talked to someone from London and they said they try to order a Moka here, but they pronounced at Mocca and accidentally ended up with a mock.

But it was up so and they were freaked out by the green tea.

That's right. Yes. We'll get that. I think after the lockdown, maybe we'll have a new match on stage. But right now you can just get a cup of tea and everything is closed.

Have you spent most of quarantine in England? All of it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. At home in the country. We went there like two weeks before the official lockdown because the queue in the shop started getting really long. Like this doesn't look good. People are panic buying. So we left and then we just never came back.

Was there a run on toilet paper there as well?

Yes, there was insane. Yeah. Oh, crazy. I thought that was uniquely American.

Yeah, because I never understood that. Just hop in the shower. If you're out of toilet paper, you're not going anywhere.

They go. Right. It was so weird. People went crazy. You couldn't get flour, pasta, toilet roll.

Yeah, no flour and pasta. I kind of understand you need to eat to survive.

But again, you own a shower, hop in there and tidy up.

Yeah, but there's a lot of pasta to know that much pasta.

I think that kind of happened again a little bit last week when they announced the last lock down wherever I went and got to end it right.

Now, in retrospect, do you wish you had quarantined somewhere, Sunny?

No, we quarantined to the best time because we quarantined during lambing, because where we live is a working farm. So when we got there, like lambs were arriving. And so we went straight into, like, feeding baby lambs. So it was a very good time to be in the country. And then we had this insane tropical summer where it was just hot for six months in England and now it's miserable. But, you know, it was like remarkably good weather for us.

So it was great.

Now you are in a slightly worse situation than my wife and I, because we have six and seven, but man, three and five in quarantine and you're here. Congratulations.

Yeah, thanks. I'm really proud of myself. Oh.

Oh, my God. Just reading three and five percent to spike of panic in my body. And that's in normal times when, like, my sister can watch the kids and I can go do something.

But the idea of that age 24/7 for eleven months is really something else.

Yeah. Like the weather was amazing. I just keep coming back to the weather like that. It was sunny. We could just be outside and we were so lucky to have space and not have to be in a city and like be surrounded by green fields. You know, I can't imagine having to do it in a urban space, but we felt very lucky. And actually, you know, like we have kids, people always say, oh, my goodness, that goes by like two seconds, two minutes, eighteen.

So I did think, like, you know, as nightmarish as this is, there is a window here that we get to think of them being durable and tiny.

And, you know, I couldn't agree more, I. And I feel like it's such a crazy blessing. We've definitely spent more time with them this year than probably we would have cumulatively over the next two years.

But it does have its challenges and there's no time for you to recharge like all the patience required for them generally. You had to go on a car ride and do a little recharge. You work. You get a recharge.

Yeah, no, we've been just going to bed at like eight thirty, which I don't know. That seems to work athlete like really long hours.

Now, I got to imagine of the many pros and cons of it, one pro is you get to do a press tour just at home. Is that lovely?

Look, I mean, this is how I spend all day just to just wear sweats every day. Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah, no, that part's nice. And all the trouble that this would have entailed being off is great. It's such a champagne problem for Emerald director. It's her first feature and she's made this awesome film and she's such a genius. And there's a part of me that just wanted to have like a thing that we could go to and their outfits and have our photo taken together. And I cried in Sundance because we did like a photo together for Variety because it was like one of those portrait studios.

You go to a million portrait studios in three days and they make Emerald. And I saw the photo together and I sort of welled up because I was just so proud of her and started crying.

And the poor photographer was so troubled by what was going on. There's a part of me that wishes that we had like a thing where I could stand next to her and celebrate her about, yeah, that would be nice.

But then inevitably, let me just remind you, you would be walking down the carpet and after you did like the top four outlets, you'd get to the questions where they're like so-and-so just got accused of blank. What do you think about that?

First of all, I'm just now hearing that for the first time. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I didn't miss that. I did that.

And I don't miss the sort of horrific fear of falling over, you know, the worst stuff. But yeah, you're right. Well, I think it's got that I cannot stand the whole trying to look handsome aspect of it.

It's my least favorite part of anything. Just even opening the door. I'm going to consider how I look when I look in the mirror. It's just a bad endeavor for me.

My wife digs it. She gets the hair, makeup. There's a dress she's excited to wear.

She loves it. Do you enjoy that part of it?

I enjoy the people part of it. I enjoy it like the hair and makeup guys. And I mean, I never thought I'd miss a junket. Sitting at home with your ring, like on your own is so strange and not having anyone to, you know, when the journalist walks out the room, you know, he was weird.

Oh, you know, like there's none of that. So you just don't get to decompress about any of it. And it's oh, I did an interview before Christmas with someone and I was sitting on my own in a room doing it. And then I guess I was doing the interview with the guy for like an hour. And at the end I realized that the whole room and the ground floor of the house had gone dark. Oh, it was just me sitting on my ring like talking to this guy.

And I kind of lost track of what I was saying and I just felt so weird. So I miss, like, you know, I miss all the people in the junket. Like, the whole structure of it feels very comforting to me.

That happened to us on Friday. We were interviewing a guy. He was in Barbados and he showed us he flipped the computer around. It was sunset in Barbados. It was so gorgeous and we were so envious.

And then about fourteen minutes later, I realized I cannot see this person anymore.

He was just a pitch boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, you've disappeared. But that's fine.

Now, how far are you currently from where you grew up? A couple of hours.

I was born in London. I moved to Germany when I was about three, lived in Germany till I was seven or eight, and then it's kind of outside of London. And then I moved back in when I started working.

Were you in Dusseldorf? I was, yeah.

OK, my mother fell in love with Dusseldorf on a trip there with a lover.

And then when I was six feet away, yeah, this is the truth. And then when I was 16, I had this great desire to drive on the autobahn and she had a great desire to return to Dusseldorf. So we we slam those two things together and we went, and what a lovely place, isn't it?

It's it's on the Rhine maybe. Is it right on the Rhine?

It is, yeah. Well, we went to Hanover first. I guess we went to this little when I was five or something. I went to the international school there. Yeah, it's lovely.

I'm super fascinated with Germans. I probably am more interested in them than any other group of folks because well, in a nutshell, they're obsessed with poop, which I think is funny. But the level of cleanliness, organization, all that stuff, there's something unique about the culture. I was wondering if any of it rubbed off on you?

I don't think so. I mean, I went to a kindergarten that was like a Rudolf Steiner kindergarten where we used to sort of wear flowers in our hair. And, you know, it was like a treat to beat the dust out of the mats that we sat on the floor. And and then I went to school and Hanover, you know, we moved around a lot, but. We were amongst expat community, like all of our friends were in the military or whatever, we weren't.

My dad's a hotel manager, but I got questions about that. Don't you worry about hotels. Yes.

Yes, I'm going to go right into it. So my grandparents on this very modest roadside motel where, you know, you can park your car right in front of the door, colonial motoring. I spent summers there and I used to roam that place.

And it was such a unique experience.

Like I'd try to take apart the ice machine, just so many memories of being kind of turned loose in a hotel. And I wondered, do you have access to the hotel your dad managed?

Yeah, we did. I mean, when we were little little, we used to ride around in the laundry carts. You know, we'd sort of sit and they'd throw all the laundry on top of us and we'd get taken down into the big laundry room. And and we used to go into rooms after people checked out and like, have a look around.

People left anything behind.

And once we found a penknife, my brother opened up and I tried to shut it and I shoved it onto my finger. And then we weren't allowed to stay in people's rooms anymore.

But, yeah, we kind of had a bit of free reign. You know, it was the 80s.

Yeah. I'm going to ask a very morbid question. Trigger warning. My grandmother, my sweet, sweet grandma Midge found no less than four different dead bodies over their tenure of owning this hotel because unbeknownst to me, people go to hotels to commit suicide because they don't want to ruin their whole lives.

Are they going to, like, consider their home?

Well, I think they consider their family that they're going to leave the home behind you. So I guess I'm asking if your dad found any cadavers at this time.

You know, I've never asked him, but now I'm going to call them up and find out.

He did tell me stories about burglaries like robberies. You know, that was like a cat burglar when we lived in London in the MIFA, he would come in and steal jewelry from the top floor like fancy suites and things of that kind of stuff going on.

And then mom and dad, they met working at a hotel. Is that accurate?

Yeah. Yeah. In the Middle East. I can't remember if they were in Jordan or in Amman, but yeah, they met in the Middle East.

