Zosia Mamet hasn’t seen Madame Web, the turkey that crashed the Marvel franchise earlier this year and launched a thousand memes. “I chose not to,” she says with a smile. Mamet appeared in the Spider-Man spin-off, which has an 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, was described by one reviewer as a “Chornobyl-level disaster”, and became one of this year’s biggest box-office bombs.
The 36-year-old actor laughs awkwardly when I mention it. For a few days in February, Madame Web – and lead actor Dakota Johnson’s sublime press tour – was all the internet wanted to talk about.
What went wrong? “I think it’s really tough with movies like that,” Mamet sighs. They’re “made by committee,” she says, “because there’s so much money put into them. Nothing creative made by committee is ever brilliant.”
Madame Web was a rare setback for Mamet. Best known for her breakout role as Shoshanna Shapiro, the neurotic aspiring girl-boss of HBO’s Girls, she has also played a beatnik photo editor in Mad Men, a straight-talking lawyer in The Flight Attendant, and a lovelorn aristocrat in forthcoming Netflix ensemble comedy The Decameron.
If one thing unifies Mamet’s characters, it’s that they march “to the beat of their own drum, or are a little bit left of centre,” she says. Although Mamet can play it straight – in Netflix’s earnest but dull Tales of the City, she played a sullen documentary film-maker – she is a gifted comedian, with a knack for physical humour. As Shoshanna in Girls, she vibrates with hummingbird energy; in The Decameron, there is a pantomime quality to her gasps and swoons.
In The Decameron, which is loosely based on the 14th-century Boccaccio text that inspired Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a group of nobles congregate at an Italian villa to escape the plague-ridden masses, with predictable results. Mamet portrays her character, Pampinea, as frivolous and desperate for love: the running gag is that she is a 28-year-old maid with sagging breasts. She was “a hoot to play,” says Mamet. “I just threw tantrums constantly.”
We speak via video call, Mamet at home in a state she asks me not to identify, for privacy reasons. She relocated there in search of warmer weather with her husband, actor Evan Jonigkeit, two years ago. Amiable and self-deprecating, she seems tired; I suspect she isn’t thrilled at the prospect of an imminent press tour in New York. Mamet is a homebody, happiest when in bed by 11pm, or riding her horse, Herbie.
To many, she will always be defined by her role in Girls, the Lena Dunham-created comedy drama about four young women making their way in Brooklyn. In the early-to-mid 2010s, Girls was all critics wanted to talk about, in part because it coincided with the rise of digital publishing; blogs such as Gawker and Jezebel, as well as legacy media, analysed every plot and character arc, tearing the show apart. It was too white, too privileged, its lead female stars were all children of famous people, its characters dislikable (which was Dunham’s intention). The intensity of the coverage was disproportionate for a show that only ever attracted a modest audience.
Over time, Girls has gained a deeper critical appreciation. During Covid, many people rewatched it, with gen Z appreciating the show’s now period-era indie sleaze fashions and first-generation iPhones. Many identified Shoshanna – who breaks up with her fellow Girls in the show’s penultimate episode, identifying them as silly, narcissistic and bad friends – as the show’s most-valued player. “She basically realises,” says Mamet, “that these women should be trying to be her friends, and not vice versa.”
There have long been rumours of a rift between Mamet and the other Girls – Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Dunham – with fans speculating that this is why Shoshanna so seldom appears in later episodes of the show. Would Mamet have liked more screen time? “I would have taken all the screen time they gave me,” she says, diplomatically. Mamet is no longer close with her former colleagues, but she squashes any suggestion of bad blood. “I have nothing but love and admiration for all of them. And if I got the chance to work with any of them again, I would absolutely love that.”
Mamet is not a method actor. “I don’t really think about characters as their own entities,” she says. “They are more like a suit I put on for the moment.” Except for Shoshanna. “Sometimes she pops into my head and I wonder what she’s doing now. I don’t know – it’s like a pair of jeans that got frozen. It’s like she stands up on her own. I miss her a lot. I think she’s the only character I’ve ever played that I genuinely miss.” In 2022, Dunham told the Hollywood Reporter that she’d informally pitched a Girls reboot to HBO executives, although nothing ever came of it. Mamet “would play [Shoshanna] again in a second,” she says.
In 2014, she wrote a column for Glamour magazine about her teenage eating disorder, which led to her being hospitalised at 17. Her father, Pulitzer-winning playwright and film-maker David Mamet, told her that she was “not allowed to die”. Was her decision to live outside image-conscious LA in part to protect her from the possibility of relapse? “It’s definitely triggering,” says Mamet of Hollywood. “I think it’s also harder to tease out reality from dysmorphia when you are living in a world that kind of values dysmorphia.”
