Maya Erskine

Watch Maya Ishii-Peters get home at the end of the first episode of PEN15 (2019). She has spent the day pretending not to mind what the boys have decided to call her, and at the front door she stops pretending. Erskine plays it without a laugh anywhere in it, and we realised we had stopped laughing some minutes before and could not say exactly when. That is her method in one scene. She gives Maya a bowl cut and a mouth that runs a full second ahead of her brain, and she can go from swagger to tears without a cut, because she is not doing an impression of a child. She is remembering one.

The career before that was small. There was a web series, Project Reality, made with Anna Konkle, and a part as Diane Nakamura in Insecure (2016) that we did not single out at the time. Then she, Konkle and Sam Zvibleman built PEN15, and she wrote, directed and starred, playing her thirteen-year-old self among actual children. Everything she does well is in it: humour drawn from personal embarrassment and never winked at; the mixed Japanese-American household, with her own mother Mutsuko Erskine at the edge of the frame as Yuki; the willingness to look exactly as bad as the material needs. She said in 2024, "I’m so much more comfortable when I don’t have to look pretty," and the series is the proof. Our reservation is the one we had then: ten episodes on a single idea, and two or three of them are sketches stretched to length.

Since the series ended in 2021 she has mostly been an actor in other people's work: Alice Mori, the lead in the romantic comedy Plus One (2019); the voice of Mizu in the animated Blue Eye Samurai (2023); and Jane Smith in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024), opposite Donald Glover, with Francesca Sloane running the show. We have not reviewed those, so we will not judge them here. We will note that some reviews found Mr. & Mrs. Smith less personal than her own work, and that the worry is a reasonable one. Her physical precision travels, from the bowl cut to an action part. Whether the shame travels, in a script she did not write, is what we would want to know before recommending anything.

The other person to thank is Konkle, who has been there since the web series and who plays Anna tall, stooped and apologising before she has finished a sentence, so that Maya's swagger has something to land against. Erskine is better with a partner quieter than she is, and better still when she is holding the pen. She is set to direct a feature comedy. We would like to see whether she can be as unsparing about somebody who is not herself. Nothing she has made yet has asked her to.