By their own admission, Mae Martin has made a career out of oversharing. Since the Canadian-born, London-based writer, producer, and comedian entered the industry at just 13 years old, Martin’s standup has hit on themes like drug addiction, relationship obsession, and the quirks of sexuality—a youthful fantasy they entertained of being eaten out by Bette Midler to an audience roaring with applause, for example. Or their dream of becoming the lead singer of Aerosmith and performing to an auditorium of screaming men, boners bulging.
In a world of social influencers and Photoshopped selfies, Martin’s unbridled tenor is refreshing and, apparently, infectious. The instant they appear on my computer screen from their parents’ basement in Toronto, I blurt out, “YAY!” like the caricature of a tween fan girl. But before I can cringe, we’re joking about staring at yourself compulsively during Zoom meetings, about the inherent awkwardness of photo shoots, about being at our parents’ houses.
“FYI, my mom might interrupt to ask if I’ve taken my vitamins,” I say.
“Yeah, my mom just gave me a bunch of advice on how to do this interview,” they respond, laughing.
“What was the advice?”
Martin smiles. “Not to give too much away.”
It’s curious counsel for the polymath. Theirs is an exuberantly off-center and unselfconscious oeuvre. Can Everyone Please Calm Down: Mae Martin’s Guide to 21st Century Sexuality, Martin’s 2019 book—a collection of musings on gender fluidity—also asks readers to reflect on their strangest sex dreams. Specifically, “Have you had the one about Severus Snape and Buffy the Vampire Slayer having sex with you in a crypt? Is that just me?”
The kind of uncloaking you see in Martin’s work is not a put-on, as far as I can tell. “If I could look cool, I probably would,” they confess just minutes into our chat, “but A, my lip is constantly quivering with emotion, and B, I’m, you know, objectively a geek.”
If they are a geek, it hasn’t hindered them any. The 2020 Netflix release of their hilarious and cutting British dramedy, Feel Good, has been met with massive acclaim, both critically and publicly. Indiewire described it as “brave, complex, and painful, but always damn funny,” and The Guardian called it “sensitive and smart.” Fans might like it even more: It’s earned an impressive 88% on Rotten Tomatoes (just behind comedy classics Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (92%) and The Big Lebowski (93%).
The BAFTA-nominated limited series, which Martin co-created and co-wrote with Joe Hampson, doesn’t just deliver deadpan-perfect lines like, “I came into your life like a tornado full of sticks and poo;” it’s also outright brutal in its portrayals of addiction, family dysfunction, and sexual trauma. Merging humor with fetal-position heartbreak appears to be part of a growing movement in comedy, echoing work like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s British television series Fleabag and Tig Notaro’s seminal standup album Live.
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Categorically, Feel Good lands somewhere between the two. It shares Fleabag’s relentless intimacy and British quip, but like Live, it’s (mostly) nonfiction, making it especially tender and pointedly honest—which, in Martin’s view, is not a byproduct of their work but a necessary ethos. “The young people I encounter, their bullshit censor is very attuned,” Martin says, when I ask about the uptick in emotionally raw comedies. “They’re craving authenticity.”
That’s what Feel Good delivers. In two seasons, the semi-autobiographical show follows Mae Martin’s character, also named Mae, as they try to manage a codependent obsession with their closeted girlfriend, George (Charlotte Ritchie); enter rehab to stave off relapse into full-blown cocaine addiction; repair a splintered relationship with their icy mother, Linda (Lisa Kudrow); come to realize they’re nonbinary; and sort through the emotional repercussions of teenage sexual abuse by a beloved, much older friend.
In other words, like Fleabag and Live, Feel Good pulls unflinchingly from the most excruciating pain of our lives—what we, as a culture, have historically stowed away for disclosure to a therapist, maybe—but funny. Tapping so deeply into those raw points highlights a professional arc for Martin, who, in a past standup bit, included a light reference to sexual assault with the disclaimer that they were only adding it to get a glowing review in The Guardian. On the surface, that qualifier looks a lot like a defense mechanism or, at the very least, a distraction tactic. But as it turns out, it wasn’t meant to protect Martin at all; it was meant to protect us. “With standup, I can constantly undercut myself and reassure the audience that it’s not going to get too dark,” Martin tells me. “But with acting, there’s no winking at the camera and being like, ‘Just so you know, everything’s fine.’”
Relinquishing control over the audience’s relationship to the work is a subtle distinction between standup and television, but it was clear that the former afforded Martin a kind of buffer. After 20-ish years behind the mic, they were now essentially performing intimacy acrobatics sans safety net. When I ask them about it, they don’t even pause to think. “Feel Good felt infinitely more vulnerable than doing standup.”
With such fragile material, making the show work was its own balancing act. “The most important thing to me was that it was properly funny and properly moving; one was not more important than the other,” they say. To that end, the writing team pored over every episode’s script, reading each one aloud over and over. “Any time the rhythm began to droop, we’d just pepper it with jokes.”
