I am not a man in middle age, but I imagine that there is broad consensus among middle-aged men that it would be a bad idea to date your best mate’s (adult) daughter. Not that this stops Jemaine Clement’s titular lead in Alice and Steve, the taboo-prodding new Disney Plus comedy from Sophie Goodhart, in which 52-year-old Steve falls for Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith), the daughter of Alice (Nicola Walker), who also happens to be 26 years his junior. From start to finish, the relationship is a car crash, its ripple effects felt as far and wide as the shockwave from an atomic bomb: Alice soon makes it her business to ruin Steve’s life, there’s the obligatory dinner party that ends in disaster, and at one point, Steve’s beloved dog wolfs down a baggy of cocaine. No one is safe.
It’s less about the age gap, which the show approaches with surprising nuance; it’s even a little subversive, with Izzy, the younger woman, leading the romantic charge. It’s more about the betrayal that Alice feels at Steven’s hands — the fact that he is so quickly willing to pursue a relationship that he knows will hurt his life-long best friend, and yet does so anyway. The result is a catastrophic comedy of errors, made funnier still by the sheer invention of the expletive combos and insults that Alice forges for her former bestie. (Among them, early in the second episode: “You are a piggy-eyed, big-nosed, ugly fucking paedo loser, and I hope you fall out of your fucking window and get pierced in the heart by your railing, and that no one comes to your funeral.” Bit harsh to call him a paedo, but I digress: magnificent.)
Throughout it all, a terrific Clement teems with neuroses, hilariously bumbling and awkward, the portrait of a middle-aged crisis in action, traits that his character’s younger muse finds bizarrely endearing rather than… well, incredibly lame. In the week before Alice and Steve hits streaming, Clement and I chat over Zoom. We talk age gaps, kissing scenes, Gen Z, further reunion plans for his musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, and his first big blockbuster gig.
GQ: You and Yali Topol Margalith have some knotty material to work through together here. What kind of conversations did you have about that?
Jemaine Clement: Yali and I became mates very quickly, and got on really well, so we didn’t have to work on a rapport. But we did have an intimacy coordinator for the scenes where… They’re not sex scenes, but they’re intimate — kissing scenes, stuff like that. And that’s quite laid out on the script. Where we kiss, it’s quite descriptive. Sometimes it’s not, it’s just “they kiss,” or “she leans in, and smells him.” It’s all quite thought out.
What conversations did you have about the age gap of it all? I personally kind of oscillate between thinking, Oh, people are being prudish, but there is a power dynamic at play, right? Especially with an older man and a younger woman.
I know that [writer] Sophie thought about it, and that’s why Yali’s character Izzy initiates anything romantic. In Steve’s mind, he wouldn’t dream of making a move on her. It’s obvious to him that she’s pretty. But he’s kind of surprised by it, and it’s more appealing to him because of that. Also, it’s well established that she’s smarter [and] more successful than him in some ways. He’s got money, but she’s doing a master’s degree; Alice makes a good point that Steve didn’t go to university, and stuff like that. She’s highlighting the ways in which Izzy is more successful than him.
I wondered if there’s a little arrested development going on with both him and Alice.
I think there’s something true about Generation X: we’re the first postmodern generation, the generation of irony, who weren’t mature, who were laughing at everything, and didn’t really grow up. And now we’re faced with being in our 50s. It’s kind of come as a surprise, because we’ve never accepted ourselves as being old. My parents’ generation, when they were 30, they were old. When they were 20, they had the job they were gonna have for the rest of their lives. Our generation wouldn’t do that. But now what?
