Today, my guest is writer, director, actor and memoirist Desiree Akhavan.
My history with Desiree is a lengthy one.
Back in 2012, when I was working at Filmmaker magazine, I selected her and her collaborator Ingrid Jungermann for the 25 New Faces of Independent Film, the publication’s talent list, on the strength of their comedy web series The Slope.
In the years since, I’ve witnessed Akhavan’s career going from strength to strength.
In 2014, she made her feature debut with Appropriate Behavior, a comedically rich but also raw and poignant breakup movie she wrote, directed and starred in which drew heavily on the dissolution of her romantic relationship with Jungermann. The film premiered at Sundance, announcing Akhavan as a new, important voice in American independent cinema.
Her 2017 follow-up, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, was a beautifully crafted, moving adaptation of Emily M. Danforth’s novel of the same featuring a stacked cast led by Chloë Grace Moretz and John Gallagher Jr. A coming-of-age movie about teens at a remote gay conversion therapy center, the film also premiered at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s top honor.
The following year, Akhavan made The Bisexual, a six-part London-set series that she wrote with her longtime creative partner Cecilia Frugiuele. Heavily autobiographical and centered on a queer Iranian-American expat, played by Akhavan, the show is emotionally complex and deeply personal, and rightly got rave reviews.
Since then, Akhavan has worked a lot as a director-for-hire in TV, on shows such as Ramy, Hacks, Tiny Beautiful Things and Overcompensating. And in 2024, she released her beautifully written and compulsively readable memoir / essay collection You're Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust and Movies, a frank, funny and insightful journey through her life and career that feels like the purest expression so far of who she is.
Desiree and I had not spoken in a few years, but in this catch-up chat, we touched upon: her evocative first memory of learning to swim, writing her show Friday Night Live at age 9, her urge to return to Japan … or just learn how to take a vacation period, finding joy beyond validation, reckoning with her path forward during a current time of transition, and much, much more.
Appropriate Behavior, The Miseducation of Cameron Post and The Bisexual are all available to stream, and if you haven’t seen them already, you really should. You're Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust and Movies is available wherever you get your books and is highly recommended.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guest is Magnetic Fields’ frontman Stephin Merritt …
Featured image of Desiree Akhavan by Cecilia Frugiuele.
