Mae Martin on teens, trauma, and the truth

Mae Martin doesn’t like to talk. After the naked series Feel goodthe Netflix stand-up special Mae Martin: SAPand start the podcast Beautifulfans think they know the real Mae and want to dive right in. “People come and get rid of trauma – and I’m in it,” they say. “I’m not good at small talk anyway, I want to dig deeper.”

Martin speaks with a mix of humor, warmth and livewire energy. Their work deals with difficult or existential moments in life, and often finds them funny. “With stand-up, it was a major turning point in my career when I started talking about real things: my life, my addiction and my pain,” they say. “People were suddenly totally engaged and laughing more. It’s really rewarding and empowering to say the things that bother you and then see other people say, ‘Yeah, me too.'”

Deadline speaks to Martin in Toronto, where they grew up, and it comes full circle. Years before, they would shoot with a camcorder outside of film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival or receive autographs from stars such as Liev Schreiber. This time Martin was on the other side of the fence at the festival for the world premiere of Rebelthe Netflix series they created, produced and starred in. “We filmed the show here,” Martin explains. “It’s really about adolescence and I associate Toronto with my adolescence. It’s the backdrop to all my misadventures.”

The limited series focuses on the troubled, multi-billion dollar teen industry, specifically Wayward Pines Academy in the town of Tall Pines. It is an institution that promises to “solve the problem of adolescence”. Donning fearsome glasses, Evelyn (Toni Collette) runs the school and, it turns out, maybe the whole town. Viewers’ entry point is through Abbie (Sydney Topliffe), whose parents send her to school, and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind), her best friend who tries to save her; as well as through Alex (Martin), a newly arrived cop, and his heavily pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon).

The Abbie-Leila relationship is modeled on that of Martin and their childhood best friend, who was taken to a school for troubled teenagers. The memory served as inspiration for the series. Martin describes Rebel as “essentially a love letter to adolescent friendship”.

The origins of the school are sectarian, an area that fascinates Martin. “Cults are a useful metaphor for the complicity we all have and to which we are willing to turn a blind eye in order to have a comfortable life.”

Martin’s previous series Feel goodfor Netflix and Channel 4, was semi-autobiographical and traced over two seasons the relationship between Mae and George, played by Specters star Charlotte Ritchie. It also delved into Mae’s past and their own teenage years. If Feel good was a comedy with a powerful dramatic arc, Rebel flips that formula on its head and is largely a drama with a few lighter moments along the way.

“I was keen to create the tension correctly,” Martin says of this radical gear change. “I really wanted to make sure that the funny moments were character-driven and truthful, and that any horror and pain was truly earned.”

Given that Martin had a successful career as a comic and comedy writer, was it difficult to make himself laugh Rebel? “I feel like my inner clown is very close to the surface,” they say. “As I get older, I wonder, ‘Is this just a series of coping mechanisms? Am I really funny, or is this just a way of interacting with the world?’ I’m still figuring this out.

Action points

When asked what their dream role is, Martin says they want to be the next James Bond. Maybe the clues were there all along. In Feel goodMartin’s character tells his agent, “I always wanted to be John Wick.” In Rebela pumped-up Martin plays cop Alex Dempsey, who cracks a few heads and gets seriously immersed in the action. “I’m clearly living a fantasy and I don’t know who keeps letting me do it,” they say. “I have perpetual imposter syndrome when it comes to acting, but I really fell in love with doing this show and working with Toni Collette, Sarah Gadon and the cast. I gave myself permission to really go for it. It was really fun to be aggressive and play this character with all of her flaws.”

Martin was asked to dye their hair darker so that Alex could be taken more seriously. And this character is serious. It has a darkness and yet also yearns for a happy family home in a perfect setting, which Tall Pines, as it turns out, is not. For Martin, this role felt more like a traditional acting role where they play a fictional character, as opposed to Feel good where they played a version of themselves.

Martin identifies a crucial scene a little more than halfway through the season. “It’s a sex scene between a trans cop [Alex] and his wife who is eight months pregnant [Laura]. This performance would have meant a lot to me when I was young. It’s so different seeing an eight month pregnant woman fully clothed and this trans guy.

For Martin, the fact that Alex was a trans man and that “wasn’t the most interesting or important thing about his character” on the show was significant. “What that means is that if you’re not preaching or making it a mainstay of the show, you can actually be more subversive. Narratively, there’s so much going on in that scene.”

Martin shares some screen time with Collette, who delivers a masterclass in creepy villainy as a school and community leader who specializes in manipulation. In the wrong hands, Evelyn could have been a pantomime villain, but Collette delivers something more complex. “She really got the assignment,” Martin says. “Where it could have been sort of a mustachioed villain, I think it feels like Evelyn really believes in what she’s doing and just lacks self-awareness and is sort of a narcissist.”

Rebel Adolescence

Feel good And Rebel are both produced by Objective Fiction. A creative common thread of these broadcasts, via the SAP stand-up special, focuses on the teenage years and their legacy. “In Feel good there was an adult who took care of his adolescence, then with SAP I was also driven by nostalgia and trying to make sense of it all,” says Martin. “I’m trying to understand how visceral those years were for me; all these firsts are so intense. As a teenager, everyone is a mess, but you also know who you are.

With RebelMartin hopes the audience will reflect on their own adolescence. “I wish people would think about their own teenagers. We should definitely listen more to young people. I don’t think we’ve ever really known what to do with teenagers. We sexualize them, we commercialize them, we ridicule them, we treat them like children, but we expect them to be adults. We need this next generation so much to save the planet that it would be nice to give them a little more power.”

For Martin, it was important that the young cast of Rebel like Topliffe, Lind and others felt empowered among veteran artists such as Collette, Gadon and Patrick J. Adams.

“We were already putting the show together when I watched [Netflix’s U.K. drama] Adolescence. There’s an episode with about 200 kids in this school, but if you give them that responsibility, or you trust people with their character and their intuition, then they really step up. It was important to me that [the young cast] felt like they owned their characters’ emotional worlds.

Next steps

Job-RebelMartin has a stand-up tour lined up and projects with Feel good co-creator Joe Hampson is in the works. “I miss working with him and we have a few projects in development that we are showcasing because we are desperate to write something funny again,” they say. “We have some good ideas and I’m just trying to lure him to Los Angeles.”

Martin is also considering roles in works created by other writers. “I’ve never been in a movie and I would love to be in someone else’s thing and play someone really different.”

They continue: “I would love to do an Elliott Smith biopic and star him or even play River Phoenix. I would also love to play a villain or do a children’s movie.” This could be called keeping your options open, but given that Martin has written comedies and now dramas, releases music, written books, co-hosts a popular podcast and has also started selling his works, these ambitions don’t seem lofty. Maybe Bond isn’t so over-the-top.