Yesterday, Vulture ran a long conversation between Lena Dunham and Roxane Gay about feminism, diversity, and how to write. Today: the outtakes. Love and Basketball fans, it is your lucky day.
On Ina Garten and Martha Stewart:
Lena Dunham: I know you’ve just been watching Ina Garten from hotels.
Roxane Gay: Yes, I have. Ina is my touchstone. Do you watch her?
I love her. I’m a latecomer to Ina, and I don’t cook. Do you cook, actually?
Yeah, well, I’m late to cooking life. I just started recently because I never thought I deserved to cook.
I know exactly what you mean.
Yeah, I don’t deserve to take care of myself. I’m fat and I should just eat some bread and water and call it a day.
That’s exactly how I feel.
Yes, so I started cooking. I’m actually writing a whole book about it. And Ina Garten, just her recipes are so good, and she’s so comfortable being rich and awesome. And I just love that.
And her and Jeffrey, and their whole world. Like, who lives full-time in the Hamptons?
She does it even though Jeffrey teaches at Yale. She’s like, No, you can commute.
She does things like invite Taylor Swift over to her house to hang out and organize spices. She has no preconceptions that she’s not Ina, and she’s cashing in on it in a big way. And I love it.
I do, too. Whenever a woman is unapologetic about her life, I just wanna hug her. And also, her shirts.
Oh my God, incredible. It’s the same reason I love Martha Stewart. When she went to jail, I was like, You leave her alone.
Yes, and she went to jail and just made it work.
Totally. She did yoga in jail, and started crafting classes. I once spent two hours Google Image–searching the jail that Martha was in and being like, It actually doesn’t look that bad, and I’m sure she brought a lot of pizzazz to the situation.
On Love & Basketball:
Lena Dunham: I am a huge Love & Basketball fan, and I am so excited for Beyond the Lights. Did you see Beyond the Lights?
Roxane Gay: Not yet. I saw the preview, and I’m so ready. Oh. My. God.
Gina Prince-Bythewood is fucking awesome, and needs to be making way more movies than she is.
I don’t understand it. She’s brilliant. We did a Q&A after an event recently, and I just kept thinking, Oh my God, I’m talking to the maker of Love & Basketball, and it took all my control not to lose my shit.
I cannot wait for Beyond the Lights, and I love that they cast Minnie Driver as her mother, and I love that Minnie Driver wanted to do it, because so many women in Hollywood have so much fear and ego surrounding playing a mom. So I love that Minnie Driver was like, Yes, I am a woman who could technically have a child this age, and I’m gonna go for it.
Absolutely, and she’s great. Minnie Driver did one of my favorite movies that nobody’s ever seen, called Beautiful. And you have to see it. She plays a woman from a trailer park who wants to be a beauty queen. And then she has a child — not out of wedlock, but she has a child as a teenager. And then she and her friend sort of raise the child, and it’s a gorgeous, gorgeous movie and one of the most underrated things.
That Nate Parker, who’s in Beyond the Lights, he’s hot, hot, hot. He’s in Arbitrage, and I was like, Um, I want that boyfriend.
Oh, he is so fine. He was so good in Arbitrage, which was a movie I also loved.
I find, for some reason, Jenni Konner and I always talk about how cozy we find corporate-espionage thrillers. That’s the genre where I’m like, I can just escape into you because I don’t know what any of you are talking about.
And there are always like these weird consequences, like where you’re not really gonna cry for them and you know that everything’s gonna be okay anyway, so you can watch without guilt.
Love it. We need to start like a corporate-espionage film festival.
On snackwave:
Lena Dunham: The other day had like a taxi driver who was eating M&Ms and I so wanted to be like, “Excuse me, sir, could I have three or four of those?†but I did not.
Roxane Gay: When I was a kid, my mom was really into healthy food and eating healthy and all that bullshit. So I told her, one day, when I grow up, I’m going to have glass bowls of M&Ms in every room of my house.
That’s like the chicest thing you could ever do. Do you have them?
No, I don’t. But someday. I mean, I do think it’s chic. It’s a decorative snack.
My grandma always used to have glass bowls of what she called suckers, like hard candy. And I was like, Wow, that’s what adults have.
I know. Adulthood is the best when you can just have candy freely, just available, and it’s yours.