Cristin Milioti is no one’s accessory
Actor makes career out of dismantling romantic cliches
Cristin Milioti doesn’t think of herself as a romantic comedy heroine. And even though she has starred in a deluxe assortment of romantic comedies, she is more or less correct.
Since her breakout, as Girl (yes, the character is named Girl) in the Broadway musical “Once,” Milioti has made a career of dismantling — on occasion, eviscerating — the narrative cliches of the happily ever after. In the “USS Callister” episode of “Black Mirror,” she plays a computer coder who outmaneuvers an incel suitor. In an episode of “Modern Love,” she stars as a book critic who forms a secure attachment with her doorman, not her child’s father. The takeaway of her 2015 movie “It Had to Be You” is that maybe it didn’t. And in last summer’s “Palm Springs,” her character uses a time loop to work through her issues. Romance is strictly optional.
“I can survive just fine without you, you know,” she tells Andy Samberg’s Nyles in the movie’s climax.
“Made for Love,” a new series now streaming on HBO Max, begins where most rom-coms end. Milioti stars as Hazel, a 30-something woman who is married to Byron (Billy Magnussen), a handsome tech mogul so overwhelmingly successful that even the Musks and Gateses of the world must feel a little intimidated. But the relationship suffocates her.
Escaping, almost by accident, she encounters the muddle and stress and bother of moving through the world alone. Well, not quite alone. Byron has implanted spyware in her brain.
In the opening moments of the show, Hazel flounders on screen looking like a half-drowned mermaid — wet, disheveled, in a scaly green dress and smeared eye makeup. She looks exhilarated, frightened, exhausted, confused, defiant, more. Most actors seem to work with a palette of a dozen or so emotions, but Milioti’s colors are unlimited. And since she likes to use as many as she can, she won’t play characters who aren’t fully human.
“I like playing complicated people,” she said. “I didn’t get into this to be a handbag to a man’s story.”
Growing up in New Jersey, Milioti auditioned for every school play and musical. “I just always loved being onstage, and I loved disappearing into roles,” she said.
OK, not every role. Her encapsulated review of Sarah Brown, the winsome heroine she played in “Guys and Dolls”: “Ugh.” More her vibe? The Artful Dodger, a role she campaigned for, mostly because all the female parts in “Oliver!” are terrible.
She studied acting at New York University but stayed for only a year and a half. “I was really impatient,” she said. “I was only getting to act for, like, 15 minutes a week.”
So she waitressed, and she babysat. She dog-walked, and she worked in a dog biscuit factory. She began working off-Broadway, playing multidimensional roles — in shows like “Crooked,” “Stunning,” “That Face” — that made the most of her big-eyed girlish exterior and the dark heart beating beneath. Off-Broadway paying what it does, she still walked dogs. There were also many auditions for victim-of-the-week stuff, dead-sorority-girl parts that she could never seem to book. She just didn’t have the right faceless victim vibes.
In the first workshops for “Once,” the musical based on the John Carney film, she played a supporting role. Romantic leads — Sarah Brown, ugh — weren’t her thing. But John Tiffany, the show’s director, felt differently. He found her funny and mercurial. “And incredibly moving in a properly generous way,” he said.
When the show moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a tryout, he convinced the producers that she should take over Girl, the part she went on to play on Broadway for more than a year. That role led to a recurring spot in the final season of “How I Met Your Mother” — she played the Mother — and a series lead on the NBC rom-com “A to Z,” which didn’t last long.
With some financial security achieved, she began maneuvering back toward roles that didn’t make her feel like what she described as “an unwitting foot soldier of the patriarchy.” She wanted parts that let her touch “the weirdness and the wildness and the inner forests” of human nature, she said. Parts that let her communicate the essential strangeness of behaving like a person, especially a female person; parts where she never has to apologize for a character’s sharp angles and iffy choices.
Milioti loves iffy choices, and she loves thinking
through how and why a person might make them. On set or onstage, she will throw herself into the scrappiest, spikiest, ugliest facets of any part, without ego or undue seriousness.
In “Made for Love,” Hazel experiences an awakening, transforming from a perfectly groomed helpmeet, with the spray-on smile of a woman in a hostage situation, to a gritty, messy, blood-flecked runaway who can wield a machete — or an umbrella or a golf club — when she
needs to.
Had Milioti undergone anything like that, either personally or professionally? Was there an experience that made her swear off those handbag and foot soldier roles? She wouldn’t say. (While she has sometimes discussed her personal life, she now opts for a Bartleby-inspired response: “I prefer not to.”)
But she did offer a more encompassing answer, saying that a lot of women are now confronting the roles that society — and
not just Hollywood — has asked them to play. Because we should all be the heroines of our own complicated stories. And not the sorority girl shoved into the trunk.
“It’s this reckoning of like, ‘Wow, what have we been fed this entire time?’ ” she said. “… We’re all suddenly awakening and being like, ‘Why do we feel so bad? And why were these things allowed?’ ”
“That, to me, is thrilling,” she added. “And it’s long overdue.”