If You Didn’t Like Michaela Watkins’ Performance, Please Don’t Tell Her

If you told me you didn’t like this article, I might not be able to handle it.

Well, maybe not if you told me. I don’t know you. You could simply have bad taste (the only excuse for not enjoying something I write), or you could be an internet troll. If a family member or a friend, however, let it slip that they didn’t think this was very good, I would spiral. I would exist under a cloud of despair, one which the sunshine may never pierce through again. The shadow of sadness would follow me around for so long, because someone didn’t like my article. Maybe, though, I’d eventually get over it.

But if my life partner, the person I love, who knows me better than anyone else, whose opinion I value and respect more than anything—if that person said he didn’t like something I wrote, I would lose it completely. I would question my talent, my worth, and maybe even my whole reason for existing, in a way that I may not recover from.

Welcome to my hypothetical emotional breakdown, triggered by the genius of Nicole Holofcener’s latest film, You Hurt My Feelings. The film, now in theaters, has been inciting similar rabbit holes of despair and heated discussions from moviegoers since it premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival. And, as I learned after talking with Michaela Watkins, who co-stars alongside Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the movie, the cast has endured the same soul-searching about relationships, the truth, betrayal, and ego.

“When it comes to filmmaking, we’ve been subjected to a lot in the last few years that has been really grandiose, full of really arch ideas, high concepts, and incredible violence and special effects,” Watkins tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “So many people have been saying to me since this came out, ‘I didn’t realize how much I missed these kinds of movies, where it’s just people talking to each other.’”

The beauty, pain, hilarity, and, sometimes, absurdity of that—of what happens when people who intimately know each other simply talk—is at the heart of You Hurt My Feelings.

Take that title alone: You Hurt My Feelings. The idea of that phrase, hurt feelings, can seem so trivial. Everyone’s feelings get hurt sometimes; what’s the big deal? But such a thing can be seismic for a person. Just how much gravity those hurt feelings are owed—well, that’s what the film is about.

Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, an author and writing professor who is working on her new book and is self-conscious about the fact that her publisher doesn’t think the draft is quite right. Beth and her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), are a married couple with an adult son, whose comfort with each other and, at times, codependency could be seen as envy-inducing, for partners who have been together for as long as they have.

So when Beth accidentally overhears Don casually mentioning that he doesn’t think her new book is very good, it’s as if an anvil has fallen, squashing everything about her life as she knows it to smithereens: her self-worth, her trust in her husband, and her happiness.

She wallows and confides in her sister, Watkins’ Sarah, who has her own experience negotiating just how honest to be with her spouse about his work: Her husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), is an actor with a fragile ego, whose performances she uniformly praises, regardless of quality, because it’s just easier than being honest.

Should Beth be so upset about this, they wonder? Her writing is a pivotal part of who she is; if her husband, her other half, doesn’t respect that work, then how could she ever feel that he respects her? Moreover, if he had been keeping his impression of her new book a secret, has he also quietly thought that all of her writing has been bad? There are hurt feelings, sure. But it’s also an existential crisis.

There’s no right or wrong answer to any of those questions—which is probably why, as Watkins has discovered since the film has been released, those who have seen it can’t stop talking about it. In fact, being able to think so deeply about something that could be considered so granular, inconsequential, or even petty has, for many people—herself included—been a pleasure.

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“We’re living in really ridiculous times,” she says. “It does feel like we’re in 1930s Berlin in some ways, so why would we be talking about ‘hurt feelings’ at a moment when we’ve got such macro problems facing us? I understand that this can absolutely feel incredibly trite. At the same time, we are here. We’re in our bodies. We relate to each other. I think Nicole Holofcener is an incredible observer of the micro ways in which we impact each other all the time. I think that deserves scrutiny and meditation.”

After all, she says, “Maybe we have bigger things to conquer, but why be a human if we can’t kind of have curiosity about our psyches?”

To Tell the Truth…

Watkins’ journey to You Hurt My Feelings was about 15 years in the making.