OK, so here's something that I find a little bit inconsistent. So your father's job, where he have the confidence to pick up and move to different countries and be, I don't know, it seems not very fearful. Hmm. They had a huge fear and outspoken fear of you pursuing acting, right?

Yeah, they did. But I think that's probably more to do with my dad left the country when he was like 16 and went to find work in Germany and worked his way up from the bottom. I mean, he started collecting glasses in a bar and an intercontinental hotel and then he worked his way up to, like, running the joint. You know, that was a sort of element of them wanting me to kind of have a so I could go to university and all that stuff because, you know, my brother was on an academic path and they just wanted me to have a safety net.

Yeah. I sort of put all my eggs in one basket, which I get, you know, but at the time it felt like torture.

But they also seem adventurous. I mean, I understand the oh, he chose a profession. You can start at the bottom, work your way up, and maybe he wanted that for you. But at the same time, there is an element of like romance and adventure. Don't want to go.

I mean, both of them. My mom came from like a tiny town in Wales and like, you know, ended up working in the Middle East and hotels. Yeah, I think it was just, you know, there wasn't a massive aversion to me doing it. It was just doing it when I was 18 or younger. They just wanted me to, like, have one thing that I could do that was not going to fall back on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My mother had a similar desire. She said, I'll pay your rent if you go to college while you're in Los Angeles trying to be an actor. So my fallback plan was I got a degree in anthropology and there's less people employed in anthropology than acting.

Yeah, right. Yeah. I didn't have a fallback back. That's the problem. There was nothing else I could have really done, which is the thing that I would say to people like 18 year olds leaving school will write to me and say, you know, I want to act. And my parents, you know, and I know you were in this position. So what would you advise? And my advice when I have responded is like just if there's literally anything else you think you could be good at, will be happy doing like do that thing.

OK.

OK, interesting. So when I read your history, one is I know that you went to Kenneth Brawner play and then you wrote him a letter.

Yeah. Wow. I was. Yeah. Real quick.

Well yeah. First of all I was like I've never written a letter like that is where we differ.

They a little bit and then I guess his sister answered and said he said, if that's what you want to do, go for it. Right. But then you asked Julian Fellowes, who is like lecturing at your school or something, and he said, do not.

Well, yeah, he said, I have a very good fallback option, but it was him and his wife who introduced me to the casting directors, assistant of Pride and Prejudice, the audition, me, Pride and Prejudice. That was my first job. So they did facilitate me. Missing the person who ends up giving me my first job, so I owe them a huge amount, but he did tell me to marry a banker.

Yeah, well, when I read the Kenneth response, I was like, oh, that's nice. I guess that's what I should say. And then when I read the fellows, when I was like, well, that's kind of mean. But then I'm so delighted to hear that you've taken the fellows approach where you're like, yeah, probably don't do it.

I think so. I mean, I just think if I could think of something else that I could have done that would have made me happy, I would you know, I just think that the stores that had to align for me to be able to get that one job, that then that meant that I got the next one of the next one. It was just so remarkable. And I just I knew so many actors, particularly in my 20s, that were just incredibly talented and did not get a job full of no money.

And I just think there was a huge amount of luck required. And you just don't want to be struggling like that.

You could steal my advice because I don't really want to encourage anyone to ruin their life, but I just say, yeah, if you want to do it by a Honda because you're not going to want to have repair bills, it might take a very long time. It's true.

Yeah. Yes. You can get a really dependable car. Yeah, that's step one. And sit and wait for luck.

Just right now, you get in Pride and Prejudice.

I was watching clips of it today and I just thought it maybe this is my weird American point of view, but what a quintessential role for you to get as an English actress to be in period in those outfits, the whole nine yards.

Did it feel a little bit like, well, there's no way they just landed right here?

My first thing, yeah, I was working in a pub when I was auditioning for it. I'd been a cleaner. I'd worked as a runner and a film studio for free. And I was working in a pub when I was in the audition process. Then suddenly I was going off to leave the pub to go and work on a film with Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn and Judi Dench. And it was completely surreal that even years afterwards, like, you know, I was still thinking I couldn't believe that that was a film that I was even in my first job.

It was just insane.

Yeah, I was watching it and I was like there on you a lot. Like I was watching these scenes. I was like, there's a lot of options here. But I remember doing a scene.

One of the first things that we shot was the scene with Judi Dench. And I had had real, really visceral dreams about working with Judi Dench when I was about 14 and I was such a nerd. I remember waking up from having a dream where I was working with Judi Dench and realising that it was just a dream and being, like, genuinely emotional, that it wasn't real. And then all of a sudden I was 18 and I was in an actual scene with her.

And I remember Joe Wright, the director, coming up to me after the first take of the scene where she kind of comes into the house and wakes us all up and we're all standing as a family, terrified of her. And he came over to me after the first take and said, What are you doing? And I was like, oh, you've got to actually move your face.

You've got to react to her being you've got to do something. And I was just standing there like I couldn't get over it when I was going through all the stuff you have done today.

So much of it exists in a movie industry that I'm so fearful is going away.

The fact that you can go from that and you can end up in an education and get nominated for that, and then you can take some time and then you can through being so great, you can kind of plot out a future. And I'm wondering or I fear that the 20 year old Carey Mulligan today, like, I don't know what that looks like. Do you think about that at all? How much it's changed or maybe do you feel like it hasn't?

No, I think it has. I don't know what I would have done if it was all happening now. I think it would be totally different. I think I had such a luxury of what kind of anonymity? I guess in the first three or four years of my career, I was in the background getting to work with amazing people, but not really being relied upon to be particularly good. You know, I was not mentioned in reviews or anything.

I wasn't playing those parts, but I was consistently in shows with, like, extraordinary actors that I could just watch. And and then first thing I remember doing that was sort of any kind of weight on me was an episode of Doctor Who were the Doctor? I think it was David Tennant at the time, but he wasn't really in the episode because they were shooting another episode at the same time. So I was doing that. And that was the first time I was like the lead in a thing.

And that felt very weighty and exciting. But the first couple of years I did plays and I did TV things, but I wasn't in front and center of any of them. But I think now people are just coming into this, the pressure on the privacy image, the social media, stuff like none of that didn't even cross my radar. I remember Twitter's starting and someone's you know, I had an ex-boyfriend who started a Twitter account and he was tweeting things was like, what is this?

Why no one gives a shit?

Well, I don't care. And I'm right here and I still feel that way. But, yeah, I think I don't know what I would have done. I would have found it hard to avoid that, I think. How was your ego during the periods where you were like a banana and you were kind of in the shadow of all these amazing people, were you truly just grateful to be there or were you like, OK?

Oh, I was so grateful to be there. I wasn't ready until it was already too late. I remember when I first when I saw an education was the first time I had, I guess, seen myself play the lead in anything apart from Dr. Hugh. And I rang my mother up crying and I watched it in L.A. and I rang her up into saying, like, it's so boring, it's so boring.

I'm my stupid face literally does nothing and my face just look stupid and it's boring and everyone's going to hate it. It's going to be a nightmare. And I really don't want to go to Sundance. And she was like, I'm sure it's not that bad. You know, just go and just get through it and, you know, you'll be fine. Come home. And I had nightmares before I went to Sundance that they were going to shut me out for being too boring, you know, was never like I got to a place where I was like, oh, no, I can do this.

I didn't have any expectations for that film. So I felt lucky that I didn't go into that film with any kind of fear of messing it up because I didn't want to see it. So it felt like a little university project or something.

Did you learn anything from that? Did you learn like, oh, I guess I shouldn't trust my evaluation of myself?

Gosh, you know, the only real thing that came out of that was the ability to not have to do everything that I didn't have to do, all the jobs that came along, because I've worked pretty much without a break from about the age of 18 to twenty three and was anxious if I didn't know exactly what the next job was to do before I wrapped the previous job. It was like next one. Next one. I did a play and a TV show at the same time.

Once I was doing the hypochondriac Moliere play in the evening and then in the daytime I was doing an episode of Miss Marple where I was Timothy Dalton's wife.

And it was just nuts that you guys are the same age, right? Pretty much, yeah.

He's terribly handsome, but it was a real game changer.

Just not having to take every job, just being able to sort of look out and take a minute.

How did you navigate that in such a successful way? Because I had opportunities and I wanted money and I wanted all kinds of things and I was very bad at it. So how did you how are you patient?

How did you not feel like, oh, shit, my moment's going to pass. How do you turn down, I don't know, a James Bond movie or whatever things they throw your way at that point.