In her Glamour column, Mamet also wrote about how watching her mother, the actor Lindsay Crouse, diet throughout her childhood contributed to her own eating disorder. “When I was growing up,” Mamet wrote, “my mother was always on some sort of diet, and everything I was fed was non-fat or sugar free. When I was hungry, her first response was: ‘Are you sure?’” In the 2010s, many people published personal essays they went on to regret, and I wonder whether Mamet is one of them. “I don’t,” she says. “I find writing to be incredibly cathartic. Maybe for some people writing something like that would be like the exercise a therapist gives you, of writing a letter but never sending it. And I chose to publish those articles in Glamour. But I don’t regret it.”
Mamet’s parents separated when she was a baby and she was raised by Crouse in LA. There were times Mamet felt like an intruder in her own family. “I’ve often sort of thought that maybe I was left on my family’s doorstep or something. I have always felt as if I didn’t quite fit with my family from so many angles.” She was bullied throughout primary school, eventually being home-schooled to escape her tormentors. “I was in my head a lot. And I was a bit of a chubby kid. And I was kind of anxious.” It sounds, I say, like a profoundly unhappy childhood. Mamet nods. “Spending time with horses was really the thing that kept me from falling into a deep, deep depression as a child.”
Does she feel her parents did enough to protect her from the classroom bullies? Mamet answers slowly and carefully. “I think my parents did the best that they could. It’s incredibly difficult. Now, as an adult, watching our friends with kids, and seeing my parents from this perspective, [I realise] they’re just human beings and without all the answers. When I look back at it, if I were in my mother’s position there were probably things I would have done differently. But I think she did the best she could with what she had available to her.” Mamet was previously estranged from her mother, but they have now reconnected. “My mom and I are on better terms,” she smiles, “yeah.”
In April, Mamet’s father told an audience at the LA Times Festival of Books that Zosia and her half-sister Clara, also an actor, had made it on their own. “Nobody ever gave my kids a job because of who they were related to,” said Mamet, who has twice been nominated for an Oscar, before later describing Hollywood diversity targets as “garbage” and “fascist totalitarianism”. His comments gave rise to headlines such as: “Zosia Mamet’s Oscar nominee father David insists former Girls star daughter is NOT a nepo baby”.
“I’ve honestly stopped …” says Mamet, before pausing to correct herself. “That’s a lie. I have not stopped getting annoyed at the things my dad says, because I don’t think that’s physically possible. My husband is always like: ‘Why do you let it affect you?’” She capers into a higher register. “I’m like, because he’s my father! I don’t know how to turn that switch off. But I have tried to. I guess it’s sort of my version of counting to 10 when he says shit like that – I’m just like: ‘OK, take a breath, count to 10 and let it go.’”
Nepotism allegations have dogged Mamet throughout her career. As a teenager, she took summer classes at the Atlantic Theater Company, co-founded by her father. While other actors had to hustle for their first Equity card, at 16, Mamet appeared in 2004’s Spartan, which her father wrote and directed. “Did it potentially open some doors for me?” says Mamet. “Sure. I can’t argue that. I think the biggest thing that I felt it did was that growing up surrounded by the industry meant I was going in with open eyes.”
But, she also says, “oftentimes, I was actually met with more of a challenge. Because people knew I was coming in with a famous name, it meant that I was walking into the room with baggage.” She recalls one casting director telling her she had “her mother’s lips”, and an audition where a producer had formerly had a bad experience working with her father. “It’s not like you’re born to a famous family and the red carpet rolls out for you and your career is made,” says Mamet. “Because also at the end of the day, if you’re not walking in and up to the challenge, if you don’t have the talent or the ability to back it up, a name can only get you so far.”
Mamet is working on a book of personal essays. Given how candid her writing has been in the past, is there anything in there she’s worried about? “Oh my God,” she exclaims. “Are you kidding? The entire thing! I’m terrified. No one is going to want to read it, everyone is going to hate it, I should probably fake my own death so I don’t have to publish it.”
Of all the core Girls alumni, Mamet is perhaps the most prolific and high-profile as an actor now, with the exception of Adam Driver, who’s a bona fide Hollywood A-lister. Yet Mamet’s shutters have not come down in the way most celebrities’ do. She is willing to share remarkably personal stories. In addition to writing about her eating disorder, in 2017 Mamet gave a talk about her experience with pelvic floor dysfunction, which was serially misdiagnosed for six years, at one point causing her to contemplate suicide. One doctor told her she was an “uppity” actor; another poured acid in her vagina. “I’m a pretty private introverted human in my daily life, which is a funny dichotomy,” says Mamet. “But, I don’t know, I’ve always just enjoyed sharing.”
She leans forward. “We tell stories to make people feel less alone,” she says. “If writing about my own life in a really personal, open way can make someone else feel less alone and perhaps help them through a struggle or a time of darkness, or just make them see their own experience in mine and feel like it’s not singular to them, then it will be worth it.”
• The Decameron is available globally on Netflix beginning 25 July