For years, the actress has been a reliable critics’ favorite. After being cast on Saturday Night Live in 2008, where she spent one season, she appeared in projects like Wanderlust, Trophy Wife, New Girl, Enlightened, and Catastrophe, whirling through each like a tornado of scene-stealing comedy. Her quieter storm, though, proved just as powerful. Her starring role in the Hulu series Casual showed off her full range of talent, leading to memorable turns in Lynn Shelton’s indie Sword of Trust and Hulu’s limited series The Dropout.

But the first “fun gig of my career,” she says, was in Louis-Dreyfus’ Emmy-winning comedy, The New Adventures of Old Christine. In 2008, Watkins was cast as a love interest for Hamish Linklater’s character, Matthew, the brother of Louis-Dreyfus’ “Old Christine.” “That’s when [Julia and I] realized that we kind of look alike,” she says.

Before Watkins left the show, because she landed the SNL gig, the series capitalized on that likeness, with an episode in which she and Louis-Dreyfus were dressed and styled the same, freaking out Matthew, who realized he was essentially dating his sister.

Watkins first worked with Holofcener on 2013’s Enough Said. She played the woman at a party who introduced Louis-Dreyfus’s character to James Gandolfini’s, kicking off the unlikely romance that was at the center of the film. It was a thrilling opportunity: working with Holofcener, a filmmaker she admired, alongside Louis-Dreyfus, an acting hero who had become a repeat co-star. But there was one problem. The coverage of the scene ended up “wonky,” and Holofcener ended up cutting it down significantly.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Talks ‘Nasty’ Reviews, ‘Seinfeld’s’ Divisive Finale, and More

“She said, ‘I promise to make it up to you,’” Watkins remembers. “And then she did.”

When Holofcener first talked with Watkins about You Hurt My Feelings, Watkins immediately flashed back to the lookalike scenes from Old Christine. “Does Julia’s character have a sister?” she asked. At the time, the character of Sarah was just a friend of Beth’s. Plus, Holofcener told Watkins, who was living in Los Angeles, it would be a New York shoot that she couldn’t hire Watkins for anyway. At least that was the case until Watkins flew herself to New York and put herself up, so she could be considered a local hire. Then Holofcener told her, “By the way, I took your advice. I made you guys sisters.”

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Looking back on the shoot, Watkins is tickled at the idea that, for a few months, she got to channel what it’s like to be in her husband’s shoes. Her husband, Fred Kramer, is someone she jokes is “a civilian, not an actor-y, artist-y person.” In You Hurt My Feelings, it’s her character who is the level-headed spouse, forced to be the cheerleader and support system for a neurotic actor.

She thought about “how easy it is for [my husband],” she says. “He just gets to be cool and calm, while I freak out. Now I really understand that. I’ve always suspected that he only gets to be the cool, calm guy because I’m freaking out about something. If my husband in the movie, Arian Moayed’s character, wasn’t losing his mind over stuff, I would probably step in and lose my mind over things instead.” Every relationship is a balance.

Given one of the central questions of You Hurt My Feelings, then—just how honest should you be with a creative person about what you think of their work—it must have been surreal to be an actor in the film, show it to your partner, and then try to decipher what they truly felt about it. Would they lie? Would they spare your feelings?

Because he’s not in the business, Watkins says, her husband “doesn't understand the incredible urgency after he sees something to tell me immediately how it was.”

Watkins wasn’t able to make one of the first screenings of the film because she was working, but Kramer attended. When he got back from it, the first thing he said to Watkins was, “Do we have any more of those green beans left from last night?”

Watkins eyes bulge out of her head as she retells this. “I was like, ‘Hi! That was the fucking movie! What did you think!?’”

While he may not understand the need for immediacy, “when he does talk, I believe him,” Watkins says. “He said, ‘I think that this is maybe Nicole’s best movie yet.’” She laughs. “But he said it with the same sort of intensity as, ‘Do we have any more of those green beans left over?’”

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