Ilana Glazer on Broad City: ‘People thought it was effortless – in reality, we were killing ourselves’

The actor poured the hilarious, personal details of pregnancy into her new film ‘Babes’. Now she sits down with Annabel Nugent to talk about having her work downplayed on ‘Broad City’, why she chooses to lead with comedy over identity politics, and what it means for her to come out as a non-binary woman

Ilana Glazer: ‘I’ve been told my whole career my work is political’ (Getty for IMDb)

As soon as she got pregnant, Ilana Glazer knew she had struck comedy gold. “Im–me-diately,” says the actor and comedian, drawing out the word for comic effect. “You know, real hard comedy is physical. It’s falls. It’s pukes. It’s slapstick.” What it is, the 37-year-old realised, is being pregnant. “My boobs seemed to grow their own conscience.”

That comedy is on full display in her latest project, Babes. Glazer – best known as the co-creator and star of the stoner comedy series Broad City – plays Eden, a hapless, no-strings-attached thirtysomething pinballing through life when a one-night stand turns into a nine-month pregnancy. To the shock of her best friend Dawn, an exhausted mother herself (played by Michelle Buteau), Eden decides to keep the baby.

As well as a warm-hearted, very funny exploration into female friendships, Babes also functions as a redemptive sex-ed class for anyone unfamiliar with the horrors and joys of pregnancy – ie Glazer, before she became a mother to her three-year-old daughter. The star kept a list of all the weird, unforeseen things she went through when she was pregnant, many of which – insatiable horniness brought on by the fleshy sight of raw chicken, for example – made it to screen.

A lot of what Babes depicts are the cold hard facts of carrying a baby. “People are so surprised. They call the film ‘raunchy’, but this is how women talk to each other and share information,” says Glazer, who found writing the comedy a breeze. “The cold hard facts? That’s the punchline. The setup is your entire life of never being told something, and then the punchline is hearing the truth.”

A buddy comedy about two woke female best friends, Babes shares DNA with Broad City. Since coming to an end in 2019 after five seasons, the much-loved sitcom Glazer created with Abbi Jacobson has gone down in TV history as a seminal artefact of peak millennial. Its scrappy DIY energy (the show began life as a web series before moving to Comedy Central and picking up Amy Poehler as a producer) set it apart from the rest.

The Eden of Babes has a lot in common with the Ilana of that show. Both are irreverent and bold and hilarious, three qualities Glazer also possesses, alongside the signature brown curls and impish glint in her eye. “My mom is texting me,” she says, glancing down at her iPhone. “Not now, sorry mom!”

Over Zoom, her energy is frenetic, like a boiling pot about to spill over. She says “L-O-L” when something is funny but does so in a way that’s self-aware. She also talks with the timing of a stand-up, which she is, of course: in 2020, her debut comedy special, The Planet Is Burning, landed on Prime Video. But what stands out is how quickly Glazer moves between light and heavy. She’ll crack up recalling her shock at learning that she’d have to birth her placenta (“no f***ing way!”) and bemoan the state of America’s ailing healthcare system in a single breath. Conversation with Glazer is rapid and winding, a current that sweeps you along.

It is admittedly hard not to see in her Ilana Wexler – the filthy, flamboyant horndog of Broad City who captivated a generation, always saying things like: “My biggest weakness is that I lose my purse a lot, but my biggest strength is that I always get it back.” She was exactly the sort of character who engendered intense kinship in an audience, and a sometimes startling overfamiliarity in a fanbase who conflated Ilana with the actor playing her. “People would totally come up and touch me, and get in my space,” she says now.

Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau as BFFs in crisis in ‘Babes’ (Gwen Capistran)

Since leaving Broad City five years ago, Glazer has become more introspective – and forgiving of fans who overstep boundaries, which still happens. A lot. “The conflation makes sense,” she says. “Ilana really did genuinely come from me. We started the webseries when I was 22 and ended the TV show when I was 32 so it was my entire adulthood.” For a while, Glazer and Jacobson had considered calling their characters Harley and Evelyn before eventually deciding to go with their own names. “That show was the vehicle through which I grew up, so people did conflate me with the character, but I don’t blame them.”

Glazer herself was confused as to where Ilana stopped and she began. “It has taken me years to parse these parts of myself out,” she says. What has helped the process along are the years of psychoanalysis she has done and continues to do three times a week. “I’ve found a real dedicated practice to understanding myself,” she says. “I really used to believe those people [who thought I was Ilana] had seen these personal parts of me, but that’s not true. I now understand better who I am.”

The scene behind Glazer as we talk points to a different version of the actor than audiences are used to. Here is a woman who lives not in the grimy city, but amid leafy green nature in a house with a porch and a doting husband who brings her coffee. The sun is shining: a picture of domestic bliss.

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on seminal millennial comedy ‘Broad City’ (Comedy Central)

More annoying than the overfamiliar fans was the assumption that she and Jacobson were winging it as they went – that the script was written off-the-cuff, and the show produced offhand. “People could not believe that Abbi and I were the showrunners, the head writers, the stars, that we were actually good actors,” she says. In fact, the pair were obsessively hands-on in every facet of making the series, from the writers’ room to the editing suite. “People asked if it was improvised. We're like, Are you kidding me? We're killing ourselves to make this show,” she says. “We were working 14 hours of the day, 11 months of the year on this show.”