I think I felt very kind of idealistic about my career and wanted to make things that would sort of be memorable and would matter. And my agent, who's one of the best people on the planet, she's called to Belfrage and she's been my agent since I was eighteen. But when an education happened, she took me out for lunch, I think when I was shooting, never let me go. And she said, look, you're in this really rare moment in your career that doesn't come up very often and it doesn't last particularly long.

But you are in a moment where you can choose and you shouldn't take part unless you can't bear the idea of anybody else doing it.

Hmm. That's a good barometer. Yeah. Yeah.

So that kind of became the benchmark. If I could sort of imagine another actor doing it and be OK with it, then I would say no. And that's not to say I wasn't fighting for stuff as well. Like I you know, I auditioned for the Coen brothers and, you know, I auditioned for things over the years I didn't get.

So it's not like I've just been sitting idly picking and, you know, desperate to bring.

Nick, it did give me space to you always box me doing plays. And she's always back to me doing tiny films that have no money that hardly anyone sees and you know, that I love. So, you know, I've been lucky to have her because I think if I'd been represented by somebody else who wasn't quite so, she's always been rock solid on that, which is a real doing.

Well, I want to talk about one of those movies that potentially no one's going to see and I bet didn't have a huge budget. But then my top three of the last decade for sure is shame. I just can't love that movie more, probably cause I'm a recovering addict. But what a fucking movie.

I mean, my goodness, some of the scenes, that scene with him in the apartment, no black woman, the way they get together, it's just one shot. I'm like, oh, my God, that's the first time I've ever seen what sex in real life looks like. Like that's it. They did it.

And holy shit, I've never seen it. There's so many awesome scenes.

You playing chic. I want your love that scene. I went out and downloaded that song afterwards and listen to it endlessly and wanted to be in that apartment. I just loved it.

I loved it. I've only ever seen it once and I thought it was. Yeah, I mean, Steve McQueen is incredible. He's a genius. You know, I really do feel like he's in his own league as a filmmaker. So to get to work with him was nuts. And I begged him for that job. I wouldn't let him leave our meeting. I just wouldn't let him go. Getting to be a part of it was extraordinary getting to make it was like unlike anything I've done before or since, I would also imagine and I would just be guessing.

But no, I had one experience like this. But that takes or. So long, like it takes her so long, it's just wide so often. Did you love that? I feel like you would just more and more and more and more forget what you're doing. I loved it.

I mean, a lot of it was the way that we worked with the cinematographer because there was so much freedom in the way that we moved and we plotted everything out. But ultimately we would just run. It felt like faster and we'd do a take. And then Steve would be like a wild cheerleading coach combo at the sideline saying, like, that was fucking amazing, but let's do it.

I don't want to go back. I just we just did also.

And it was cool because we were shooting, you know, the majority of it all. My scenes were shot in the evening, so we were shooting night shoots, which led to the sort of weird, magical quality of like shooting a movie at night. I always love I'm the only person on set is thrilled to be at work on a night shoot because I think it's just so cool.

Yeah, I feel like somehow when that happens, I'm like a kid who's not supposed to be up that late. I'm like, oh my God, I'm working. And it's the middle of the night. Yeah.

And everyone's asleep and you're all awake doing this amazing thing like, yeah, I love it. So that was really cool in New York. I love so much, you know, and Michael's just such an extraordinary actor. So getting to run those scenes over and over again and even though some scenes that we did like 16 takes in a row, just kept going, kept going. And yeah, it was amazing.

Oh, had you sang before that on camera or in a play, were you a singer prior to that?

No, I wasn't. No, no, no, no. I kind of grew up wanting to be musical theater actor. That was my dream. I came to New York when I was about 14 and I saw the some Mendis Studio 54 cabaret back the first time around. And I was like, that's me. That's my that's what I want to do. And then quickly realized that I didn't have a good enough singing voice. So I changed course.

Oh, just acting or just do acting. I can't dance. So I didn't pursue that dream. But it was you know, it's sung in choirs and stuff. So I was kind of comfortable holding a tune. But that was truly one of the scariest things I've done, which seems mad. I was less nervous to be naked on camera than I was to sing that song. I mean, being completely naked always made sense to me from the moment I read the script.

And I'm incredibly prudish. I don't even like wearing a swimming costume. But in this film it just makes me costume.

I don't know, as they always say, but that's anything but.

You're so complicated. Yeah, yeah. There's multiple pieces to it. Where's my hat? Where's my swimming costume hat. I would rather make love to a camel on camera. Then I have to do what you did because not only are you saying it's a very long kind of one or so, it's like, you know, you're not going to be able to hide.

Like there's no tactical approach. You're like, no, I got to sing this fucking song the whole way through. And if I shit the bad on this part, I don't know how we do it. Right. So there is no safety net. It scares the shit out of me watching you because I can't sing.

Yeah, no, it scared the shit out of me and I love that about it. And I remember at the end of that we did four or five takes and then Steve came up to me afterwards and said, OK, now just sing like two lines of another song because you can't have just sung one song. And we need you to finish that set and walk across the table and sit down with the boys. And I said, okay, great, what song do you want me to sing?

And he was like, Oh, I don't want to. You can't be any song that's ever been written. You've got to make it up because we can't do anything. It was like to just make it up. Sure. I was like, Steve, I didn't know how to make a song I can barely sing. And he was like, Well, you're an artist, Donnie. You're an artist. You said you were fucking artists to make a song.

I was like, oh God. Oh, that's so perfectly him.

And yeah. And then so I just like said some nonsense about a rose something.

Is that in there your fake song.

I can't remember, but I think that's maybe two words and then people start clapping, you know, maybe my last two words of my fake.

So I'm gonna have to give it a watch so that I can see what your improv. So I came up with in my. Yeah, it's like some horrible drama school.

You've successfully put the expectations very low.

So I think anything I hear you don't to go back and be terrible. But stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

We are supported by Chrysler Pacifica, the greatest minivan to ever be manufactured, designed and released into the population. I love the Pacific so much right now. The twenty twenty one Chrysler Pacifica has a refreshed interior and exterior most standard safety features of any vehicle like forward collision warning, lane departure warning and blind spot monitoring. It's America's only plug in hybrid minivan that allows for thirty two electric miles, five hundred and twenty total miles of driving, and also qualifies for a seventy five hundred dollar federal tax credit now available with all wheel drive capability and is the most advanced all wheel drive system in its class.

New Pinnacle Model interiors include.

Quilted leather seats and second row pillows. Oh, my God. More cargo capacity than full sized SUVs and crossovers. Wireless Apple car play and phone charging, standard forward collision warning with active braking provides an audible and visual warning and applies the brakes when needed. Standard lane departure warning with lanky persist automatically helps guide you back into your lane if you've drifted unintentionally. Standard blind spot warning helps you make safer lane changes and detects a vehicle entering one of your blind zones with a light on the exterior mirror.

Most advanced available all wheel drive system in its class. Wireless Abaca Chrysler is offering arm Cherrie's an exclusive one thousand dollar bonus cash offer towards a new Chrysler, Pacifica or Pacifica hybrid. Visit Pacifica and X.com and sign up to receive this offer. Updates and more from Chrysler Brand. We are supported by Dorje Dash.

You want Chinese, they want pizza and someone is craving Froyo. There's something for everyone under your dash. Now, I just spoiled you guys. You had a little party last night.

Pod Girls Party. Very small group. Yeah, yeah. In our pod.

And I cooked dinner and you just started firing off treats to the house with dish. Some frozen yogurt. Yes. And some more frozen yogurt. Yes.

Then a waffle smothered in peanut butter, chocolate and banana. It was delish.

Jordache is the app that brings you food you're craving right now right to your door. Ordering is so easy. Open the door dash app. You choose what you want to eat and your food will be left safely outside your door with new contactless delivery drop off settings with over 300000 partners in the US, Puerto Rico, Canada and Australia, you can support your local go to or choose from your favorite national restaurants like Chipotle, Wendy's and The Cheesecake Factory. For a limited time.

You can get twenty five percent off and zero delivery fees on their first order of fifteen dollars or more. When you download the door dash app and enter code armchair, that's twenty five percent off, up to ten dollar value and zero delivery fees on your first order. When you download the door dash app in the App Store and enter code armchair. Don't forget that's code armchair for twenty five percent off your first order with door dash subject to change terms apply.

I wonder what the psychology is behind why singing feels so vulnerable, because it shouldn't. It's like not more than doing comedy and doing anything, but it's the scariest thing to do.

I don't know why.

