Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, the Babes Babes, on Motherhood and Poop
“There is so little art out there that uses what is uniquely a woman’s experience as hard comedy.”
This article contains mild spoilers.
As far as movie titles go, Babes has multiple meanings. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau play the eponymous babes — free-spirited yoga instructor Eden and domestically overwhelmed dentist Dawn, longtime best friends who speak in rapid-fire jokes — but their characters also have tiny babes of their own. Or, in Eden’s case, she’s about to, thanks to a promising meet-cute that results in an unexpected pregnancy. Her hookup, Claude (Stephan James), dies in a freak accident before she can tell him she’s with child. Despite Dawn’s best intentions, she can do only so much to support Eden through the experience: She has a family of her own, and there’s too much breast pumping and not enough sleeping happening in her Upper West Side brownstone. But this is a friendship comedy above all else. By the end, Eden and Dawn confirm that, despite the men, children, and balding obstetricians in their lives, they are each other’s top babe.
Glazer and Buteau, who came of age on New York’s comedy scene, have the same easy rapport offscreen. Glazer became a mother in 2021 and Buteau in 2019, which makes Babes personal for both of them, especially Glazer, who co-wrote the script with Broad City collaborator Josh Rabinowitz. The women know a thing or two about their characters’ trials, including unpredictable bodily secretions, nipples that look like melted Tootsie Rolls, infant poop, and a crippling sense that youth has officially ended. Glazer recruited the great Pamela Adlon to direct the film — it’s Adlon’s first project since Better Things ended its five-season run in 2022 — and after a warm premiere at South by Southwest in March, Babes is now spring’s sunniest big-screen comedy.
You’ve been friends for a long time. What’s your origin story?
Ilana Glazer: We don’t remember! We used to do stand-up for drink tickets, so we were definitely on the juice when we met.
Michelle Buteau: You’d do two, three shows in a night. Maybe we met in, like, the back row of The Improv. Who knows? I go by aura. She had a very pleasant aura, and I loved to see her every time. It’s a little blackout, but you remember the feeling.
IG: Michelle is magnetic, magnanimous. If you’re smart enough, you’re just moving toward her, sort of like when a flying saucer comes down to Earth and the light takes you. She’s big-hearted. We’ve been trained for so long to think that cutting people down and insulting them is what comedy is, and it really isn’t. It’s like a cheat code. We were on the same wavelength.
Ilana, the last movie you made about pregnancy and motherhood, False Positive, was far less upbeat. Was there something about becoming a parent yourself that allowed you to take a sweeter, sunnier approach to the topic?
IG: Yes. False Positive absolutely encapsulates my fears about becoming a parent, but also my fears about entering the medical system as a female-bodied individual. That movie is about medical misogyny. So far, women don’t have protections around it. You have to be in government to protect your body from the government, so it’s vulnerable to enter the medical system pregnant. I think I started knowing I wanted to be a parent around 27, but I didn’t do it until I was, like ,33. I just taped my hour of stand-up, and the theme of it is, I am shocked by the joy of this experience. It’s total ecstasy. It’s also incredibly hard, messy, frustrating. You can beat yourself up. You feel distant from your partner in ways you didn’t realize you would, and you have to work in new ways to find each other again. It’s dark at times, but, damn, the light shines brighter than I’ve ever seen in my life.
Michelle, you’re nodding.
MG: If there was a donation basket, I’d put some money in it.
Was it always clear that Eden’s hookup would disappear from the story? The Stephan James sequence is so charming and invigorating, and there’s another version of this movie where they figure out the baby situation together.
IG: Stephan’s character is based on the late, great Kevin Barnett, my mutual best friend with Josh Rabinowitz, who was an endlessly creative comedian and person. He was a musician and a stand-up and a showrunner and a writer and a producer and an actor, and he died in 2019. I think life and death are two sides of the same coin, and what’s in Babes are the absurd moments that come when you’re a parent. You may have thought something was gross — you know, literal poop — and now I’m like, Am I into scat humor? But then somehow that moment is also the most beautiful thing. It’s this dichotomy. It was absurd to lose our best friend, who was such a lively person, and creating a story where we got to make his baby was really meaningful and therapeutic for us. The romance then shifts to Eden and Dawn. I didn’t think I would ever kill a character off, but then seeing how death can happen when you don’t expect it is the basis behind Claude.
That’s a lot more profound and ruminative than I was anticipating. I assumed it was just a device to focus the plot around the friendship.
MB: Between Broad City and everything else, there’s a lot of terms that are thrown around, like raunchy and in your face. But Ilana is mindful and soulful and thinks about everything. You have to be very skilled to make it look this easy.
What was the first scene the two of you shot together?
