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Lena Waithe on “Master of None” and putting queer women of color on television

Lena Waithe‘s phone has been buzzing non-stop. The writer-turned-actor (and self-admitting social media addict, “much to [her] girlfriend’s chagrin,”) is receiving all kinds of praise for her role in Netflix’s new series Master of None. The half-hour comedy series co-created by and starring Aziz Ansari has only been available for a week but it’s garnered close to perfect reviews from the media and fans alike. As Denise, an out black lesbian theater critic who is friends with Aziz’s character, Dev, Lena is charming, funny and unapologetic about her thoughts on being a woman, dating other women and how they are treated by the world at large.

“There’s been a lot of people reaching out saying they love Denise, they love Lena,” Lena said. “I’m seeing Instagram handles being changed-Lil Funyuns and Princess Love and everybody wants a Ratch hat, so it’s really heartwarming, honestly, to see people get so excited.”

Lil Funyons and Princess Love are just one tiny part of one episode, but Lena’s deadpan yet charismatic delivery on the obsessive woman using these nicknames in countless voicemail’s left on Denise’s phone is one reason queer women cannot get enough of her and the woman behind the role.

“The character wasn’t too far from myself, a woman of color who is obviously a lesbian woman,” Lena said, something she’s happy is a “non-issue” on the show.

But there are some differences, of course. Like in real life, Lena is much more talkative (“super, super animated” she will tell you) and instead of being a single woman on the town, she’s been with partner Alana Mayo, a Hollywood production executive, for 18 months.

“The thing is what we really to do was make it look like we were not acting,” Lena said. “We really wanted people to feel like they were a fly in the wall in a sort of early 30-something conversation and usually those conversations are pretty random and silly and kind of chill, so I kind of had to bring it down a little bit, because my normal is a big, big, big personality. And I think Aziz kind of played it a little bit straighter, too, like we really just wanted to let the lines speak and let the writing take centerstage.”

Master of None is Lena’s first gig as a regular on a series. She’s been behind the camera for several years, writing and directing a pilot called Twenties (“a thinly-veiled version of my life and my experience in my 20s and dating straight women”), producing the beloved Sundance indie Dear White People and currently in post-production on a pilot she wrote that was picked up by Showtime. Lena said a casting agent, Allison Jones, saw her doing an interview about Twenties and called her in for a meeting.

“She was the one who asked me if I had any interest in acting, and I honestly told her I didn’t,” Lena said. “She was like, ‘OK, I get that, but let me call you in for stuff if something makes sense.'”

Lena agreed, and she was called in for a few different parts including a Judd Apatow film and a spot on Veep.

“I actually auditioned with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, which was amazing,” Lena said.

She landed a small role on an episode of The Comeback, a show she says she’s “obsessed with.” (“I did a whole scene with Lisa Kudrow and was directed by Michael Patrick King. It was ridiculous.”)

When Aziz and co-creator Alan Yang were looking for “interesting people” to put in their new Netflix series, Allison submitted Lena’s name.

“So I went in to Aziz’s house and met him and Alan and we just talked; we chatted. And because we’re writers, we had that natural kinship and I was talking about my life and how I met my girlfriend and they were really fascinated because I’m the only woman she’s ever been with,” Lena said. She filled them in on the rest: “They were like, ‘Was she closeted? Was she, like, harboring secret feelings for women?’ I was like, ‘No, absolutely not. She asked me out on a date’ and they were like, ‘Wait-what!? She asked you on a date?'” And a resemblance of that same story is now in an episode of Master of None, when Denise says she’s getting vibes from her straight boss.

“I was like, ‘Yeah. I didn’t even know I was being asked on a date because I knew her prior to this as as straight woman. I thought we were just going to grab drinks.’ So I’m on a date I don’t even know I’m on and I’m thinking, ‘Am I getting vibes from this girl? Like what’ going on?'” Lena said. “Of course, later on I figured out she was trying to come home with me and I didn’t know that, and so of course as soon as I found out, I turned up the volume and turned on the charm and then of course, here we are, living happily ever after.”

