MARIELLE HELLER
The uncompromising writerdirector-actor has built a career on sticking to her guns
marielle heller had tried everything. She was nearly a year into her campaign to adapt The Diary of a Teenage Girl, cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner’s semiautobiographical graphic novel, into a play, and she was no closer to her goal. At the time, around 2007, Heller had zero writing or directing credits to her name. But she was convinced that Gloeckner’s story, about a 15yearold testing the limits of her sexual desires in 1970s San Francisco, was one that she wanted to tell. So she busted out the nuclear option.
“I just wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Heller recalls. “I called Phoebe and was like, ‘I don’t accept it. I don’t accept a no. Let me sit down with you. Let me tell you what I want to do. Let me tell you why this means so much to me.’ I sent her a million pictures of my cats. I went to Michigan and stayed with her and her kids, and got to know her better.”
She’s fairly certain it was the cat photos that did it in the end. After 10 months, Gloeckner cracked, and agreed to let Heller adapt Diary, first for the stage and eventually for the screen. Heller’s frank, funny, gloriously unnerving 2015 film went on to become a critical and festival favorite; it won Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards, and set the ball rolling on a career that’s only continued to pick up speed.
“At some point I realized: They’re saying no to me, but why do I have to accept it?” Heller says. “I have nothing to lose. I can just keep pushing.”
Heller, 41, went on to direct 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?,
which starred Melissa McCarthy as literary forger Lee Israel. The next year, she directed A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,
about the unlikely friendship between an embittered journalist and Fred Rogers, played by Tom Hanks. Both earned Academy Award nominations. Last year, she helmed the filmed version of Heidi Schreck’s Pulitzerand Tonycontending play, What the Constitution Means to Me,
and made an unexpected return to her first passion, acting, in Netflix’s chessprodigy story, The Queen’s Gambit. Her juicy turn as the selfliberating, alcoholic housewife Alma Wheatley was the series’ beating heart. It’s midJanuary, in the depths of coronavirus winter, and Heller and her family have temporarily decamped from their New York City apartment to “a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere” in Connecticut. Her husband, the Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, occasionally flits by in the background, stopping to wave hello to the camera. “I have a fourmonthold and a sixyearold, and the world is falling apart, so I’m just glad to be here,” the writerdirector says with an amiable shrug.
Heller has taken an unusual path to becoming one of Hollywood’s most soughtafter directors. Growing up in Marin County, California, with an artteacher mother and a chiropractor father, she was drawn to acting at an early age. “I think I was one of those really annoying kids who was so clearly wanting to be a performer,” she admits, with a laugh. At the age of eight, she landed a spot in Alameda Children’s Musical Theater, shirking her schoolwork to perform in three or four plays a year. “At that time, I just felt like, ‘Oh, my God — this is what I was made to do.’ ” After high school, she studied theater at UCLA, but once she graduated and started auditioning, Heller quickly grew disenchanted, and as she puts it, “betrayed by the business.”
“The life of being an actor sucks,” she says. “I was in theater school playing Lady Macbeth and doing these great dramatic parts, and then I got out into the real world and was auditioning for commercials, and just not getting to do anything that felt remotely meaningful. I had this vision of these great creative conversations I would have with people and this deep emotional work that we’d all be doing. Then it really was more about whether you were working out enough and in good enough shape to get cast as a character.”
Then, when she was 26 years old, her sister gave her a copy of Gloeckner’s 2002 book. She fell in love. “It felt so real,” Heller remembers. “It crystallized the way I had felt as a teenage girl, and it made me realize I had never felt represented in that way. I was so blown away by the candor in it and how relatable it felt, even though it wasn’t my story at all. I was like, ‘Oh, this is what boys must have felt when they read The Catcher in the Rye.’ It just really exploded my world.”