Mayim Bialik adds writer/director to resume with ‘As They Made Us’ debut
This week’s “As They Made Us,” a dysfunctional family drama with Dianna Agron (“Glee”), Dustin Hoffman and Candice Bergen, marks the writing-directing-producing debut of Mayim Bialik.
A star of hit TV sitcoms (“Blossom,” “The Big Bang Theory”), Bialik also hosts “Jeopardy.”
But this semi-autobiographical movie debut, she said during a Zoom interview, was never the goal.
“Even when I wrote it I was not even thinking of a movie. My father passed away seven years ago and there’s a very formal year of mourning in traditional Judaism.
“After that year ended, I started writing. I spoke to writers I respect very much, in hopes that they would discourage me from continuing to write.”
They didn’t. Her screenplay finished, “I sat on it for about a year,” and then found out people liked it. Similarly, she “never thought” about directing.
“It actually is something that I feel in many ways I’ve been training for my whole life. Because I’ve always been more interested in what happens behind the camera than in front. And,” she said smiling, “I’m very bossy. And lo and behold all those things came together.
“It makes a tremendous amount of sense. I’ve just done so many other things in my life,” like raising a pair of teenagers.
Her film revolves around Agron’s divorced mother coping with her troubled parents while her brother has long been estranged from the family.
Bialik, a divorced mother, acknowledges it’s personal.
“I did grow up in a home with mental illness and with addiction. It’s something we didn’t talk about — and many people don’t.
“I take elements of my life and my childhood in this movie but it is not autobiographical. There are things that never happened, a complete fabrication of certain aspects of the story. Suffice it to say, I’m not alone in growing up the way that I grew up.
“Crafting this story may have originated in personal experience. But the twists and turns that are required for a film to tell a story are not always the same as what happens in real life.”
For Agron, Abigail was deeply personal.
“Dianna has publicly spoken about her father who has multiple sclerosis, a progressive degenerative condition that she’s been dealing with since her teens,” Bialik said.
“She made it very clear that she believes this was a role she needed to play and it really felt right.
“She strikes a balance at the complexity of being the sole caregiver. Essentially, balancing her own life and the needs of her parents, which I think resonates with a lot of people.”