A chemistry read with Aziz later sealed the deal, but it was Lena’s real life that served as inspiration for Denise, an entirely new character than had been written into seven episodes of the series already.

“They went back and made her African-American and a lesbian,” Lena said. “And it’s a testament to them and their writers’ room that they would do that and really talk to me and make sure the character was as honest and authentic as she could be.”

But without lesbians in the writers’ room, Lena was still on standby to guide them in the right direction.

“There were times I’d be like, ‘Aziz, she shouldn’t say that’ or “No, man, that’s not a thing. We can’t do that,’ and he was like, ‘OK, cool-we’ll figure something out,'” Lena said. “So they were really cool about listening to me and making sure this character was something the lesbian community, or the gay community as a whole, could be proud of.”

And they are, especially queer women of color who rarely see depictions of themselves on television. Lena says she’s been seeing all kinds of comments on her Instagram and Twitter, praising her performance and thanking her for being visible.

“People are literally saying, ‘You’re me. I’m you. That’s me. I’m Denise. That’s who I am,'” she said. “I think it’s really cool because I don’t consider myself to be a complete stud-I’m sort of a soft stud if that’s a category. And that’s an interesting thing, too. I think there are two main categories that people know lesbians fall into: Very butch/stud or very femme. A lot of lesbians, though, that I’m meeting and I encounter are like me where we are in the middle and that’s not always a fun place to be because, for a long time, I was never feminine enough to date a stud but I was never fully masculine enough to date someone who was super femme, and I didn’t want to date another soft stud like me. It’s a whole thing, and if there’s a Season 2, that’s a conversation I would love to have with Dev and he’s trying to figure out, ‘Why are there so many categories?'”

Lena appreciates when people note that Denise is just one of the guys; that it’s important to see how LGBT people interact with those outside of their own community.

“I think that is really important because the truth is, the gay community-we don’t really need to be put off in a separate room with only ourselves,” Lena said. “Because we have a lot of straight friends, and we have those conversations with our straight friends and I think it’s really cool that we’re seeing that on this show, and it’s not sort of this weird thing where my character is standing on a soapbox.”

The fact that a character like Denise exists is one Lena calls “a happy accident,” and she said she recently told Aziz, “Dude, the gay community is very happy with you right now.”

“They literally met me and said, ‘OK, you’re interesting and you have a whole special thing happening and we want to put this in the mix. We want to have this on TV’ and I thought that was really cool of them,” Lena said. ” Because [Aziz] did a really cool thing which was put a gay character on TV who wasn’t just walking around draped in a rainbow flag. I think that in itself is revolutionary.”

But Denise is also not de-sexualized, which can be a part of some shows trying to include lesbian characters without providing them with any kind of existence other than an offering of diversity for diversity’s sake. That’s why Master of None is so successful; this show is offering diverse perspectives from its main cast, not disposable side characters.

“I mean the cool thing is the character initially was a straight person and then when my gay self got cast, they’re like ‘Why not? Let’s just see it as a part of the character,” Lena said. “Aziz and Alan, they never said, ‘We’re lesbian experts,’ but they’re like, ‘What’s the real answer?”‘They would genuinely ask me questions like, ‘What would you actually say?’ I felt super, super comfortable talking to Aziz, talking to Alan about my life and me in general; how I walk in the world. And they’d listen to this conversation and use it as inspiration.”

Case in point, this conversation between Dev and Denise in the first episode, “Plan B.”

Dev: So, Denise, for lesbians, is there, like, no protection? You kind of just go to town on the puss?

Denise: Basically. If she’s looking good and smelling good, I’m down. I mean, there’s Saran wrap and dental dam, but don’t nobody use that shit.

Dev: You don’t have, like, a drawer full of dental dams beside your bed?

