Aya Cash of “You're the Worst” Is Actually Pretty Much the Best

You’ve probably seen Aya Cash before. Even if you haven’t watched her as one half of the central couple on FX’s phenomenally funny You're the Worst—and if you haven’t, what do you think you’re doing with your life?—you’ve likely glimpsed her in guest appearances on The Newsroom, The Good Wife, Modern Family, or Law & Order (both SVU and Criminal Intent); or in the 2012 film version of Sleepwalk With Me, or as Jordan Belfort's zero-bullshit assistant, Janet, in The Wolf of Wall Street. (See? Told you.)

Last year, You're the Worst creator Stephen Falk introduced the world to a spectacular new kind of TV love story—the kind that starts with casual boredom sex between two selfish, self-destructive millennials and then takes a turn when they unexpectedly fall for each other. At the end of last season, music publicist Gretchen (Cash) jumped into de facto cohabitation with her unmotivated novelist boyfriend, Jimmy (Chris Geere), after a fire destroyed her home. Tonight, the show picks up where it left off, its infuriating yet irresistible main pair proving hilariously toxic to everyone around them (and sometimes to each other)—and Cash spoke to GQ about the upcoming season, her “dirty hippie” upbringing, and how a onetime aspiring repertory Shakespeare actor ended up the star of TV’s best sex comedy.

So the first few episodes of You're the Worst’s second season are pretty great, and it looks like once again you guys are just having the best time together. Has it been fun returning to this role?
Oh, absolutely. Gretchen is one of the most interesting characters I’ve ever gotten to play; I always want to come back to her. I think her freedom is really fun—her lack of need to people-please is my favorite part. She sort of lives out your inner fantasies of how you want to behave but can’t because of social norms and common decency, and I appreciate that about her.

What felt different about this time?
This season the writers take things to a place where I would say is very unexpected. Especially in comedy. And that’s what I like about our show and about the writing—that the comedy and drama are so closely related. Just because we’re doing a sitcom doesn’t mean the humor doesn’t come out of pain and reality.

Also, the cast—we’re all very good friends, and we live in different places. Kether [Donohue] moved to L.A., I live in New York, Chris [Geere] lives in Manchester, Desi [Desmin Borges] lives in New York, but he’s always traveling. So to get to come back together with everyone was just really fun. We started end of April, first week of May, and then we shot until August, so it was like summer camp. With fifteen-hour days.

Your character Gretchen is, like you mentioned, very liberated and also very entitled—and I feel like she’s very of this moment, culturally. I’m always curious: How do you describe your character to, say, your family or your parents? Or your elderly relatives?
Well, my parents are not your typical parents—my mom is a poet and a novelist, and she writes quite a bit about sex and about drinking. [Laughs] So this is very much the sort of culture, actually, that she writes about! And my dad was a hippie who lived on a commune and did naked street theater during puppet shows, so I don’t think he’s really that shocked by anything, either. His street-theater group would come out—they were called Pageant Players—and a puppet would say, “Give him all your money, you bourgeois pigs!” And then he was a musician for many years and played in the Polynesian Gamelon. He met my mom by fixing her flute. And now he’s a Buddhist priest.

My dad’s friends, every once in a while, get uncomfortable with all the sex stuff in the show. But it’s not that they don’t relate or anything. They were that age, too. I don’t think it was so different for them. I just happen to be from parents who were very much in the 1960s.

Oh, for sure. Sorry—I realize sometimes I ask that question assuming that everyone’s parents are like my parents, who live in Minnesota and go to church on Sundays. In cases like yours, that’s...completely un-useful, isn’t it?
I went to school in Minnesota! I went to the University of Minnesota, and this Shakespeare festival I was part of for a few years in Winona, Minnesota, was just so magical—I love it there. [Laughs] But I also realized once I went to Minnesota just how different my upbringing was. I thought growing up that my childhood was not that unique, but in Minnesota, it was like, “Oh, yeah, not everyone is the dirty hippie that I am.”

Tell me about your Shakespeare years!
Oh, god. I think I did seven Shakespeare plays the year I graduated. Winter’s Tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet—[pause] ah, I’m losing them! My big dream coming out of school, as someone who was sort of quote-unquote classically trained—sounds like such a froufrou thing to say!—but I thought I was going to go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. That was my dream, to get a contract and work for a Shakespeare festival and just be a company rep actor at a theater company.

So you set out to become a repertory stage actor, and you ended up on TV. How’d that happen?
When I graduated from school, a lot of my classmates worked at the Guthrie Theater [in Minneapolis]. The Guthrie Theater didn’t hire me, and that was devastating to me. That was it, you know? That was what I’d been trained to think of as the best job you could possibly get in the world, and I was devastated.

And I was like, Well, rather than sit around and hope they’ll hire me, I’m gonna go to New York, because I love that city. I was always very excited about it; on my spring break I’d always go visit my friends near New York and take the Greyhound bus up for 24 hours in the city to see, like, three plays in 24 hours.

So, you know, there’s a certain romance to New York in my head, and I wasn’t afraid of being poor. My family didn’t have money, and I was taught that that was part of what being an artist was. So I was like, okay, I’ll be poor and waitress in New York. Of course, it’s all relative, and my “poor” is still the entitled kind of poor. I wasn’t food insecure. But I didn’t have much money, and I was working as a full-time waitress for, actually, many years. And then I got a play in New York, and that sort of changed my life. [pause] I guess I was still waitressing after I was doing the play. But my career kind of took a turn from there.

Do you have plans to do more stage work in the future, or more Shakespeare?
It depends! It’s hard to get interesting roles for me, to be honest. I tend to go out of town now to do interesting things. I did Anne Frank recently at the Denver Center; I did Hamlet in Roanoke, Virginia. I always thought being an actor would allow me to travel, but now all I do is go to L.A. and, you know—Hartford, Connecticut. [Laughs] But it’s always nice to be in New York; there’s still a romance to it.

Gretchen on You’re the Worst is fascinating because while she’s endearing and lovable, she also has these amazing tics that convey to the audience that she can also be a little obnoxious—in a way that almost certainly reminds every viewer of someone they know. The one that jumps to mind is the one where she kind of paws at Jimmy, baby-talks at him. What’s your inspiration when you incorporate that sort of thing?
Even though as humans Gretchen and I are very, very different, certain things I do in my relationship freaked my husband out when they showed up on You’re the Worst. He was like, “It’s the most you!” It freaked my husband out seeing me look at someone else as if I’m in love with them. [Laughs] Because it’s a look that only he sees in real life! But that’s how I experience love; he could probably tell you better than I could what exactly he recognizes, because I’m just trying to do what I know.

That pawing moment, though, funny enough, is actually a Stephen Falk–specific thing. I believe that is actually from his relationship. He had a very specific way he wanted me to paw at [Chris Geere]. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s from a Stephen Falk relationship at some point.

What are you up to next?
I’m developing a script based on a book—my mother’s book!—and that’s my first time doing that. So now I’m learning how to give notes and maybe how to produce, since that’s something I’d like to do in my life, producing. So that’s been fun and exciting and challenging. Works a new part of your brain as an actor; I’m enjoying being asked how I think something should go, or what I think is best for a film or a story. [Laughs] It’s an interesting process, and I’m very much enjoying that challenge. Movies are impossible to get made, but we’ll see what happens.