Glazer and Jacobson were like ducks in the water – stoned, sex-positive ducks calmly gliding on the surface but paddling furiously below. It was frustrating, she admits, but over time her tune has changed. “I mean, the show was so good that it read as effortless to people,” Glazer laughs. “I’m actually proud that it was misconstrued that way – like it was magic, this sort of witchy magic trick and a cloud of smoke, and we leave you with these precious episodes.” Ta-da!

On paper, pregnancy was the most female thing I could do but it also highlighted the masculine inside of me

Like Girls before it and Fleabag later, Broad City was a watershed moment for the portrayal of women on screen. But for its writers, it was just hilarious. “I’ve been told my whole career my work is political,” says Glazer. “When Abbi and I ‘learnt’ that Broad City was feminist, we were like, huh! We hadn’t even thought about it like that. I’ve certainly gained awareness over how politically perceived my work is since, but I consider it my personal responsibility to keep going deeper in who I am so that I don’t get stuck pushing a platform,” she says. “If you’re not leading with comedy, it’s propaganda.”

Don’t get her wrong, Glazer is thrilled to hear audiences at Babes say how meaningful it is to see an honest portrayal of women on screen. “It gives me chills,” she says, raising one freckled, goosebumped arm to the camera for me to see. But that is a byproduct, as opposed to the point. “If I’m making comedy, I really consider it a social responsibility to lead with comedy. If someone is sitting down in one of my shows and doesn’t know who I am, I want them to invite them to laugh.” Now, it’s her turn to laugh: “I’m not a teacher. I’m a comedian.”

Ilana Glazer in her 2020 stand-up special ‘The Planet Is Burning’ (Amazon Studios)

While she isn’t a teacher, she is an activist. More and more, Glazer lends her voice and platform to causes she believes in, such as a ceasefire in Gaza and mobilising American voters. She thinks it’s important to keep those two things separate, though, comparing her different vocations to the children’s book Richard Scarry's Busy, Busy World. “In it, there’s a town with little areas and everyone is doing their own thing and that’s how I feel, I want to be serving each context. I want each little world to be operating the way that’s optimised,” she says. “So, comedy should be really funny. And politics, in my pursuits, should be really progressive and messaging basic human rights for everybody.”

Fans of Broad City will recall the fallout from when those worlds collided in 2016 after the series welcomed then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a guest star. The move was considered pandering in the same vein as Clinton’s much-maligned call for voters to “Pokémon Go to the polls”. Glazer and Jacobson got caught in the crossfire.

Hillary Clinton makes a cameo in ‘Broad City’ opposite Glazer and Abbi Jacobson (Comedy Central)

“Oh my god, what a world! Things have changed,” sighs Glazer when I bring it up. She stands by the decision, regardless. “I mean, I did vote for Hillary Clinton. I did want Hillary Clinton to win over Donald Trump. I don’t think she’s a perfect, flawless person or a perfect flawless politician. I’m not friends with her. I can’t really tell you where she is for me on a spectrum of hate to dislike to like to love – maybe somewhere in the middle as a person? But I really wanted her to win.”

I wonder whether her newly amped-up activism means she’s ever at odds with other comedians. Glazer, who has been and continues to be critical of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Palestine, has previously spoken about her devout love of Seinfeld, though many fans of the sitcom have objected to Jerry Seinfeld’s comments advocating for Israel and demonising pro-Palestine protesters.

Ilana Wexler is so Cosmo Kramer in ‘Seinfeld’

“Seinfeld is a great example,” says Glazer, when I ask whether she can still enjoy the series in spite of its creator’s remarks. “Every single episode of that show is encoded in my spine. The images, the rhythm… the Jewishness. The Jewishness was so important to me.” As Glazer speaks, it sounds like she is still working it out for herself, but for the most part can differentiate Seinfeld from the Jerry of it all.

“I don’t go to dinner with him, I’m not calling him about politics,” she says. “I so appreciate Seinfeld the TV show and Jerry Seinfeld for the parts that I’ve been influenced by.” She points to Michael Richards’ racist outburst as another example; in 2006 the actor behind Cosmo Kramer – Seinfeld’s beloved buffoon – yelled the N-word at a group of Black people who heckled him during a stand-up gig. She can find that behaviour wrong, while also recognising his imprint on her own work. “Ilana Wexler is so Cosmo Kramer,” says Glazer in reference to her Broad City character.

Knocked up: Ilana Glazer as Eden in ‘Babes’ (Gwen Capistran)

That said, “I actually don’t really watch Seinfeld these days. I got what I needed from it.” Likewise, Chappelle’s Show; in recent years, Dave Chappelle has come under fire for transphobic comments in his later specials. “But it is an interesting experience to go back and watch something that means something very different than when it first played,” she says. “But really, it’s about feeling the difference in myself from who I was when I first took in that comedy to who I am now.”

Her sense of who she is continues to evolve. In fact, it was only in the last few years, during her pregnancy, that she came to understand that she identifies as a non-binary woman. It’s funny, she says, “being pregnant on paper was the most female thing I could ever do, but it actually highlighted both the masculine and feminine inside of me”.

“For so long, my masculinity felt like something I had to hide or make a joke of, and my femininity was something that felt like drag. There was always this element of comedy to it that was limiting my genuine personal experience,” she says. “Then this gift of being pregnant made space for me to be real with myself.” Has putting a name to that identity changed anything in her day-to-day life?  She smiles. “It’s more a point in the process of a long journey of self-actualisation. I’m moving through the world in a way that’s truer.”

‘Babes’ is now in UK & Irish cinemas