When we did Inside Llewyn Davis, we did a concert at the town hall for the film when the film came out, and they go everyone who sings in the movie to come. And then they go out like Patti Smith and Gillian Welch. And they had this gig and I was the only person who wasn't a professional singer. And I had to do my song and I was like, oh, fun, how great this be awesome.

And then got there and was paralyzed. Just couldn't I mean, you know, how to like a double whiskey on the side of the stage, knocked it back, got on stage, sang, came off like practically collapsed. I was so nervous doing that. I don't understand how people can do without their voices shaking.

I'm going to launch a theory right now. OK, let's hear. OK, which is like in general, if you're even you're doing stand up, you're doing improv or you're doing sketch like you're going to make a joke, it's going to bomb or not. But if it bombs, you're not going to then make that joke for four more minutes. I think it's the notion that, like, if it goes wrong, I'm going to be stuck in it for the next three minutes going wrong.

And it's going to be the longest three minutes of my life.

But that's the case with comedy, too. I mean, doing a standup set and then there's still maneuvers.

There's still moves. You can make it feel good, though. What if you if you're just part of it. I know. Maneuvers and you.

That's a really good point. You're right.

For somebody who is not funny to do, standup is definitely worse or AMPA was funny hitting standup on to the majority of the majority.

But even like Kristen gets nervous before she sings and she's going to sound amazing. She always does. And she's proven that to herself. But she wants to take a brand and all preopening brana prov before she sings.

Even when we did like the Christmas special for us. And it's like, oh my God, there's just something about it that feels like you're sharing, like your insides. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know why, but it's almost like being judged by your face because it's like, OK, here's the sound of my voice. Feel free to hate it or love it. Yeah.

I think it's also worse with your loved ones. Like doing anything. I don't know. I'd rather like two hundred strangers than my family and my best friends.

This is one of my friend's biggest complaints while I was doing stand up for a few years, they're like, why aren't you inviting me to the show?

And I'm like, because I only want to do it for strangers. I can adopt a fake thing that I can buy into. But if you're there, I'll stop buying into it.

Yeah, 100 percent. What people come see the place you're in. Were you comfortable inviting them? No, I wasn't comfortable.

I would say this is my one experience of trying to be funny was a monologue I did. I know that sounds terrible. It wasn't just a comedy, but I did a monologue. Who girls and boys in twenty eighteen, which was like 90 minutes of this woman telling the story of her life.

And I'm so sorry. Hold on. Your monologue was 90 minutes. Yeah. How on earth did you memorize that one of those 90 minutes in England.

And then when we went to get into New York, it was ten minutes longer because I had to slow down because no one could understand my accent. Oh, I have this like Eastend Cockney accent in New York. No one could figure out. Let's go slower.

They kept bringing you machos. Yeah. Yes. And the first half of that is comedy. I mean it's pretty much the whole first forty five minutes. It's just meant to be so funny and I found that was the closest I've ever come to pulling out of something until three days before our first performance. I hadn't run the play through it all from start to finish every time I'd get about a page through like a panic attack. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it was really bad.

And I had to go and see, like, doctors and they were so nice, the face. They were like, look, if this is really if you can't do it, we totally understand. We'll just cancel the run like that kind of stuff. Oh yeah. It was really bad.

And then I was like, no, no, no. I think I could do I mean, it was try propane and all.

Yeah, I did. OK, good. Did help a bunch. Yeah. People are amazing.

I loved it, I did it for the first like maybe five shows and then I didn't need it anymore but I still use it for talk shows because I'm terrible on talk shows and that helped me a lot. But yeah, it was amazing and it was more just a monologue. I mean, I can't imagine what it's like for standup comedy, but for this monologue just needs an audience. It just doesn't work. You can't rehearse it in a room and it just made no sense to me.

But yeah, I band I sort of said to my husband, anyone can come whenever they like. Will you just be in charge of the house tickets and just don't tell me when anyone's coming?

I don't want to. Yeah, that would be my preference. I just want to be complete. I want to think everyone is a stranger the whole way through. Yeah.

And the problem with comedy is you really can't lie to yourself because the verdict. Comes in immediately looking like you could be doing an emotional scene, what are you going to stare closely to see if people's eyes are welled up? You can just tell yourself. I think that went pretty good. But comedy, boy, there's no hiding.

No. And when we did it in London, we had certain reactions and we got out to New York in the first couple of previews in New York, we were like, oh, that's not funny in America.

Okay. You know, those things immediately didn't translate.

We had to fix it right away, but it was terrifying. But to have, like, a tiny experience of having to try and be funny, a tiny experience of trying to sing on stage, like I just can't get my head around. People think that all the time.

You keep putting yourself in these horrible situation. Yeah. I just wonder, do you have kind of a personal topping yourself complex? Like, it kind of sounds like you put yourself in these positions that are really hard, like challenges if you're going to sink or swim. Yeah, yeah, I think so.

I think it's more it's not worth leaving home for unless it's sort of something that scary scary, but just something that like really excites. And definitely the monologue was nuts and it would have been one of those things. I think this is often the case with the jobs I end up doing is I think like if I you know, in 20 years time, I'll kick myself that I didn't do that. I should have done it when I'll see that someone else is doing.

And I think, oh, I should have done my job. And I feel that I want to avoid that feeling as much as I can. So there's no game plan other than trying to keep it interesting for myself. I like trying to do things that I initially read and think this might be a disaster.

You should try auto racing, just give it to them, just give money to one and mull it over. Mull it over.

OK, I have one more question before we talk about your new movie, which is what a sexy make up scene in the elevator and drive.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh. Were you already with your current husband at that time?

I was single at that time. Oh. Oh my God. That's a dream.

Insane is not.

He is a very good looking human being isn't he. Ryan Gosling.

He's dreamboat. Is he the most for you. One of. Yeah.

Oh I hate him so much. I want to see him do stand up.

You would kill it. Oh fuck you. Really funny. Yeah. Oh good. Grae very naturally funny.

Can you work on cars. Do is is super mechanical. I oh I bet he's the best mechanic in town. Were you smitten with him while you were shooting that.

Oh totally. Yeah. Yeah that was real. Like childhood wish fulfillment stuff like I'm living in L.A. I was living in a motel which I always thought was so cool and romantic.

I was driving myself to work and sunrise and shooting a movie. And it was like, oh, and then, you know, Ryan and I just stared at each other for days on end and it was like fairytale stuff. Oh yeah, yeah. Oh oh oh oh yeah.

Would you go to lines like they call lunch and then you go to lunch is like have a smile on your face going like well this is, this is my life. But as good as it gets right here, it was pretty sweet.

Yeah. I mean but it's also the whole film, you know, working with Nick, he was like Steve in a way, like some mad genius. He's just going to make this thing out of their mind. And they already have the film in their head. And you just get to sort of be the, you know, princess stuck in the tower to Brian's like knight in shining armor. It just the whole thing felt so surreal.

I loved the musical choice in that movie. Like everything was very eighties. What do I want to say? It was my favorite genre ever.

The Smears Fima. No, no, no. Oh, oh. Psychedelic Furs.

New Wave knew it was very new age. So, so much of the character. That movie was the New Wave music. So I was curious, while you were making it, did he introduce music at all to these scenes? Like did he let you in on what that vibe was going to be?

Well, so I started the process of filming living in a motel. And then, like after a couple of weeks, I moved in with Nick and with his family because I had a spare room and they were editing in the house. So I was hearing the music, you know, when I was coming home from work and I like saw that sort of river basin montage bit coming together with that song in the background. It was all very. Yeah.

So the music, he wasn't using it on set really. But I guess I was getting to hear it, getting to see bits and pieces in the evening. Yeah. Was part of it.

Now your husband I read something today that I find impossible, which is somehow you guys were pen pals when you were younger. Is that apocryphal? Is that real?

No, that is real. How not how we knew each other when we were kids.

How was he born in L.A.?

He was born in L.A., but he didn't live in L.A. for very long. He moved to England when he was like six. OK, but we went to camp together when we were kids. No way. Yeah, and you were just brose then, or were you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were just friends and we were, you know, we were like 12 years old. Yeah. And then how did it rekindle then? We lost touch for a long time and we met again in Nashville in 2011.

Like you just ran into each other at the honky tonk Waffle House.

I went there with a friend and he was doing a gig in someone's house where her husband is, Marcus Mumford for Mumford and Sons.

I didn't know what I was getting. The sense you didn't know that, which is exactly why I think. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Wow. You guys just hold on at the same can cause not pause, pause, pause.

So this kid from your camp like you've know you're a successful actor and then you go like fucking hey the kid from my camp, he's got a hell of a band, a pretty popular band.

