A different kind of leading lady
Insecure’s Issa Rae reflects on her real and fictional selves
Issa Rae’s ability to turn everything, whether a disastrous date or a workplace bumble, into comedy has carried her from YouTube sensation to a different kind of leading lady. In the HBO series Insecure, she plays Issa Dee, who can show viewers her vulnerability without totally showing her hand, a character as self-assured as she is selfloathing. She’s funny, maddening, manipulative and trying her best. To her legion of fans, she’s simply Issa.
Which is something the real Issa admits has started to get tiresome. As Rae grows older, she’s finding it less charming to be confused with this fictitious Issa. If only she had named her Insecure character Nia or Amani.
“I just didn’t think. I was so pressed with telling a good story that I didn’t think about the fact that this character, named after me, was going to air,” Rae said. “And even while shooting, it didn’t cross my mind until it aired. This is not by any means my life, and this is where it gets muddy because people assume that it is.”
More than six years have passed since Rae emerged on YouTube as the creator and star of The MisAdventures of Awkward Black Girl. The web series, clicked on by millions of viewers, led, finally to Insecure, which she developed with veteran comedian and writer Larry Wilmore.
The show’s acclaimed first season packed much of what’s driven classic sitcoms — office conflict, dating foibles, dishy friends — with much that is rarely, if ever, seen on TV. The show’s blackness is as essential as its comic sensibility. And because they’re intertwined, Insecure can pull off hilarious, twisting subplots, such as season one’s unforgettable “broken p---y” debacle, a drunken rap turned into a girl-feud turned into a social-media disaster. Insecure also puts a spin on how race plays out in the workplace with a specificity never before seen on a sitcom. Insecure producer Prentice Penny describes this as capturing the “paper cuts of racism.”
“Where the white co-workers are sending each other emails about the uncertainty of Issa planning the beach day, or the boss asking Molly to talk to the black co-worker,” he says. “Things like that where it doesn’t come off as so in your face.”
Director Ava DuVernay, whose own TV drama, Queen Sugar, recently kicked off its second season, is just glad Insecure exists. She has never bought into the criticism of Girls creator Lena Dunham for not including significant black characters on the show. The way to diversify popular culture isn’t through token characters, she says, but through shows such as Aziz Ansari’s Master of None and Rae’s Insecure.
“We don’t need to be inserted into this woman’s story if she’s saying I don’t know that experience and I don’t want to force it,” she says. “Issa’s show is an answer to so many years of not having Friends. They didn’t have any black friends. The show Girls: There’s no black girls. Sex in the City: We’re women and we love these stories and we try to insert ourselves in them and see ourselves in them, but we are not in them. But now, we’re there. And we’re not just there as tokens. and it’s friggin’ funny. She’s friggin’ funny and has a voice.”
There are times when Rae’s been referred to as a kind of black Liz Lemon, a reference to Tina Fey’s character on 30 Rock. She loved that show, but whether she embraces that comparison, she admits, depends on “the mood and context.” Nobody, after all, runs around calling Christian Bale “the white Denzel.”
Ask her about fame, and she’ll shake her head. “I think fame is dead,” she says.
“Everything is sort of temporary. There is temporary fame, and I feel like I have temporary fame during a specific season, but I think the era of movie stardom only exists for the older crowds. The George Clooneys and Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies and for music stars. But for television, I just don’t feel the same way, because it is so flighty, and there is so much happening at the moment.”
Issa’s show is an answer to so many years of not having Friends. They didn’t have any black friends.