Martin and Hampson infused that emotional symmetry into many facets of the show, gender being one of them, though maybe not in the way you’d think. Unlike many of pop culture’s femme and queer-centric hits (take the 2020 rape-revenge fantasy Promising Young Woman; HBO’s 2017 assault-driven thriller Big Little Lies; and both The L Word, Showtime’s 2004 lesbian drama, and its 2019 reboot, The L Word: Generation Q), Feel Good avoids the depiction of cis-gendered, heterosexual men as either incompetent and feckless or violent and sadistic. Given the show’s denouement, in which (spoiler) Mae confronts their close friend and rapist, Scott (John Ross Bowie)—a plotline based on Martin’s personal experience with sexual assault—retracing that narrative would have been easy.
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Instead, Feel Good takes a heuristic approach. Its cis-het, male characters are deeply complex, occupying conflicting spaces simultaneously: protective, frightened, loyal, hubristic, ashamed. In one devastating scene, Mae and their finance-bro Narcotics Anonymous acquaintance, Kevin (Tom Andrews), go on a cocaine bender that ends when Kevin surreptitiously calls his sponsor. She arrives and forces him to say that he is loved out loud. “I don’t want to. I’m human garbage,” he responds with a crumpling chin before acquiescing in shuddering sobs.
Though it may feel like a manufactured move in the post-#MeToo era, to Martin, who grew up in the male-dominated comedy club scene of the early 2000s, it’s just the truth. “There was a vast array of men—some, amazing mentors, some, predatory villains, but all of them complicated.” It’s a fresh take on inclusivity, to include those who have historically done the excluding. But it tells a story that’s as feminist as they come. “I feel hyperaware of how what we call toxic masculinity affects men,” Martin explains. “How can I expect men to hear and empathize with my experience in a nuanced way if I’m drowning out the male suicide rates?” They pause, then add, “I’m not looking to be right. I’m looking to be accurate.”
Inserting complexity into the conversation around toxic masculinity didn’t come without resistance. Network execs sent Feel Good’s writing team a note suggesting that Mae “kick Scott in the balls” during their confrontation or take a photo of him and tweet it. “They missed the whole point,” Martin says. It’s easy to do; collectively, cancel culture has become our go-to. But the reality is that it makes use of an exhilarating, mythical notion that our response to being wronged fits neatly into boxes for gleeful vengeance or righteous forgiveness—particularly in cases of rape.
Martin’s treatment of the topic eschews such oversimplification. “We live in a really reactive world,” Martin says, “but I wanted to show that there are no winners or losers.” A portrayal of abuse that omits that opposition between the victors and vanquished creates room for a grief that’s rarely talked about: that empty space where your abuser once stood. “It’s a huge loss,” Martin tells me. “You’re not going to stop thinking of jokes you want to tell that person or the songs you want to text them, even when you know you should cut them out of your life.”
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Cutting, canceling, or any variation thereof is a hot topic in Martin’s life these days. In October, Dave Chappelle made incendiary remarks about trans people in his Netflix standup special, The Closer, stating, among other things, that there are only two genders. This resulted in a trans-solidarity walkout and protest by Netflix employees on October 20, with many calling on the popular streaming site to cancel the special.
In the Venn diagram of issues the upset presented, Feel Good’s components place the show right at the center: a nonbinary protagonist… written by a standup comedian… for a show on Netflix. When Martin posted a statement to their Instagram in solidarity with Netflix employees, the comments ranged from gratitude and admiration to disgust and rage. But Martin isn’t interested in booting those who can’t seem to find their way amid pop culture’s shifting moral compass; they have a better idea.
“My fantasy is that I write some really incisive joke about gender, and Chappelle, and Louie C.K., and Ricky Gervais are watching TV—they’re eating a hog roast or something, just guzzling meat—and then they turn on the TV and see me doing this joke, and they’re just like, ‘Oh my God, we were wrong.’ And then they all tenderly kiss each other.” Martin is being funny but sincere: “I don’t want those guys to never be able to work again, I want them to have a better understanding and to grow.”
In a time when the Chappelles, C.K.s, and Gervaises of the world take up lots of space not getting it, it would make sense to assume Martin’s original vision for Feel Good was a kind of haven for the queer community, a place to detail the loneliness of partnering with a closeted girlfriend who hides you from her friends, the crippling anxiety of feeling like a lesser version of both a man and a woman, the optimism in finally claiming pronouns that fit.
But in fact, Martin tells me, that would have corrupted the basic principle of the show: honesty. “Joe [Hampson] and I made sure that we weren’t getting in our heads about speaking on behalf of any one community. It’s a really happy byproduct if people felt represented, but if we’d gone into it with that goal, we would have written really boxy, issue-based stuff.”