Well yeah but yeah basically yeah. That seems weird to me. Yeah.

Well I guess I wasn't totally aware of them because they weren't, I mean I didn't know anything about music, but I had seen him. It's a support band at a gig years before when I was like 19. And I remember thinking like, oh god, he's changed. Uh huh. Because he was very short when I knew him.

Sure. Of Yeah. And yeah, I, I got so tall. But yes. You know, we sort of connected to like Facebook but never actually said we met properly in person again in 2011. But then it was like the week before he played the Grammy's with Bob Dylan and did that thing. And then, you know, the whole sort of thing started for them.

In America, you got on the ground floor, but like with a sliver of time, just a negative. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Cause post Grammy performance, he's got time for nobody.

Probably would have just looked like a gold digger, not be perfect.

Oh, look who crawled out of my past head and Padgaonkar. Yeah, that's awesome.

Now my wife and I think one of the pieces of glue that holds us together is we're both from Michigan and we have kind of some shared values, some shared experience. We're both frugal as motherfuckers.

Well, that's evolving. But, you know, she is in general. Do you guys have like is that part of the magic?

I think a shared history of having known each other since we were children? I think people don't really change, really. And I felt that he didn't change.

He just got tall. He just got taller.

Yeah, he sang louder. So I suppose that and we grew up in similar circles, in similar households and everything like that. But I think knowing somebody when they're twelve and being able to identify the twelve year old and someone. Yeah.

That's pretty special. Has quarantine benzion your marriage as it has been on ours.

Hey, I can't imagine anyone married would take that as anything but sarcastic. Yeah.

You know, I do think there's a way in which having little ones makes it, you know, more stressful, but also like at least, you know, a thing that you have to do all the time that you are busy. And so in that sense and also we've been taking turns to work for so long. Right. But it means that you never really off together. You always say it's like my turn, you return. But this year was like neither of us doing anything that's quite good.

That was our problem. We were a well oiled machine seeing each other three hours a day. We know how to do that. Well, we could have done that for another forty years, but I wasn't really hold on a second here or the other twenty four. Seven. What the hell does this look like. Yeah, it's different.

Me clearing my throat like an hour a day is probably manageable but six hours a day you know. God bless her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again we have space where we live we're told. Yeah. Green fields and yeah. Which is good.

OK, now promising young woman I'm going to air a grievance right now which I love to do is new favorite thing to do. Yeah.

This show's evolving into my list of my grievances. So I tried my hardest to watch the movie and there were so many layers of security.

I'm on my crew, I created passwords, I downloaded an app. I had to take a picture of a bar code. Finally, I was like, they're not going to let me watch this fucking movie. And I watch the trailer and I'm so pissed because the trailer is awesome. And I love the idea of this movie. And I was furious that it was impenetrable as a link.

I know that. So the thing at the moment isn't I getting a text message to your phone, but if you're not in phone signal, you don't get the message. It's like, oh yeah, yeah.

And I get you know, piracy is an issue. But at the same time, so is no one's seen the movie.

You got to kind of way what thing you're going to prioritize.

But in a nutshell, you are a law school student and. You left early, as I'm assuming the result of some sexual trauma, though, I'm a med school dropout. And years later, still living with parents and what very much looks like her childhood bedroom. And I am going out multiple nights a week pretending to be really drunk very convincingly.

I'm going to add because in the beginning of the trailer, you'd think you're that fucked up and you're about to get assaulted.

And it's scary. Yeah.

And then she waits for somebody to inevitably take her home and then she reveals that she's stone cold sober. Oh, wow.

Yeah. There's a fucking moment in the trailer with our favorite human being, Adam Brody. Oh, yeah.

Oh, what a guy. How much do we love him?

Oh, I love him. He's so brilliant in the film.

Well, but there's a moment where he keeps going. Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry. She keeps on. No, not on this one.

And he goes down between her legs and she just pops up and looks him dead in the face and said, what are you doing?

I probably got the dialogue wrong, but it's something like that. Oh, my God.

I was like, oh, this is exciting. Yeah, it's a twist on a revenge like that movie.

Yeah. It was Emerald Finnell who wrote and directed it. She wanted to write revenge movie that felt like what she would actually do.

And she's killing Eve director.

She was the showrunner on the second season of Killing. Yeah. And an actress. And she plays Commander in the Crown.

Oh, you just said Monica right bitties go into the crowd. Obviously been wanting to talk to you about the crown since the whole thing. It's all you want to talk about. Everyone who's English. I have to ask about the crown. What do you feel about the royals? What do you feel about the royals?

Oh, I love the royals.

I not seen the latest season. Oh, it's really I've seen everything else. And I thought it was brilliant fanciness when you been watching Bridges and what have you.

Well, that's great to Brigitta. Yeah, that's the Shonda Rhimes show on Netflix. Oh, blah.

Into OK. This is an English show we're consuming right now that we love Happy Valley. Have you seen that?

Oh, no, I haven't. But it's meant to be amazing. Oh, it's incredible. We love it.

And then your movie, of course, reminds me of our favorite show of last year, which was I may destroy you. Did you watch that?

Oh, my God. Oh, amazing. She's incredible. That woman is a tour de force, a force of nature watching that show.

But I will say, like, barely I was like watching it on my you, but I couldn't stop watching it. I watched the whole thing in two days. Yeah. She's extraordinary mechanical. She's unreal. Brilliant. Definitely looking at some of the stuff in our film. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm so happy. There are these stories more and more of these female perspective stories. Yeah.

And even in the trailer they hit on. Oh Chris losen it by the way, I thought he was maybe the perpetrator of.

I don't know, that's what I'm gathering, you know. I'm gonna have to see it.

Yeah. Chris is amazing. Chris is so we were so excited for him to be in the film. The cool thing about is that actually none of these people were in for longer than like two or three days of filming. So we had like Molly Shannon and Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, Adam Brody and Chris Wallace emerges. And then they were all coming in for like a day and doing their thing.

And then isn't that fun for you to like, here's your smorgasbord of super talented people that are going to come in and crush for a day and you're going to get to watch.

Yeah. It was not also incredibly difficult to come into a film, particularly one like which has a very particular tone because it is a dark comedy, but it's very it's a really dark comedy. You need to come in and do a day coming to do a day when anything is a nightmare. That was my worst nightmare. Oh, I couldn't agree more. Done it before and it's just so nerve racking and meeting the crew and trying to like, understand the dynamics of everything.

But everyone was just it was insane. Like every day Emerald and I would be the one I saw afterwards just completely. I mean, we just had the most. Allison Aubrey is like so brilliant in the film. And she was on the first day of filming. She was in the first scene. She just came in and crushed it. So amazing.

It's so cool. She's Carmilla on the crowd. She's so running and directing. Writing got I like her and she's written novels.

She's written multiple mobile. I know. And she has a world record for High Jump. Yeah.

Yeah. And she has written the new book, found the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cinderella. Oh Miley. I know, I know. It's kind of annoying to impress with her.

Honestly, let's I hope she has no life. Does she have no life. I can. Oh she's got like the best life. Oh yeah. Like amazing friends and oh delight.

I know she's a dependable friend. You're saying you can count on her. Yeah.

What a jerk. Generous, is she generous? I mean, the most generous to give you the shirt off her back. She really would.

Now, when you do a movie like this or you do a movie like Shame, do you consider like, hmm, do I want to take on this topic me personally or do you go like you know what? That's the director's topic or that's the writer's topic. And I'm here to facilitate that. Like, you distance yourself from that or do you take it on?

I think I distance myself from it when I'm making it.

And then I think inevitably you end up taking it on or you end up having to defend it in press and stuff. Right.

Particularly, I think as a woman, you've become a spokesperson for whatever issue the film is dealing with, which is fine. And I think it happens very often with female characters, with female driven stories. It always has to be. There was has to be some reason why the story was told of some very sort of specific catalyst for so some much deeper meaning, which, of course, is promising marriage, but also it's a revenge movie is really fun and it's funny and it's dark, like as everyone inching towards asking you if you've been attacked.

Is that what they're doing in interviews? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Somebody actually did ask me that. Someone asked me if I'd been in. So it's that kind of stuff where, you know, you just like we made a movie. It's so cool.

And if anything, all these different fleabag, I may destroy you. There's so much great stuff right now. Your movie, what everyone should be recognizing at this moment is that to be a woman on planet Earth, you have the fucking experience. You know, I'm saying like, I don't really probably need to find out what specifically or what eight specific things happened to you or to Monica. Like, it's becoming pretty clear.