MG: It’s like how we met — I’m blacking out. Together? Because I was doing, like, milking things first.
IG: We started at the house in Harlem with the lactation consultant and Marty. That house is six feet wide, and we have 30 people with giant equipment sweating their balls off in a heat wave. And you can’t have air conditioning on when you film because it bumps the sound. In that scene where I interrupt Marty and Dawn fighting, I was breaking so much because of Hasan’s face. He was like a fourth-grader who grew up to be a dad, and I could see in him what we all feel as parents, where it’s like, I’m not really an adult. I don’t have the answer. And Michelle as Dawn is so overloaded with the swirling imbalance of life and work. I was struggling to hold the tension because I felt like I was really interrupting this couple fighting.
MB: It was so funny, too, because you had the noisiest bag of chips.
There’s an art to making the rat-a-tat dialogue in Babes sound realistic. Did it take time to find the rhythm of Eden and Dawn’s speech?
MB: I think just being from New York and Jersey, this is how we speak to each other. This is our language. When I’m watching this movie, I’m just like, Oh, we look like we’re from Queens.
IG: For Josh and me to find the most real way these two women would talk to each other was hilarious to us. I produced the movie with Susie Fox and Josh, and as we were writing, Susie was really embodying the role of Dawn. She had two little ones, and Josh and I were each pregnant with the kids we were about to have. We didn’t write it with anybody in mind, and then we’re being sent lists of actresses. They were all talented, but they were actresses who could guarantee the budget back or whatever. It brings me back to Mitt Romney talking about binders full of women — a flattening, dehumanizing currency. The process is so unsexy to me, and in the middle of the night, I wake up and I’m like, Michelle Buteau. And Susie, Josh, and I could not stop thinking about her. After her 23 years of experience, I think we’ve done all the homework we ever could to be prepared to simply be free and trust ourselves.
Give me an example of a Pamela Adlon note.
MG: It was the birthday for Marty. I was always like, “Here we go with the birthday cake!” And she said, “No. You’re tired. You’re done. You’re slow. You have not thought about yourself at all. Go up the banister and just slowly look and stare.” There was something so relaxing about it because I don’t give myself license to do that at home. I go sit on the toilet for me time, but this was like, “Show it in front of your kids.” She had these nuggets of nuance. We didn’t need multicam Michelle.
IG: As a director, Pamela is such a champion of actors. In my career so far, that’s always been the most indulgent thing because you’re writing and producing and emailing people, like, “Can you get back to us on the mishegoss?” I worked with an acting coach on this movie, Aaron Himelstein, and I was so excited to have Pamela, who seems to use acting as therapy. Before the girls have their swollen rom-com reunion, my character is vulnerable. She’s heading to the hospital, about to have her baby, and doesn’t know what she’s in for and what her support network is going to be. Pamela gave me this story about a time in which she was heartbroken in her life, and it gave me this orb of energy to take into the scene. It worked.
Was this the first time you’d worked with an acting coach?
IG: I’ve worked with an acting coach before, but we can say it was pretty much the first time because he was so good. I mean, he was an actor as a kid, and he’s been in this business for a long time. Since I co-wrote the script, he helped me remove myself and understand what I had unconsciously intended. I needed someone else to help me see it.
MB: It’s the reason why whoever’s cooking Thanksgiving dinner is not hungry anymore. You can work so hard on the process. I have an awesome coach for my show Survival of the Thickest, and when I tell my friends to get a coach and they say they don’t need one, I’m like, “Professional athletes have more than one coach.”
IG: It’s almost like a therapist for your role, or a professor.
What was it like to master the physical comedy of the pregnancy suits?IG: I have such chills just thinking about it. The pregnancy suits are hilarious. The older I get, and especially with the experience of becoming a parent, the more I can genuinely take pleasure in the process as the reward. The laboring was so funny. There is so little art out there that uses what is uniquely a woman’s experience as hard comedy. If we do that, then we are excluding a group that doesn’t like to be excluded. To watch my friend of 20 years do what only she can do was so rewarding. I was beaming like a Jewish mom.
MB: I don’t know if you know this, but in the restaurant scene in the beginning, the waiter is Josh Rabinowitz. It was so wacky and wild to be like, “What are you, the Gordon Ramsay of my pussy?” I just threw stuff at him.
IG: And we had so few takes on this movie, like two takes. We shot this movie in 25 days, and we had Michelle for 15. Luckily, Michelle Buteau is like a comedy Terminator because she was throwing tags and alts out of every hole.
Michelle, any you’re particularly proud of?
IG: I do love “When I say ‘baby,’ you say ‘moon’!” But the best part about working with Ilana is that even when I’m doing a run about how disgusting my nipples are, she’s like, “Yay!” It’s a joy.
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