It’s not the only happy byproduct. Feel Good may be the first scripted show to feature queer issues and actors without alienating a straight audience (perhaps a result of how few queer stories get greenlit in the industry). Though Martin doesn’t suggest that being inclusive of a mainstream audience was the goal, they do see its advantages. “The more people realize that, for instance, a queer story is accessible to straight people and, in the same way that I love Titanic, a straight person could love Feel Good, the more the people in charge will make these shows, and the more you’ll hear from different voices.”
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Writing a queer love story for the masses is trailblazing work. To pull it off, Martin worked from the inside out rather than the outside in, using their singular experience as the blueprint for a bigger picture. “We knew that as long as it was true and authentic, then by nature it would be an honest depiction of queer inner conflict, and love, and shame—and human conflict, and love, and shame.”
Feel Good is just that. Its stories of gender dysphoria and sexual identity are woven together with more universal motifs like unavailable partners, complex PTSD, infuriating family dynamics, and trading actual intimacy for sex. In specific, both seasons are threaded together by the arc of Mae’s (sometimes thriving, sometimes wavering) relationship to George, a schoolteacher who “looks like a fit little squirrel” according to Mae (hot tip: fit means “sexy” in British parlance).
While Mae brings addiction, unhealed sexual trauma, and co-dependence to the relationship, George brings a fear of intimacy, emotional repression, and ingrained homophobia. It’s a combo that lands the two knee-deep in plenty of potholes (and a gut-wrenching breakup), but it also sparks a magnetic attraction. Eventually, Mae learns it’s better to want a partner than to need one, and George discovers that pushing love away is ultimately a dead end. Considering the dogma surrounding relationship success—primarily, that you can’t love someone else until you love yourself—the couple’s progression is pretty miraculous.
Miraculous and fictional. But when I ask Martin about the possibilities of romantic love under trauma’s weight, I don’t sense an ounce of cynicism. “We bring all kinds of baggage to relationships that trigger each other in different ways,” they tell me. “And yeah, I guess the fantasy part about Mae and George was that they were able to accept each other’s flaws quite quickly, but none of us ever really loves ourselves completely; everyone thinks they’re a piece of shit some days.” It’s a less rigorous philosophy about love: Spiritual purity is nice, but it’s no requisite. “I think you have to be aware of your flaws, but there are definitely ways to have real romance and be a little emotionally fucked up. Love is great like that.”
Mae and George weren’t the only ones who evolved in the course of the show’s development. Co-writing Feel Good had the inevitable effect of pushing Martin out of their comfort zone as well. “Because I had to write the other characters,” they remember, “I had to imagine how it feels to be my parents, how it feels to date me, how it feels to be around me.” Writing George in particular, turned a floodlight onto several of Martin’s shortcomings as a partner. “…Like my tendency to put a Band-Aid on or bulldoze over real issues with a level of romance that nobody’s asked for... my self-obsession, too.” Even writing Mae forced a “crisis of confidence” for Martin. “I was like, What’s funny about myself? I can’t even remember what my personality is.”
The crises kept coming. As a producer, Martin worried about putting headphones on to listen to music and get into character before each take. “You feel like you’ve invited all these people to your birthday party and you have to make sure everyone’s having a good time,” they explain. “I didn’t want to look like I was being wanky-actor pretentious.”
Catering to other people’s needs at your own expense, putting Band-Aids on relationship issues, questioning who you even are—they’re all at the center of Mae’s character, so it’s no surprise they sprouted up for Martin to contend with while creating Feel Good. But the show became a form of therapy, however unconventional, in Martin’s story of personal growth. And maybe that was a surprise.
“I’m definitely in a better place now than when I started the show,” Martin tells me, “and that’s in part because it forced me to look very starkly at my own patterns and flaws.” They have stronger boundaries now, for example, they approach intimacy differently, and their people-pleasing has subsided, if only incrementally. But the biggest payoff lies in Martin’s newfound sense of agency. “Writing and producing the show empowered me,” Martin says. “It really helped me listen to myself.”
It’s a new kind of Hollywood ending, the kind that starts with rehab and ends with a Netflix series. But while Martin’s personal demons are much the reason for their greatest success to date, they also nearly destroyed their life at one point, just as they nearly destroyed Mae’s. In the final episode, Mae wonders who they would have been without their trauma—how they’d handle life, how they’d handle love. I ask Martin the same question.
“Everything that happens to us is integrated and feeds into this tapestry that’s both positive and negative,” they begin. But their voice trails off for a moment, as if they’ve lost the thread. When they return, it’s with a softer cadence but a firmer tone. “I actually don’t know. I have no idea. Feel Good wasn’t written by someone who’s got all the answers,” they tell me. “What I do know, though, is that I hope those experiences helped me pull people in, helped make everybody feel like there’s a space for them.” ❤
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