I think this is the female experience. Yeah.

It's not it doesn't require someone's unique experience to tell the story. To be honest, it's not a unique experience. That's the thing.

I mean, it feels very much like these are things that we've been talking about amongst ourselves for years. And now finally, it's kind of a global conversation or more so than it was. But, you know, and I do think there's a reason why the film in some sense is sparking all these conversations. That is intentional, is meant to question some of the things that we've become so used to in our culture. You know, there's nothing really in promising young woman that isn't in a broad comedy in the last twenty years where a guy tries to find the most drunk girl he can at a party and lose his virginity to her in a million stories like that, we're just looking at it through a different angle.

There's a sense of responsibility when you're talking about things that are really sensitive and and other people's real life experiences. Nothing in this film that is unusual that we haven't heard about. And that's what's so tragic is that it's all very commonplace stuff that we're dealing with. But it's also horrific.

This is too much of an admission. But when I was watching it, I'm shedding misogyny. I'm not there at all. And I catch myself all the time going like, oh, yeah, that's flawed thinking. So when I was watching the trailer, I was I had the thought like, oh, this feels like entrapment to these guys.

Like, I literally was pursuing this thought of like, God, that's entrapment a little bit, these guys. And then I was like entrapping them to take someone home and sort of put them on their own, like.

But I had to go through that thing because my first kind of thought was like, what poor guy who thinks he's met a girl like some. And then I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, clouded.

I still if you here.

But then. So there's also characters in the film like Alison Breese character, Madison is you know, she's complicit in a totally different way. She's rationalizing the behavior of people that she was with because I have friends. And actually it's really hard if somebody accused somebody you love them. Like it's easy if we accuse people that we don't like in a kind of horrible people. But if someone accuses one of your loved ones, you know, it's hard. There's no answers in the film, which is what I love.

And there are lots and lots questions. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in there that is tricky stuff. And so I felt it a little bit when I was signing onto the project. I mean, not at all when we were making it. And then in the releasing of it, you feel, thank God, not my experience, but it is a lot of people's experience and you want to handle that safely and respectfully.

I stumbled across the interview with you during the same press or, you know, it's clearly a junket.

You're clearly on interview 63 in this guy, like very clumsily asks you if your relationship with Fassbender is incest and like, the whole thing is so fucking awkward.

Oh, no. What did I say?

You were fucking great. You're like, well, why? I don't understand. Because she was nude in front of him. No, she likes to fuck with her brother to remind her of being a kid. And, you know, your incest deductions probably, you know, in the politest way possible. That was not explicit. So if you assume that that says probably more about you.

But anyways, just I was just more overwhelmed with the notion that you have to sit in a room and then some clumsy dude comes in. And makes you defend whether or not the scene in the bathroom is incest. Yeah, the same thing happened in wildlife. Somebody in a Q&A stood up. I played a mother of a 14 year old and my husband, who's played by Jake Gyllenhaal, leaves sort of a mid-life crisis, leaves to go and fight a wildfire, leaves me on my own to sort of fend for myself in the 1950s with no income.

And I end up having a very brief affair with a local businessman. And it's just like the worst week of this woman's life, basically, which is not a good idea for the film, but it's much better than, you know, really.

And with the playing of it and this man Q&A, I was absolutely horrified by my character and wanted to make a real sort of objection to her existence and thought that it was abhorrent the way that she behaved.

Ohlmeyer you couldn't get over it. And he was like, and there's something going on that's weird with the kid, like some sexual thing with you and the kid, like, you all know sexual thing with that kid.

Yeah.

This guy went out of town once and his wife took on a lover and he projected.

Yeah, yeah. You should have answered by saying, let me answer that question with another question. How long ago did this happen to you, sir? I'm so sorry.

That was like a therapist in the room who intervened and said, look, I think I can rephrase your question for you and rephrase the question, because I can't remember how she rephrased it perfectly, but I think she stepped in and made it. Oh, that's a reasonable question, which is so cool. Yeah. So when does promising young woman come out?

It came out on Christmas Day in America. It's streaming on Friday, the 50 January 15th that goes missing.

I'm going to stream it because I really, really want maybe that was Universal's ultimate goals are like we know he's going to want to watch this and he'll pay for it. So let's make let's give him so many hurdles that we can't watch it for free. So actually.

Good job. Good job. It's a good test. Yeah. Yeah, I failed it, but they ultimately will get fifteen bucks or whatever it is we win so.

Yeah.

Well Carrie I didn't say it at the beginning, but I think you're phenomenally talented. I love, love, love seeing you and things like that. I'm really excited to see promising young woman. We hope you get a matching machine.

Oh my goodness. I do too.

I'm going to look it up. It'll change your life. You guys are going to fly directly to Nashville and re reignite that fire that burned so bright twelve years ago. It's going to do everything for you.

Oh my goodness. I'm changing this offer. Oh, OK.

Whoever your person is who's listening. However, we got a hold of you on email. We're going to send it to you.

Yeah, that's what we're going to do. We just say you don't have to Google shit. We're going to send you a fucking thing.

Yes, it's done. It's done.

You're going to be you to have it and bring it to that side of the earth and it'll taste better as a gift, I think.

Oh, you're all right. Well, I'll do my ducille. I'll make sure that everyone in England gets one as well because I'm in touch with them all.

You know, you might want to set up a little like lemonade style, stand out there in the country and introduce good. The good folk to Boston.

Oh, my goodness. Wow.

You've got a whole this is another challenge for you. You'll be panic sitting on the side of the road like I feel so stupid and exposed. And what if they recognize me and I'm selling my. Do they think I'm broke?

Good plan. Great talking to you. Thanks, guys.

They don't talk to me. Well, I stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

We are supported by better help. If you're having trouble meeting your goals or difficulty with relationships or trouble sleeping or you're feeling stressed or depressed, better help is available. Better help offers online professional counselors who can listen and help. Monica, you made your therapist cry this week, which is so exciting.

I did. I said that was hashtag goals. Yeah, it was a really good session.

We both get so much out of therapy. I definitely am a big proponent that everyone give it a shot. All you do is fill out a questionnaire to assess your needs and better help match you with your own licensed professional therapist. You can start communicating in under 48 hours. It's not a crisis line. It's not self-help. It is secure. Online professional counseling. Better help counselors have a broad range of expertise which may not be available in your area.

You can log into your account any time and send unlimited messages to your counselor. You'll get timely and thoughtful responses. Plus you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. Better help is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches, so it's easy and free to change counselors if needed. It's more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is available. This podcast is sponsored by Better Help and Armatures get ten percent off their first month at Better Help Dotcom DACs. That's better help l.p dotcom slash decks and join the over one million people who have taken charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced, better health professional.

We are supported by Article Monaca article.

Article is coming in handy right now because I am trying to buy stuff for my house and I need it to be cute and not outrageously expensive and articles. Nailing it. Well, Artigas newest collection encourages the mixing and matching of styles, colors, palettes and textures to breed life and warmth into our spaces as we head into the new year. Keep your eyes peeled in your Instagram Open for inspiration, featuring articles. Latest looks. Now listen. As Monica said, you can save up to 30 percent over traditional retail prices because article is able to keep their prices low by cutting out the middleman and selling directly to you.

Fast, affordable shipping is available across the USA and Canada. All in stocked items are delivered in two weeks or less. It's beautifully crafted quality materials and durable construction article is offering. Is fifty dollars off your first purchase of one hundred dollars or more. Go to article dotcoms DACS and the discount will be automatically apply to checkout. That's article dotcom slash decks to get fifty dollars off your first purchase of one hundred dollars or more.

And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman. What are you doing right now? Tell the world or sipping immature, and that's a ding, ding, ding, because my first fact is that the Moccia machine, it is it's much abased.

Yeah.

Because remember, we bought carry the. All right. But there wasn't there there was all kinds of hurdles because she was in England. So we had to just buy it here and then melt and send it to her.

Yes. And she may have called her house on fire by this point because I don't know that it qualified to meet the EU standards.

Is she going to be able to use it there because the plug converter guarantees for the Sunderer converter? To me, I imagine if you're living in England, you got one, OK?

Yeah.

But the fact was, you said you told her that I was making Moccia from scratch and I just want machine is making it from the leaves.

Well, I guess that's what I mean. Like, you know, when my momma differentiate, making, like, spaghetti from scratch would be like, OK, if you buy the thing or ragu. Now, if you get the crushed tomatoes and the tomato paste and then you combine it all, that's from scratch.

So the fact that it's raw leaves and not the powder, that's true. That's why I was calling it scratch. I get that.

