In I Am Not Okay With This, Sophia Lillis (Sharp Objects, It) stars as Sydney, in her words, “a boring 17-year-old white girl” who is just trying to figure out her life and how to function as a teenager. Except she has, shall we say, supernatural tendencies?
What’s up with Sydney? You’ll need to watch I Am Not Okay With This when it premieres on Netflix (on February 26) to find out.
I’ll say this: Come for the zany dialogue (Sydney tells her diary to “go f*** yourself” in the opening line of the trailer, which I must say, I appreciated). Stay for terrific performances from Lillis and Rose Kathleen Perkins, who plays her overworked, disconnected mom.
I spoke to Perkins a few days before the premiere of I Am Not Okay With This to ask all about the show, her character, and her work on one of my all-time favorite shows, Episodes.
Read my conversation with Perkins below (and binge-watch these terrific shows ASAP):
.Awards Daily: We’re so close to I Am Not Okay With This hitting Netflix. How does that feel from your perspective?
Kathleen Rose Perkins: I’m excited for everyone to see it. I can’t wait to hear people’s reaction to the show. You know, you sit in this bubble for a while when going through production. We shot it in the summer of last year, so we’re just ready for other people to see it and let us know what they think. We think it’s kind of cool, but we’ve seen it so much, and we know the story. We want to see how the show connects with other people.
AD: I got a chance to watch it and really enjoyed it!
KRP: Did you? That’s great to hear!
AD: I did! I wanted to ask you about working with Sophia Lillis, she’s such an incredible up-and-coming talent and she is really the heart and center of the show. What was it like working with her and building that mother-daughter relationship?
KRP: She’s so special, but when you meet her, it’s a little unassuming. She’s very quiet. And humble. She really is just a normal kid. But, when she gets in front of the camera, she just becomes this amazing actress who’s portraying a very complicated character. Upon meeting her, I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, we look similar.’ [Laughs]. And we slowly tried to get to know each other over the couple of months that we had [filming]. I thought she was just a delight. And really easy to be around. Sometimes that can be hard when, you know, there’s a generation difference. [Laughs]. It can be hard to relate to someone. But she was very easy to talk to. She has, like I said, humility and integrity. She apologizes profusely when she misses a line, which she never has to, because she never misses a line!
She’s just this really normal, awesome person who has this incredible talent.
AD: In I Am Not Okay With This You play a recently widowed, single mom. She’s overworked, she’s stressed. This is something, we’ve seen before in coming-of-age stories. I’m curious, how did you try to make your character, Maggie, unique? What did you do to make sure she wasn’t just another archetype?
KRP: Yeah, that’s a great question. The thing I liked the most, and the thing that differentiates her from the adults that you see in these types of shows is that Maggie is, and it’s all in the writing, which I really, really responded to, is that she doesn’t try to connect with her kids. She’s actually really trying to not connect with them because she’s going through enormous grief and she’s in complete denial about the grief that she’s experiencing. She doesn’t want to connect with her kids at all. And the majority of the season, she refuses to even engage. She just shouts out demands and expects her daughter to pick up the slack because she’s so stretched for time and effort with work and everything.
She expects her daughter to just be a soldier and do work. They don’t talk about feelings. And every time her daughter wants to talk about something, how she’s feeling, what she’s going through, Maggie refuses to talk about it, which I think is very interesting because it’s usually the other way around.
So that’s, that’s definitely what drew me to the role. And plus, it’s so different for me. I’m usually the talky, feely one who’s desperate to talk. [Laughs] And so this was a big challenge for me to do, and something very different and outside of my wheelhouse. I welcome the challenge because I think the writing is really on point and interesting. And not what you usually expect from these kinds of shows.
AD: How did you tackle that challenge? Because as you said, you know, you are usually the warm, bubbly person. And Sophia is somebody who you very much liked and wanted to be around, but on camera you’re sort of pushing her away. How was that, playing somebody who is so different from you personally?
KRP: Yeah. Well, I had to rely heavily on the director, Jonathan Entwistle. He kept coming in and saying, ‘Just don’t look at her.’ ‘Don’t even regard her.’ [Laughs]. Because I kept wanting to engage, it’s hard not to try and engage with someone like Sophia, you want to! So, he helped me, especially in the early days of filming, he was instrumental in saying, ‘No, we want her to be completely disconnected from her kid.’ And I hope that that’s what came across because like I said, it’s not innately in my DNA.
It was a departure to just rely on him, not look around too much. I tried to do a task, that always helps. If I was pouring myself coffee or wiping down the counter, it was always good to multitask. That showed that she was like, ‘I’m just not going to engage right now, not until I have to.’ I don’t engage with her, not until the very end [of the season], where I just talk to her. Every other time you see Maggie I’m pretty much doing something else. I credit Jonathan, just directing good performances out of everyone. He definitely had a very specific vision for the show. And the reason why I wanted to do it in the first place is I saw The End of the F***ing World, and I thought that was brilliant. I was really excited to work with him.
AD: Speaking of other bubbly characters that you played, I cannot let you get off the phone without asking you about Episodes because I’ve seen every single episode of Episodes at least three times. [Perkins played TV executive Carol Rance on the Showtime comedy opposite Matt LeBlanc].
KRP: [Laughs]. You have?
AD: I really, really, and I’m not just saying this because I have you on the phone, really love that show. It’s something that I watch whenever I’m having a rough day or I just want something light that will make me happy. Episodes is my go-to show for that.
