Actresses Zuzanna Szadkowski, Desiree Akhavan and Gillian Jacobs all appear on HBO’s “Girls” this season, which premieres this Sunday at 9PM. 

Read what they had to say about working on the show, their upcoming projects and more!

Zuzanna Szadkowski

Congrats on joining the “Girls” cast this season. What can we expect from your character?

 

I’m in grad school with Hannah, so I get to be kind of a sassy, smart grad gal.

 

What was it like working with Lena?

 

She is so sweet and she is also really, really intelligent as a director and she takes care of the actors and she really communicates well.  I think she has a great amount of respect for the people she works with.  So it was so comfortable and warm and exciting.  And she gets really good work out of people, so I am excited to see how it turned out.

 

What do you love about Lena’s writing?

 

I think it’s so real.  It is funny and it is heartbreaking and these characters – when you are auditioning for her and saying her words, it is so easy because she has really fleshed out human beings that have all of the colors.  So it is great.

 

What else do you have coming up?

 

I am also on “The Knick” on Cinemax.  I am in season one and we are going to get started on season two so I am excited about that.

 

Desiree Akhavan

Tell us about your role in this season.

 

I play Shandra.  Shandra is the classmate of Hannah’s in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

 

What was it like working with Lena?

 

It was incredible.  Lena Dunham is a fantastic director because she makes you feel like you can bring your best to the table and that you are in creative control with what you would like to do but you are also in good hands of someone in the driver’s seat.  So working with her was phenomenal.

 

Tell me what you admire about her.

 

I admire a lot about Lena Dunham … I admire her humility.  I think she is a humble person and she is incredibly intelligent but she knows how to channel her abilities and use her power.

 

You recently graduated from NYU Film School. Speak about your passion for acting, directing and writing.

 

I’ve been writing scripts and acting since I was 5 years old.  This is something I do and I don’t know how to function as a human being outside of this.  I would just combust and die and wither somewhere.  So this is what I’ve always done.  I grew up in New York.  I went to theater every week of my life for a while and I thought I would be a playwright, and I pursued that degree and then randomly a friend dragged me to a history of film class and because of peer pressure I took it and I fell in love hard and that’s how I ended up making films.  I took that one class and it was just like a lightbulb went off.  I was like, “Oh, this is where my skill set makes sense.  This is what I should be doing for the rest of my life.”

 

What was it like attending NYU Film School?

 

It was an incredible experience.  I got exactly what I needed from NYU’s grad film program.  I don’t think that grad school for art is for everyone, but for me it was an incredible fit.

 

You also have your directorial debut coming out.

 

So it premiered at Sundance a year ago and it’s in theaters and iTunes on January 16.  It’s called “Appropriate Behavior.”

 

Tell us a little bit about the project.

 

“Appropriate Behavior,” I would like to say is like a gay “Annie Hall” set in Brooklyn.  It’s a comedy about a woman who has been dumped by her first girlfriend and she is trying to win her back and also come out as bisexual to her Iranian family.  I play the lead and it’s a comedy but also very sad and dark at times.

 

You wrote it as well?

 

Yes.

 

What inspired it?

 

My life.  I took themes that I was dealing with at the time and injected it into characters that were kind of heightened absurd versions of myself.  Something very silly and absurd and not really true to my life, but the themes in the heartache was true to what I was experiencing.  I had just been through a terrible breakup.

 

And can you speak about the challenges of balancing the directing and acting in your project?

 

It was like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time.  Like once you get into the groove of it you know what you are doing but before that you are like, ‘What the f— am I doing?’ and your arms are all over the place.  So I found that one job enabled the other after a while.  So once I got into the groove of acting, I felt like I could ask things of my actors that another director couldn’t because they weren’t in the trenches with them.  And when it came to directing, it was a good experience.

 

What was your favorite scene to write and film?

 

My favorite scene to write was the lingerie scene.  There was this silly lingerie scene online right now where this woman is trying to sex herself up to win back her ex-girlfriend.  And my favorite scene to shoot was actually the most painful scene to shoot, which was the threesome scene and it ended up becoming much better than I ever thought it could be because it was a sad moment in the film, but ends up being very funny.  Once we were in post it turned out that it was the most comedic moment of the film, so that was my favorite, discovering that in the film.

 

Gillian Jacobs

 

 

Tell us about your role in this season of “Girls.”

 

I play an artist named Mimi Rose-Howard, who is kind of an obnoxious, pretentious artist and Hannah Horvath does not like me very much.

 

Is it fun to battle it out with Hannah and Lena?

 

It’s great.  She is a very creative “insulter” and it was really wonderful to play a different sort of character and step into this world.

 

Was it fun to join this cast?

 

Yes, it was so much fun.  It was New York, summer, what could be better?  I mean, we weren’t shooting right now that’s for sure.

 

You also directed a documentary; tell us a little bit about that.

 

Yeah, it is a short documentary about this woman named Grace Hopper, who was the first computer programmers and coders that started in the 1940’s and it is for fivethirtyeight.com

 

What attracted you to the subject?

 

I was asked to do it.  I didn’t know anything about her, I’d never heard of her, I didn’t really know anything about tech or computing so I really had to educate myself about her, the work she did, computing, and the 50’s, the very early days of computers when they were the size of rooms.  So I learned a lot and that was really fun.  I got to teach myself.

 

What can you tell us about your Netflix show?

 

My Netflix show is called “Love.”  It’s produced by Judd Apatow and stars myself and Paul Rust and I think it’s going to be really great.