I'm just like I didn't take the leaves on. Like, you model them up into a paste and then add the water. You know, that would seem.

Could you do this? I'm not done. OK?

OK, I could I think, quite honestly.

But so look, this isn't my job. Clearly, a lot of people make this jokes, this jokes. But Monica and I have fallen into this pattern where we're texting and then I inadvertently text like five things and she hasn't responded yet and then I get insecure. So then I say, thank you for attending my TED talk, which is again, is a well-worn joke.

It's oh yeah, it is old.

How old is that joke. I just got hip to it like six months ago.

It's a great joke. I stand by the you don't know how old it is, but it's definitely well worn.

OK, well I still really like it. And so I say to you, you do. And then last night you were in a bit of a pickle because you were nervous you weren't going to know how to fill up your car because you had never done it before. And you want to know where the where's the button to open up the fuel door? And I said, try pushing on the fuel door. It turns out that was the case.

Yeah. All this to say you made double safe, that you don't put diesel in it. And I said, yeah, don't put put a premium in it. Yeah. And then you said, OK, but I want to put the most expensive one in and isn't diesel more expensive.

Well and then I said, well I'll give you a TED talk when I come over about diesel and here we go. Yeah.

And it was supposed to be just for us, but you thought, oh, I should share it with the world.

It's not actually what I thought. I thought we ran out of time and I promised you a TED talk. So now everyone's going to get OK. OK, so just in a nutshell, do you care at all?

Yeah, I actually do. OK, so the way a normal gasoline engine works is the cylinder go. I'm sorry, the piston goes down in the cylinder and then it fills it with gasoline and then the cylinder goes up and it compresses it and then a spark plug ignites it and it forces the piston back down. And that's how it's making motion.

OK, in a diesel, there's no spark plugs. So there are glow plugs to get it going initially.

But the compression is so fierce inside of a diesel engine that just that much pressure as it compresses the gas will cause it to explode on its own without any spark.

But also diesel burns dirtier.

And so there are little elements in there that can also spark the explosion. The fuel itself can perpetuate the explosion. Got it.

So diesel isn't better gas. It's it's not as good of gas, really.

Oh, but it has a different power curve. And then back to the octane thing. So what's interesting is you would imagine that like ninety one octane is more explosive than eighty seven octane. But what I've been told, maybe someone correct me on this in the comments but it actually explodes slower so ninety one explodes slower, which gives a longer bit of thrust to that piston because the explosions lasting longer. OK, I'm glad I stopped in.

Yeah. I learned something new. I definitely didn't know any of that stuff.

But if you put diesel in and unleaded car you're fucked, OK, and don't do that. No. So does the more expensive unleaded is actually better for the environment, please say yes.

Well, I will say this. Generally speaking, all things being equal, if you fill a car up with eighty seven versus ninety one, you will get slightly better gas mileage with ninety one. So in that respect, you're using less fuel.

You don't even need to feel bad because I got you that car a month ago and yesterday was the first time you had to figure out how to put gas in it.

I know. So you're using a tank of gas a month.

I know, I know. I drive so infrequently, but by but, you know, when I had my Prius, I was filling up, like, every three months.

Well, let's be honest. You were filling up every three months. I was filling it up once every four months.

Every time I would drive it, it was always hovering above me.

And then I that's true. I wait till I get to the very end. But I was feeling a little bit like E once a month. A lot once a month is kind of a lot.

And so the Prius held nine gallons and I would go on that for three months.

This I filled up.

There was a you know, I'm not going to. Tell the whole story, but there was a whole snafu at the gas station, a whole hullabaloo, right. And what I ended up having to do is just put money on the card. And so I did a prepay.

I didn't get to see how much it would be filling up the entire tank. OK, so I filled up to 40 dollars and it was half off and it was eight gallons.

Jesus Christ, what gas station where you at? Did you stop at that fucking Mobil? I don't told Vermont. Yeah.

That you cannot stop there. Why? Seventy six right next to your house is literally half as expensive. Oh, that is the weirdest mobile.

I always wonder how they're in business when you really look at their gas prices the next time you drive up my house because you'll see seventy six is first. And by the way, I'm making no statement about mobile versus seventy six nationally or even statewide. But here in Los Feliz it's drastically more expensive at that moment.

I've pulled in there and was about to fill up and glance was like oh my God, what are they doing? Because that's not what it is. I think right now a gallon of premium is like three forty in Los Angeles.

So if you only got eight gallons, it's like twenty eight and some ain't changed. Yeah, OK.

It should have been, you know, twenty eight dollars.

OK, ok. OK, so I'm not going to go there anymore. Oh my God. I knew immediately.

I knew immediately. It had to be that mobile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got taken it. I got swindled.

You got taken for a ride. Well I didn't get swindled, I just was, I was irresponsible.

After on it I should have looked. How ironic that not only do they charge way more, the fucking pumps are broken. Yeah. It was broken.

It was a nightmare. That's what you got for your extra money.

The pain in the ass. You got the high hard one. All right. Well, I learned my lesson. You took it right in the caboose. OK, sometimes you got to learn the lessons the hard way.

And today I did. Lessons are a dish best served cold.

What is the actual thing? Revenge. Oh, OK. So so, Kari, how fun. Yes. This is our second English person in a row, Jethro and now Kari.

Yeah.

And we just interviewed a professor yesterday who is stationed in England. She's been there for eighteen months and she was telling us about the subtle differences in how we assume as Americans like, oh, will that be the easiest place to live?

Yeah, it would be such a natural fit because we speak the same language and so much of our history comes from those folks on the Mayflower.

But now culturally, there are a lot different.

Yeah, and I also know that because Calli, my best friend. Yeah. Is living there and she has said the same thing she has.

What did she just says it's really different.

Yeah. I kind of want experience because I've been there for a week at a time on vacation.

I've not noticed it.

I live there for a month in college and I remember it being different.

But you were mostly an American movie premieres while you were there.

Uh, isn't that where you famously saw Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn, Jen and V v v v. Yeah. Mm. What a time. What a time to be alive.

But it was different, but I think I was too young to really I hadn't lived by myself in America. Well I was going to say you haven't even left Georgia so.

Yeah. You know who. Well other than your brief stay in Memphis, Tennessee, thank you for remembering. Of course. And then visiting grandma and grandpa and Savannah, which is a little bit different of a vibe, you know.

But whatever the point is, you could have gone to Detroit and thought you've been all topsy turvy. I would have, yeah, for sure.

OK, so you've left the journal behind.

Every time we do a fact check, I've arrived with a new media form of media, either a memo pad, a reporter's notebook.

This is a yellow legal pad.

I can't wait for you to have a clay tablet that you have carved like Kanaya Foreman.

OK, you said less people are employed and anthro than acting. I'm just now seeing this fact right now. OK, I didn't check it because I lost it in all these letters on my page. Yeah. Yeah, got lost.

Let me look how many people are employed in anthropology.

It's going to be tricky because like it, certainly everyone with an anthropology degree ends up employed. But do they end up employed in the field of anthropology? I got to imagine it's like less than one percent because with the exception of a couple corporations that hire anthropologists and you got some at museums mostly you're just in academia for that, right?

Maybe some excavation companies have onsite archaeologists or something. While you're doing that, I'm going to find out how many people are in seg.

Oh, good idea.

That's tricky, though, because, like, yeah, it is, but so will your number will be OK to do this as quick facts, anthropologists and archaeologists, two thousand nineteen median pay was sixty three thousand six hundred and seventy dollars per year.

OK. Typical entry level education, master's degree, number of jobs, 12, 19, eight thousand, eight thousand, yeah.

OK, how many people do you think are in Sagasta one hundred thousand.

One hundred and sixty thousand. Wow. Yeah.

But that again, I mean if you do one commercial in your life, you know, if you're smart you'll wait to your second commercial because they don't force you to join until your second.

So you don't want to pay those dues if you're one and done. But you know what I mean.

I do know what you mean. Yeah. There's a lot of unemployed actors in SAG after. Yeah. Which always is an issue in the voting. Not that people care how the sausage is made, but generally in a union. If you got the UAW and they're voting on some policy at the factories, I can imagine the great majority of people voting work in a factory. Yeah. And so often they'll vote for a strike in 80 percent of the people that are voting to strike aren't working.

So there's really no there's no loss for them. Yeah, I'm not saying we should or shouldn't strike. I'm just saying that's a peculiar dynamic, I think to sag after a compared to UAW or Teamsters.

