I never fully understood it until I got to watch my friend actually live it out through a character.” I’m so sorry.’ That heartbreaking choice that she has to make of Dad versus Mom, you’re faced with it daily. “It was heartbreaking to watch you, as an adult, not only talk about it, but there was that moment of realization of ‘Oh wow, little Anna went through this. It’s still hard to watch parts of it it was hard to shoot. Without Erskine by her side, Konkle is certain she would not have had the support or the courage to be so open on-screen. I think it’s so normal as a kid, and I can say this 10-years-of-therapy later, to think the things that are going wrong in my life are because of.” “It just started to all become too much for me. ![]() It was the feeling of ‘If we’re going to share this, let’s share it fully,’” she says, recalling that part of her life. “We grappled with including that stuff and talked about it a lot, but at the end of the day, we decided to run with it because it was real. “Vendy Wiccany” touches on Anna’s thoughts of suicide, and Konkle says her aim was to address the “slippery” mental health issues she didn’t know she was facing at the time. The confusion of seeing her parents apart yet together comes to a head for Anna in Episode 3, when she and Maya run away to the forest and pretend to be witches, performing a pseudo-exorcism. “For me that was a huge secret: On the outside I was doing theater and playing the French horn and trying to be as great as I could, and then my family life was a mess.” “We learned from Season 1 that whenever there’s an honest story that feels scary to share, it’s probably going to resonate with people,” Konkle says. She remembers that time in her life as being “very tense.” When Konkle was roughly the same age as her character, her parents ended their marriage and split the house she grew up in between the two of them for two years. She gives herself two middle fingers and mouths, “F- you,” as tears well up.Ĭentral to Season 2, similarly, is the divorce of Anna’s parents, which reflects pretty closely Konkle’s own experiences. ![]() In Episode 6, “Posh,” Maya the character is racially profiled by her peers, and afterward stares at herself in the mirror and tries to make her eyes look wider in a wordless moment of self-hatred. Erskine - whose real-life mother plays her mom in the show - used Season 1 of “Pen15” to examine her Japanese American identity. But the show is rooted in their adolescent emotional lives and experiences. Those feelings clearly resonated with many, so rather than reinvent themselves with the show’s sophomore season or negate the emotions of Season 1, teen tantrum style, the duo decided to amp them up, taking an often darker turn to reflect their characters’ feelings that every single moment of their middle school lives is monumentally significant.Įrskine and Konkle, both 33 (and born exactly one month apart), have stressed all along that Maya and Anna are not exactly akin to teen versions of themselves. “Pen15” is a show about firsts, and without that partnership forged from the growing pains of performing and creating under pressure, Konkle and Erskine may never have made their first series together, let alone one that is so deeply personal to them.
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