Exclusive Interview
‘Laid’ Stars Stephanie Hsu, Zosia Mamet & More Preview Peacock’s Deadly Rom-Com Series (VIDEO)
One-night stands and casual hookups are fairly harmless, right? Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth for Stephanie Hsu‘s Ruby at the center of Peacock’s new dark comedy Laid.
Inspired by the 2011 Australian comedy of the same name, Ruby finds herself in a dicey situation as she discovers that her former lovers are all dying in unusual ways. In order to move forward, and hopefully break the cycle, she has to go back through her sex timeline in order to confront her past. “She’s messy. I like it,” muses Hsu, who takes on a role quite different from her Oscar-nominated performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“I think it’s fun. I did a lot of comedy when I was coming up, and I’ve been really wanting to do something that’s a little bit more wild in that way,” Hsu shares. “And it is so fun to be an anti-hero hero. It’s so fun to be flawed and also be a woman who’s flawed.”
Jeff Weddell / PEACOCK
Despite Ruby’s flaws, she’s got a tight friendship with bestie AJ (Zosia Mamet), which will be tested as the season plays out. “I think getting to play this dynamic, getting to work with Stephanie, getting to say these words… the whole experience felt so juicy,” Mamet teases of their onscreen dynamic.
When Ruby is faced with this situation, she turns to AJ for support, and AJ promptly turns to her sex murder board, for lack of a better term. The poster offers some clarity and organization surrounding the various deaths occurring in correlation to Ruby’s sex life, and in many ways, the board feels like a character in and of itself. “It feels like more than a prop, but I don’t know what to call it other than that,” Mamet notes, adding, “I’ve never gotten to interface [with something like it before]. Our art department did a really, really exceptional job.”
Executive producer and co-showrunner Nahnatchka Khan reveals, “In the writers’ room, we put up her sex timeline on the board and really through that discovered a lot of who Ruby was because of her past relationships… constructing the messiness from the jump was a really cool way to develop a character,” Khan continues.
James Dittiger / PEACOCK
One face on that board happens to be Richie (Michael Angarano), a former fling of Ruby’s who finds himself in the crosshairs of fate for their past entanglement. “Richie’s very clearly Ruby’s emotional foil in a lot of ways. He’s very resigned to his fate, and he has nothing left to lose. And when you get to that point, when you’re faced with that, and then you come out on the other side of, it’s a really interesting space to explore somebody who might not be concerned with people pleasing, being the nice guy,” Angarano teases of his character’s approach to life.
Instead, Richie is serving up his blunt opinions, “just kind of being his authentic self, being very honest,” Angarano says.
James Dittiger / PEACOCK
As for AJ’s love life, she’s committed to her boyfriend Zach (Andre Hyland), who doesn’t really get along with Ruby. As Hyland puts it, “Ruby and Zach only know each other because of AJ. They’re not two people that choose to spend time together. AJ is with Zach and Ruby happens to also be AJ’s best friend. So they kind of have to both put up with each other because they both love AJ and so they kind of butt heads a little bit because they’re both in each other’s worlds and never really asked him to be there,” Hyland continues. “That’s just the circumstance.”
They’ll be forced to try and uncover the mystery behind Ruby’s situation, but not without some sweet pop culture influence as she sparks something with client Isaac (Tommy Martinez). “For the rom-com element, we definitely wanted to play with those tropes,” Khan’s fellow co-showrunner and executive producer Sally Bradford McKenna notes. “We wanted Ruby to be a character who’d grown up on the same diet of Anne Hathaway movies and being told is what she should expect from love and this is what you’re looking for, and when you find this, you’ll be content or complete or happy.”
“It was important for us to know that she was a character that had that frame of reference, but then to add this dark element [of] why can’t I find love?” McKenna adds.
“There’s a lot of dimension to her and there are dramatic turns, but there is a sort of wildness and silliness about her that I really love,” Hsu concludes when it comes to Ruby. Meet her for yourself by tuning into Laid as it arrives on Peacock, and see what the cast had to say about the green flags and red flags of dating in our video interview above.
Laid, Series Premiere, Thursday, December 19, Peacock
