Ilana Glazer Just Wanted to Make a Comedy About ‘Real-Ass Women’
Ilana Glazer is so excited to do nothing. It’s T-minus 48 hours to the theatrical premiere of Babes, the millennial mom comedy starring Glazer and Michelle Buteau, and the comedian’s promotional calendar is predictably packed. Think of the busiest day you’ve ever had in your work life, and then triple it — that’s how much Glazer’s life currently resembles a compression packing cube.
“Don’t tell my agents, but I want to Clear. My. Schedule,” Glazer, 37, tells Rolling Stone about what she’ll do (or won’t do) after this press blitz for Babes, which also stars Hasan Minaj, John Carroll Lynch, Stephan James, and Oliver Platt. “I want to get lunches with friends. I want to have a spa day. I want to have dates with my husband. I want to go to the museum. I want to smell my child’s scalp and her feet. I want to pick her up from school. I want to get high, put sunglasses on, and just get lost in Prospect Park.”
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That everyone would want a piece of Glazer right now is understandable. Since its premiere at SXSW 2024, Babes, co-written by Glazer (who also produced) and Josh Rabinowitz (Ramy) and directed by Pamela Adlon (Better Things), has been raking in accolades for its absurdist, truthful, and sincere look at pregnancy, motherhood, and ride-or-die best friendship.
Before she can Homer Simpson-into-the-bush, however, Glazer has a flurry of press appointments to make. Currently, she’s seated in the back of a car, zooming through New York. The first time we meet, however, Glazer is mid-glam in her room at the London West Hollywood — the type of establishment where you need a special key card to even ascend beyond the lobby. “I keep saying I’m being shuffled around like Norman Lear,” Glazer cracks as a hairstylist straightens her trademark tight curls into a sleek bob. As we make small talk about New York versus Los Angeles (“The desert makes me nervous,” Glazer, who was born in Long Island and lives in Brooklyn, says firmly), a makeup artist draws on lip liner and nail techs tackle her hands and feet.
This would be an unusual routine for her character in Babes, where Glazer plays Eden, a free-spirited Queens yoga instructor who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a one-night stand. Beside her is Buteau as Dawn, a married dentist, Eden’s childhood best friend, and mother of two who promises to help shepherd her bestie through pregnancy’s horny highs and lonely lows — possibly at the expense of everyone’s time and sanity. The end result is a funny yet brutally honest look at what no one ever tells you about pregnancy and parenting, and how even the closest friendships are bound to fluctuate amid all of these changes.
“I love that it digs into the unsexy realities of pregnancy and parenthood,” Adlon tells Rolling Stone. “It’s so rare to see that portrayed honestly on the screen. The comedy was there, and I knew I could tap into the emotional honesty. It’s essential for women to laugh at what is uniquely and privately theirs and portray it authentically.”
As Glazer tells it, Babes began to take form when executive producer and manager Susie Fox noticed “a gaping hole for good-ass studio comedies.” Fox envisioned Glazer, who had recently wrapped her 2010s-defining Comedy Central series Broad City, potentially filling that gap. “With my insatiable desire to be loved, I said, ‘I see that as well. I bet I could do that for you,’” Glazer says.
As Fox laid out the broad strokes of her idea for a pregnancy buddy comedy, Glazer says, she revealed her own real-life pregnancy to Fox — Glazer and her husband, David Rooklin, welcomed a daughter in July 2021 — and found out that Rabinowitz and his wife were also expecting. “We put together a list of the most surprising and absurd experiences we were having becoming parents and as new parents,” she says.
True enough, Babes showcases birth-ready cervixes (“Your vagina looks like it’s yawning,” Eden tells an in-labor Dawn early in the film), pregnancy-induced horniness, placenta-birthing, and the medieval-seeming nature of prenatal medical procedures, like amniocenteses.
By the same token, not all of Glazer and Rabinowitz’s list items were physical. “The thread that continued to come up for us was how your friendships change,” Glazer says. “We’d all been on the other side when our friends chose to have kids, and then we watched those friends turn into zombies and eventually return to human form.… Josh and I were so naive to the loss when you gain a beautiful child in your life. It’s scary, the shift of your friendships.”
If anyone can claim expertise in non-romantic companionships, it’s Glazer. From 2014 to 2019, the comedian co-produced and starred in Broad City, a coming-of-age sitcom that captured the wacky and often-humiliating experiences of two twentysomething best friends (Glazer and real-life pal Abbi Jacobson) living in New York. Based on Glazer and Jacobson’s independent web series of the same name, Broad City tended to draw comparisons to HBO’s Girls. But where Girls was cringely provocative and satirical about overeducated, underemployed millennials, Broad City was slapstick, surrealist, and unpretentious. A typical season would escalate young-adult minutia — psychedelic trips to Whole Foods, debating whether to peg your crush — into a farcical comedy of errors.
For all of its situational ridiculousness, the friendship between Glazer and Jacobson was the beating heart of Broad City. Babes follows suit by honing in on the bond between Glazer and Buteau, who have been friends since meeting in the New York comedy scene in the late 2000s. Casting Buteau took a few tries at first — Glazer says she received three or four “no”s before they finally got her on board. “We were looking at these lists of actresses who would guarantee a box office [draw] — women who I so admired,” Glazer says. “But seeing these lists of women reminds me of Mitt Romney’s ‘binders full of women.’ Just a complete flattening of women into a monolith. I found the process so unsexy. I truly woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, like ‘Michelle. Michelle. Michelle. It’s Michelle.’”
At the time, Buteau was busy filming the first season of Netflix’s Survival of the Thickest. “She passed, and then I called her again, and she passed, and then I called her manager, and she passed,” Glazer says. “But the vision was so clear: To portray a friendship from the inside out with two real-ass women was such an important opportunity that once I got Michelle and her manager to see this vision, they couldn’t unsee it. Thank God.”
“What drew me to Josh and Ilana’s script was the raw honesty,” Buteau tells Rolling Stone. “The emotions that you go through, the emotions that you can’t put a name on or have vocabulary for. But also, I just laughed.”
The “real-ass women” trifecta was completed after Glazer secured Pamela Adlon to direct what would be her debut feature-length film. “The script had a lot of elements that I love,” Adlon tells Rolling Stone. “It’s a rom-com — a bromance, if you will — but the relationship is two lifelong female friends whose lives are hitting the inevitable fork in the road.”
Glazer didn’t know Adlon before Babes, but she admired how honest Better Things could be about older motherhood. “She has this classic rock-star energy that was so spontaneous and colorful,” Glazer says. “She’s a real champion of actors. If I felt stuck, or was struggling, she would help erase everything that I was holding. She would break off a piece of herself to give to me and take into that scene.”
Understandably, pregnancy and motherhood have been top of mind for Glazer ever since she became a parent. That same year, she co-wrote and starred in the Hulu horror film False Positive, a Rosemary’s Baby-esque story about a young woman (Glazer) who struggles to conceive and seeks help from a fertility doctor played by Pierce Brosnan. “False Positive embodied my fears of becoming a parent,” Glazer says. “It also embodied my fears of the vulnerable experience of entering the misogynist medical system when you are a pregnant person. It’s dehumanizing — our health care system in this country.”
However frightened Glazer was about carrying a child and being a parent, she is actively embracing this latest life stage, which she says has “given me new colors to see and sounds to hear … False Positive to Babes definitely illustrates this growth.”
In an age of millennial mom anxiety and dread, Glazer doesn’t claim to be chasing the zeitgeist. “I think reality is the funniest place to write from,” Glazer says. “Comedy is the tension between joy and suffering. It’s the point where light becomes dark. That’s where the funny thing is.”
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