Zosia Mamet on Orgies, Boils, and Flat-Earthers

What was funny about the Black Death, the plague that wiped out half of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages? We wouldn’t have an answer for you if it weren’t for The Decameron. The new Medieval dramedy, loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century novel of the same name, follows a group of aristocrats as they abscond to a countryside villa to escape the bubonic nightmare. It doesn’t take long for chaos to ensue, and the nobles soon find themselves descending into a satirical sex- and alcohol-induced nightmare with their peasants under lockdown. Zosia Mamet, the writer, self-proclaimed horse girl, and actress best known for her career-making turn as Shoshanna in the HBO masterpiece Girls, stars as the personality-disorder-riddled Pampinea, who can’t stop drinking and abusing her servant (played by Derry Girl’s Saoirse-Monica Jackson). Just before the show premieres on Netflix later this week, we asked Mamet to take the hot seat for our Rorschach Test, in which she sounds off on corsets, sex toys, orgies, and her newfound fear of flying.

———

ORGIES

“I think my social anxiety would really get in the way. I am all about it if someone wants to get down on that, but I think I would be like, “Does that guy over there like me? Oh no, he probably doesn’t. Why did I come to this thing after 10:00? Shit, I have to wake up tomorrow and now I’m going to be tired and I probably won’t make it.” It would just be sort of a spiral of all the things I had to do the next day.”

———

BOILS

“I went on a date with a guy once, and he ended up being a pretty big loser for other reasons that I won’t discuss now. But he took me on this date to see Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl, which was almost worth how bad the date was. Then I left my favorite leather jacket at his house, and I was like, “I cannot leave my favorite jacket with this monster who I never want to see again.” I went on a rescue mission to get it the next day, and he was like, “You got to get your jacket quick because I gotta get up early in the morning because I got a boil on my ass and I have to have it surgically drained tomorrow.” Then when I got there, he was like, “Do you want to see it?” I was like, no.”

———

AFFAIRS

“I recently watched the Ashley Madison documentary, which was fascinating and made me very sad, but I’m deeply intrigued by what causes people to partake in affairs because it is something that I just don’t understand. Not to say that I’m a saint in any way, shape or form, but I’ve personally never cheated. I have been cheated on, though.”

———

VIBRATORS

“There’s a scene in our show that takes place in, we called it the Dick Room, but it’s like a boudoir, or a sex salon. There’re just paintings, sculptures, dildos of every shape and possible size that you could imagine. There are just dicks everywhere. Our showrunner was trying to explain to all of these Italian men with a language barrier what she wanted all of these medieval sex toys to look like, which was hilarious. But otherwise, in general, vibrators? Yes, obviously.

———

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE

“My favorite thing that I’ve heard about the DUI was when Whitney Cummings posted something that was like, ‘I honestly didn’t even know that Justin Timberlake had gone on tour until I saw his mugshot.’ So maybe it’s a DUI, or he’s just a marketing genius.”

———

PEASANTS

“Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who plays my handmaiden, is fucking genius. We got to play around with the dynamic of how intimate that relationship was for women back in the day, particularly for unwed women of a certain age, and just how deeply dysfunctional it was. There is love there, but at the end of the day, it is also a relationship that isn’t chosen and one that involves someone serving at the whims of someone else, and there’s a deep co-dependency there. There was a lot to dig into, but it was also pretty depressing.”

———

FLAT-EARTHERS

“I just want to give them a hug and show them a Morgan Freeman voiceover documentary.”

———

CORSETS

“Thank fucking god they don’t exist anymore. I mean, they look fantastic, but they’re torture devices.”

———

REMAKES

“I understand the desire. Every generation wants to make their version of whatever that classic piece is, but I think 9.9 times out of 10, we’re never able to do that thing justice because there are so many factors that go into making something truly great. It isn’t just the script and the actors and the director. It’s the time period it was made, it’s the vibe of the industry, it’s the circumstances it was made under.”

———

DEBATES

“Sadly, debates are no longer debates. They’re almost like, who can lay down the biggest dig and talk the largest game? I don’t think Donald Trump said anything that was even true.”

———

FILLER MIGRATION

“One of my neighbors is a doctor and one summer she was doing a residency. There was an outbreak of this flesh-eating virus and all these people kept coming into the emergency room with it. It took the form of a sort of slug that would move under the skin and you had to cut skin open to get it out. Then I saw some article a couple of weeks later about filler migration and there was imaging of what it looked like over a series of months and years. I was like, that is the same thing as the flesh-eating virus. It terrified me.”

———

INTIMACY COORDINATORS

“The Decameron was one of the first times I’d worked with an intimacy coordinator and I felt like it was really adding to the quality of the simulated sex. It was so incredibly helpful. I knew her first name from when I met her on set, but afterwards she would send a follow up email out being like, ‘Is there anything you want to debrief about?’ That’s when I learned that her last name was Cooch. Nothing has ever been more perfect.” 

———

CHALICES

“Bring them back.”

———

BOEING WHISTLEBLOWER

“I have never been afraid of flying. But now every time I get on an airplane I’m like, ‘Are the brakes not going to work? Is the panel going to come off?’ I sincerely hope not because I get on airplanes quite a lot.” 

———

ALL FOURS

“Well, I have not read the new Miranda July book. But there was a period of time when I was a kid when I pretended to be a dog and I demanded all of my meals be served out of a bowl on the floor. We’ll leave it at that.”

———

HANGOVERS

“One year, I spent New Year’s Eve in Manhattan and I had to fly back to L.A. the following day. I got blackout drunk and ate sushi that gave me food poisoning and then had to get on a 6:00 AM flight. I’m cautious not to recreate that.”

———

HORSE GIRL STIGMA

“Are we crazy? Absolutely. Are we hurting anyone? No. So leave us alone.”

———

THE BEAR

“I feel like The Bear is the perfect example of that alchemy of teamwork that can happen when you get a group of individuals who are all aces in their field to together. It’s just a confetti explosion of brilliance.”

———

VIRGINITY

“I happened to have a really nice experience. It was sort of the same way I was proposed to: there weren’t fireworks, there weren’t roses, but it was simple and quiet and nice.”

———