KRP: That’s so nice to hear! Thank you!
AD: Take me behind the scenes. What was that experience like? I want to know everything. How quickly can you summarize it all for me? [Laughs].
KRP: Right? Exactly. Well, I mean, it was a dream to basically be able to make fun of an industry, that at that time, I was desperate to make fun of because I’d been through it. I’ve been in the industry for a while and had experienced all those people that they parodied and based all of these characters on. I was desperate to get that job because I just wanted to be a part of telling this story of how crazy this television industry is.
I actually fell in love with Carol, and I fell in love with her desperate situation. She was constantly at nerves end, but she had to look like she held it all together perfectly and everything was fine. But underneath there was this bubbling surge of anxiety under her all the time.
And I can understand that because in that role, in that world, TV executives are a dime a dozen and they have a high turnover rate. They’re constantly afraid of losing their jobs. And that’s got to be the worst position to be in, how do you sleep at night?
David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik are just brilliant writers and they brought every one of those characters to life and made them people that you really root for, even though they’re despicable people! {Laughs].
AD: Yeah! Carol, on the surface, is somebody you would typically dislike because you meet her, and she’s having an affair with her married boss! And then you get to know her and you do really begin to love her. Honestly, she was one of my favorite characters in the show because she was so relatable. Or maybe, I just relate to that idea of constantly trying to keep it together myself?
KRP: Right? Exactly!
AD: She was just wonderful and she had so many layers, like you said.
KRP: I was lucky that we did five seasons and every season they said, ‘Okay, you’re going to do something very different this season.’ You know, I had an affair with every one of my bosses, and each one of them was like a different side of Carol that you got to see.
It was just a dream role. I don’t know how often that comes around where you get the opportunity to, over six years, be able to develop a character. And have the showrunners really enjoy what you bring to the table and also try to write towards that.
That was a real gift and I’m so thankful that I got to be a part of it because when do you get that opportunity? Where they look at you and go, ‘Okay, now we’re going to put you through this’ [Laughs]. And it was just fun! Every year it was like, ‘Oh gosh, what’s that? Oh, okay, let’s do this!’
It was a real dream.
AD: Another aspect of Episodes that I really loved was Carol and Beverly [Tamsin Greig] and their friendship, and seeing it grow throughout the seasons. It was such a unique, a very honest depiction of female friendship. They were a really wonderful support system for each other.
And again, you know, in I Am Not Okay With This, you’re portraying this distant mother-daughter duo, but these are such different dynamics. What was that like, and which character is closer to how you go about your personal relationships?
KRP: Yeah. That’s a great question! Unfortunately, I have to say I’m closer to Carol than Maggie. [Laughs]. And I don’t know if I should admit! You know, I’m a pretty anxious person. And I like to dance. Like, do a tap dance and make things feel like they’re all right when really everything is falling apart. I really do relate to Carol in that way. Tamsin Greig who played Beverly, is actually one of my best friends. We really gained a friendship out of that show.
And, also it’s hard to tell because I Am Not Okay With This is a brand new show. If you would have asked me after the first season of Episodes if I related to Carol or if I was like my character, I don’t know if I would be able to say that I was, but we all grew into our characters a bit.
I don’t have kids, so I don’t know what it’s like to relate to them. I have nieces and nephews, and I relate to them in a very different way than Maggie does with Sydney. I don’t really see myself in that role as much, but I do like how badass Maggie feels. I like that she’s demanding and efficient, wastes no time and suffers no fools. I really liked that and I aspire to be more like Maggie, the older I get. {Laughs].
AD: In what ways would you like to see Maggie shift as you potentially [and hopefully] do more seasons of the show.
KRP: Yeah. I’d love for Maggie to get a love interest. I’d like her to get a man.
AD: Yeah!
KRP: [Laughs]. It would be lovely if she found some love again. It would be so sweet. I’d like to see what she would do with that. Like, if a man kind of approached her, wanting to be with her, how would she deal with that? I think that would be a cool thing to see, because bless her heart, she needs some love in her life.
AD: I’m just curious, on a personal note, when you watch TV, are you a binge-watcher or do you prefer a slow burn through your show? And how do you think people should consume I Am Not Okay With This?
KRP: Yeah, I’m a binge-watcher all the way! If I have three or four hours, I’m going to watch three or four episodes. I binged through the last four episodes of Cheer last night. We’ve binged The Stranger, which is a British show on Netflix. I’m binging most of my shows on Netflix. So, I am a big fan of the streaming. I’m so glad to actually be on the streaming platform that I am a big fan of. [Laughs] That’s really, really cool!
AD: Is it going to be weird to go on Netflix just to watch a show in your free time and maybe see your face on the homepage?
KRP: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I can’t wait to see! I think that especially with this show, yeah, binge the crap out of it! It’s so quick! Time flies! We sat down with the whole cast and some of the production team, and had a screening specifically for us. And we watched it back to back to back. And I didn’t even get up to go to the bathroom. It takes, maybe, three and a half hours? I feel like people are going to want to know what happens and how it ends because it just ramps up in such a beautiful way.
The whole ark of the story is so well put together that I don’t know how you could not say, ‘yeah I want to watch the next episode, and the next episode.’
I Am Not Okay With This will be available to binge-watch on Netflix starting February 26.