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Maude Apatow steps away from famous family in HBO drama
Maude Apatow is bringing her famous name — but not her famous parents — to a new role.
The elder daughter of comedy tycoon Judd Apatow and actress Leslie Mann is known for appearing in her family’s films, but her latest project is far from her father’s funny fare.
The 21-year-old is appearing alongside Zendaya in HBO’s new drug- and sex-fueled high school drama “Euphoria,” premiering Sunday at 10 p.m.
It marks her most notable departure yet from family projects. Apatow debuted alongside her younger sister Iris while playing their mother’s fictional children in films their father directed like “Knocked Up,” pseudo-sequel “This Is 40” and “Funny People.” She also appeared in a few episodes of HBO’s “Girls,” which dad Judd executive-produced.
“Euphoria,” adapted by “Assassination Nation” scribe and director Sam Levinson, is the American take on the Israeli series of the same name, weaving Levinson’s own experiences into the storyline. The series follows a group of teens through the trials and tribulations of youth, highlighting addiction, risky sexual encounters, questions of identity and the perils of social media.
“The main thing that drew me to it was the way they talk about anxiety and OCD, because that’s something I struggle with, and I’ve never seen it done so well in TV,” Apatow told the Daily News. “I think [Levinson] just really captures this time that we’re living in right now, this weird darkness of what’s going on politically, and social media and … that pressure we all are experiencing right now.”
Though Apatow appears in a series of Jergens commercials with her mother and will co-star in her father’s film collaboration with “Saturday Night Live” cast member Pete Davidson, she says she “never thought I would work with them for the rest of my life.”
Apatow had determined by age 16 that acting was her calling. By 17, she was performing independently of her folks. By 20, she took her father’s advice to “write for yourself” to heart and starred in “Don’t Mind Alice,” a short film she co-wrote and co-directed.
“That’s … the coolest thing ever, to be able to write and star in your [own] material,” Apatow says, citing the semiautobiographical musings of writer-actresses Phoeobe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”) and Lena Dunham, who she appeared with on “Girls,” as inspiration.
Infusing her writing with her own unfiltered experiences “makes me nervous to think about,” admits Apatow, who says she’s writing a non-autobiographical screenplay she won’t talk about.
Apatow said her childhood was was more grounded than most might think. “I went to the same school from kindergarten to 12th grade and had a really nice group of friends”— “a very different experience” than the teens in “Euphoria.”
But the characters “are like people that I knew or had elements of people I knew.”
While Apatow’s well-aware of the “amazing opportunities” her name has afforded her, she has no intention of riding her parents’ coattails. “People will always say, ‘Oh, you only got that from your parents,’” she says. “And it makes me just want to work a thousand times harder to prove myself on my own.”