Zosia Mamet's been on our screens for a while now, playing a pretty varied range of roles, but one common thread throughout many of them is an emphasis on the friendships formed between women. "I think great female friendships are just as much love stories as romantic ones," she said during a recent Zoom interview. "In many ways, that's the legacy that Girls left behind, and that's something that I continue to search out."
This comes into sharp focus in the HBO Max series The Flight Attendant, the addictive semi-comic thriller which premiered last November. The series stars Kaley Cuoco as Cassie, the titular woman who gets caught up in an international game of intrigue, but key to the story is Annie as Cassie's best friend and ally, whose own life also gets tangled up in the drama.
The Flight Attendant was of course the reason for the newest installment of our Collider Connected video interview series, and Mamet went into detail on how she joined the show and what it was about the material that spoke to her — specifically, the fact that over the course of the first season, Annie gets real opportunity to stretch beyond the confines of the traditional "best friend" supporting role. "I got to read, I think initially, the first five episodes, and [showrunner] Steve Yockey was very clear that Annie's journey really amps up quite a bit in the second half. She's back-loaded a bit in that regard. But just in the way that they wrote her from the beginning, I knew that she was a bit of an onion, and that they wouldn't just let her sit unpeeled," she said.
It did require some trust on her part, because as she acknowledged, plenty of actors have joined projects with those sorts of promises attached. "I've had friends totally be screwed by that. They've been told they're going to have a ton to do and then they end up literally being like, 'All of my scenes are on a cell phone, sitting in an office and I'm bored out of my mind.' You never know anything in this industry," she said. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard like, 'This is the next big whatever.' And then no one sees it. And then the movie that was made for $5 that no one thought anyone would see becomes the blockbuster of the year. There's no rhyme or reason to what we do, and it's what makes it such a hard industry and also so exceptionally rewarding when it does work."
Mamet's first major breakout role was, of course, as one of the core cast of Lena Dunham's iconic HBO series Girls, which she credits with being the opportunity that made her love television as a medium. "There's something very special about getting to play a character over a long period of time, when you're on a show where the character is allowed to and change and shift," she said.
At the time of our conversation, The Flight Attendant Season 2 was in the process of being written, and she was preparing for a change in shooting location — the new season will be made in Los Angeles, though Mamet is hoping that her character gets to be involved in some of the international locations that the show's premise lends itself to visiting. "I'm often like, 'So this year when Annie goes on all those trips...' I did text [Yockey] that the other day. I was like, 'Okay, cool. So wherever you guys decide to go this season, can I play whatever animal is in the background?' I was like, 'I'll be an umbrella. I don't even need a credit, it's fine. You don't have to pay me for the day.'"
For more, check out the complete interview above, which also includes:
- What it was like working with Cuoco.
- What she remembers about the experience of making Girls.
- How she ended up wrangling goats while playing the role of "Bedouin Woman" in the 2004 film Spartan (directed by her father David Mamet).
- Why she loved guest-starring on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with her husband Evan Jonigkeit.
- What she learned about doing interviews from her Weiner-Dog co-star Ellen Burstyn.
- Why she's currently developing her own future projects.
And more! Watch the video above for the full interview. The Flight Attendant Season 1 is streaming now on HBO Max.