Denise: I got some coconut oil–rub her down with that.

“That’s a thing I said-that’s a thing I have at my bedside,” Lena said. “So that’s a Lena thing and they made it into a Denise thing. I was like, ‘Cool, let’s do it!’ The words flow out of my mouth in a natural way because, you know, I got coconut oil and I rub her down with that and that’s a thing I said to Aziz. He was like, ‘Yo, that’s funny’ and started to see how he could put that in there. Same with the red bone thing-that’s literally a conversation me and Aziz had in between shots. Him and I just talking and being silly and I just naturally referred to a light-skin woman as a red bone and he had never heard that term before.”

From “The Other Man”:

Dev: So who is the lucky lady?

Denise: Ah, there she go. That’s Carla Meyers, the new editor in chief. Cute, right?

Dev: Which person?

Denise: Over there, the redbone chick.

Dev: I don’t see anybody with red bones.

Denise: No, it just means she’s light-skinned. It’s a thing we say in the black community.

Dev: Oh, okay. So is Halle Berry a redbone?

Denise: No, she’s caramel.

“I think that’s what Aziz really loves and is inspired by,” Lena said. “He’s like, ‘Those people have those kinds of conversations-how can we incorporate them into the show?’ And if I had any input at all, it was really us sitting around and talking as ourselves and them kind of going away and making it into the show and making it feel honest.”

That kind of honest representation is something Lena strives for in her own writing, including her Showtime pilot based on the reality of what’s going on in her hometown.

“It definitely deals with the violence happening in Chicago and what it means to be young and black and living in war zone, really, because that’s what my city has, unfortunately, turned into,” Lena said. “My family still lives there. My background has always been comedy; I’ve always written comedy scripts. This is the first drama I’ve ever written and I think because it’s so close to my heart that people really responded to the material. It’s very real; it’s very honest. Spike Lee is doing something in the same world [with his film Chi-Raq] but his is sort of a more artistic look at it. I’m taking a very real, down to the ground look at it.”

With rapper/actor Common as executive producer and creating original the music for the project, and Clark Johnson (who was behind the pilots for both The Wire and The Shield) directing, Lena is all but guaranteed a series pick-up from Showtime. Although the show follows five straight young black men, she said there are definitely queer people in their world.

“I will say, if we get a series order, I have in mind, definitely, a couple characters that will intertwine in their lives and be a part of the queer community,” Lena said. “Not because I feel a responsibility, but because that’s the world we live in. I’m a black American, I’m a gay American-we exist in the world. I think sometimes people see black characters or gay characters people go, ‘Oh, well, they’re meeting a quota,’ and I’m like, ‘No, we want to reflect the world that we live in.’ I do believe that you can’t have this many people in the world and they not have gay family members, they not have gay friends, and seeing how the black family and the black unit and the black community are really dealing with that and what that really looks like.”

Lena is also producing another project from a friend that is loosely based on his life as a black gay man, but she said she has “a special place in [her] heart for queer women of color.”

“I think being in the forefront and being visible, we still-and that’s why people are so excited about this character of Denise-we still are lacking in that area,” Lena said. “We don’t really have a ton of them that you can really consider role models. And because I am a writer, I don’t believe that every gay black character has to be perfect; I don’t buy into that. I think they should be human just like Don Draper or Nurse Jackie, so let’s make them honest and three-dimensional. But for me, it’s about that visibility that’s really important. It’s about having a queer character of color that you really are like, ‘Wow, I’m invested in their story and the things that are in front of them and the decision they have to make,’ because if they’re perfect, you almost do them a disservice. That’s my goal, to make honest and authentic characters and I’m very humbled I got the chance to play one on a show, and I plan on writing even more of them as well. I definitely have some thoughts in my mind and I’ll always be representing my community and making sure that we’re visible.

Follow Lena on Twitter and Instagram. Master of None is on Netflix now.

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