What we should look up is also that was another good TED talk about what we should look up is how many actors make over 50 that we could do that is qualify for the insurance.

That's sixteen thousand.

Like that's not about what an anthropologist is making. Sixty three thousand dollars. So we should say fifty thousand.

What do they call that plan one? How many SAG actors qualify for plan one health care? Well, we are getting into the weeds on this.

You must earn at least thirty five thousand in covered earnings.

OK, I thought it was 16.

Your you're out to lunch. Got no plan. One is. That's the good one. Yeah. So you need to do plan to. But why.

We're trying to find out how many this actually addresses your your big objection one second ago and. I am not calling them to ask because I've had a lot of conversations with them over the years and is tough.

Well, fucking eighty five hundred people signed a petition to change that. The plan, one that lets me know there's more than eighty five hundred people on it. Oh, OK, then that kind of answers, because if it was eight thousand, eight thousand doesn't sound right, I'm going to be honest, I can't fully trust this site that I pulled that number from. But sure. OK. OK, so we'll say you're right. OK, so I just want to clarify, in case anyone heard it, she mentions David Tennant and I do like a really small gasp.

And that's because of Broadchurch. I've been watching it and I love it so much.

Very small. And he is in it and he's incredible.

Which person does he play? The main guy. The main detective. Yeah. Donelle Ultima Cottee's. Good. Donella automatic. Don't you love how often they say Donnay Latymer.

Yeah, it's mainly him. Yeah. So you made a joke that Carrie and Timothy Dalton were the same age because they're.

Yeah. And Carrie's thirty five and Timothy Dalton is seventy four.

That is a 40 year gap. Yeah.

Oh boy. That means I, I would be dating a six year old.

Oh yuck. I don't like putting in her.

You'd, you'd be dating a negative seven year old. Oh.

Like Oh wow.

OK, um I don't mean to say if anyone out there has a 40 year old gap, but there's just an openness about thinking about your age now and a negative seven year old. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. But I think the way we would qualify, I think we could come up with some guidelines. So for me, I'd like to see anyone involved in a 40 year gap to be at least thirty eight. That would be the would be the minimum age that they got together.

Yes. Yeah. That you're dating a seventy eight year old when you're thirty eight. Yeah. Because you know, maybe you're like thirty. Who gives a shit. Thirty, thirty, thirty five.

Oh man. If you're dating a seventy five year old I would be a bit sad for you.

I know. See that's the part that I, if I loved him I would be happy for a few weeks.

You know, he's going to get that thing and he's going to live to be two hundred.

Oh OK. So it's sooner than we dream chrome. Oh he's got, he's got kids in his basement. Yeah. Well then on that further compounds the ethical dilemma.

OK, so but if you're seventy and your boyfriend's one ten surveille, we were having a hard time pronouncing this word and it is per panel lol.

It is, yes. It's not propaganda. No. No. And I thought it was. Yeah it sounded so right when you said it and wanted it to be right.

But it's propranolol. I almost need to take properly on and not just pronounce it correctly.

I said panic. Well the person who taught me this takes it OK.

Propranolol now. Propranolol. Oh it's really that's a boy.

Do they need medication? I was just thinking this because I just picked up two prescriptions. He was like, what are the names of them? And I had to hold up the tube.

Yeah, because I could not say it. Of course not. Can I try to.

I wouldn't be able to do it, but can I try to find the spelling of Xeljanz.

My Oh right. Is an ex fucking listen to this x, e, l, j, a and Z.

This would be a million point word in Scrabble. Yeah. You've got an X, J and a Z and for some reason the X is Zall.

It's not.

Are you sure it's not zel. OK, Xeljanz. Does that make you feel better.

J n or an J Xeljanz.

Yeah that's quite honestly there's somebody in the consumer affairs said, you know what, people are going to have an easy time saying it's pharmacy and spelling and searching on the Internet.

Xeljanz Yeah.

I don't, I don't. There must be an actual reason. An explanation. Yeah. Maybe it stands for stuff like, you know how covid stands for Coronavirus.

Why are medications weird.

Terrible search.

My seizure medication is Levitra, Levitra, Satnam, Lipitor.

I love it. Or leave it to someone in pharmacology can tell us one of our armchairs can.

OK, but I did find an article here.

Oh you don't want to know another TED talk.

Oh jeez. All right. All right. Is it interesting? Can I just read you a couple of the names that are out there in Civic with a K ADCETRIS? Yervoy will breed with a Y Zytiga X Evea no, fuck these people, there is a reason so many drug names look so weird.

A good drug name is supposed to check lots of boxes. It should be easy for doctors to spell accurately. Will fail when they scribble it down on a prescription pad.

It should be memorable, should be used in every country around the world without triggering some cultural confusion or sensitivity. It ought to be consistent with the science or clinical application that distinguish the product through years of development at the brand name shouldn't be so geeky that it's obtuse for patients but fail. Ideally, you want it to trigger some relevant connection to your product. That's not an explanation.

Some of that makes sense, though. Writing it down and needing that to look a certain way kind of makes sense to me.

Well, it does say the FDA is getting particularly tough, rejecting about four out of every 10 name proposals because it wants to avoid medication mix ups. Yeah, exactly. Classic mix up. Yeah. Although that's a bad mix up.

I hope I get something known. OK.

Oh, OK. I'm going to do a fact and you're not going to like it. And I did not check this back. So the Bhiman at Lauras.

So you can be mad at Laura and this is very on brand for her to write something like this, she said. DACs asked if the story of Carrie and Mumford being pen pals was apocryphal, but I think he meant to use the word apocryphal, which means basically that a story or account is dubious and probably not true.

I do say apocryphal instead of apocryphal, and I know it's apocryphal. Yeah, but in an age she's dead, right? I use it a lot too.

I know.

I heard you use it after I read this and I was like, oh no, I'm going to have to tell. Yeah. Hippogriff would imply some kind of hypocrisy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it apocryphal. I'll nail it. Yeah.

I just wanted to tell you because I also know that you strive to be better. Yeah. And Laura did it and I didn't do it. Yeah. And that's why I take Xeljanz to help with that.

We really know that's for arthritis. Oh and I don't take it very often.

You were describing something and you said blah blah blah. And a black woman.

Oh, you were talking about one of the movies and movie scenes. He was in this with the black woman. And when I heard it, when I was editing, I was like, I think I should take that out. And I started to take it out.

And then I was like, why am I taking this out? It's almost like color blindness, you know what I mean? To be like, why do you have to say black woman?

You should just say woman. But also like, no, she's a black woman, like you can say that. So I'm just confessing that I've come around on that.

OK, I've learned that because I kind of used to be on that side a lot of like, you don't need to qualify.

And I still think, well, certain cases, absolutely. If you go like, oh, I bumped into two guys at 7-Eleven who had a car for sale, you don't need to say I bumped into two black guys who had a car for sale.

Yeah, but if you're describing something in an effort to recount that person's memory, it is a completely relevant detail. Yeah. And to pretend it's not. Is that stupid colorblind thing?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah.

And actually this is a tease I guess I'll say, but Kristen and I have a little side project for armchair that we're under arm chair that we're doing.

I'm super excited for you guys. You came up with an awesome idea which was shattered glass to celebrate some of the women who have been gangsters.

And we interviewed a person and that person was awesome and said, you should say black person, Indian person, whatever she was like. But then but like, say, white person to you could just just no one saying take it away, but just do make it equal in the in the way you're describing. I agree.

And I liked that anyway. So I've I've turned a corner and I wanted to make that. I know. No.

Oh well welcome. Do people know, right. That you are not only can play black but should play what do they know that it's so great.

But you went down to Florida in a nutshell and you met your very young and a friend of a friend. You a casting director. I was.

It was I just graduated high school. High school.

And you guys got to go meet with an agent or casting director.

She was like very old, like an old producer down in Florida.

Yeah. And she's very, very old. And she told Monica excitedly, You can you could play black and shoot.

Well, I added and I added she didn't say that, but she was encouraging me to explore all of the colors of the rainbow because I could.

Oh, my God, no. Again, we don't know what the fuck she was. She did not, she did not. And it's so funny.

I wonder if Karl, because I was with Cally, remembers her name.

She had a very specific name that we show business to, was at Showbizzy know Carol glitz or something. I'll ask her if she remembers and I'll report back next time if she can remember. OK, so anyway. That's all.

That's all. Yeah.

OK, well, stay black too much.

This is why I can't turn any corner with me around with Kirsten around you. Can you save to turn many corners. But with me you have to stay. Going to get my course. All right.

I love you. I love you.