Rachel Bloom Is Confronting Hecklers, Pet Mortality and Cosmic Indifference … With Song
Rachel Bloom has never shied away from confronting big, dark topics with music. It’s kind of her thing. The writer and actress, who first wooed the internet with the viral music video for her track “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury,” spent four seasons examining mental illness and identity with song and dance on her deep (and deliriously funny) CW musical comedy: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
After the series ended in 2019, the shit hit the fan. 2020 was rough for just about everybody, but Bloom had a particularly hard go of it. After giving birth to her first child in the initial wave of the pandemic, her daughter went right into the NICU. Then, her friend and longtime song-writing partner Adam Schlesinger died of COVID-19 complications. Death, both the threat and reality of it, were suddenly top of mind. So when she began to rethink an already-planned one-woman show on the other side of things, she wrote a part for the grim reaper itself.
Bloom has already performed Death, Let Me Do My Show on stages across the U.S., delivering comic and often crude songs that help her digest humanity’s cruel cosmic journey. It hits its widest audience yet when it premieres, in comedy special form, on Netflix. Death, Let Me Do My Special, directed by Seth Barrish and produced by Matthew Vaughan and Rotten Science, drops Oct. 15. So when Bloom recently jumped on a Zoom, she talked about bringing the show to the screen, her evolving relationship with Hollywood in the years since Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and how hecklers, both real and planted, help her stay in the moment when she’s onstage.
At the risk of attempting to therapize you out of the gate, what do you think it says about you that what’s at least billed as your one-woman show is actually a two-hander with another performer?
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I mean, if you read it badly, it could be a confidence thing. (Laughs.) But I like surprising people — and the idea of death being a heckler. Death and grief feel like a heckler ruining your life. That was an idea that I had early on, but we went through so many iterations of this. The heckler was partially inspired by some of my experiences in writers rooms with men who use comedy as a way to assert dominance over other people. If I think of who’s my inner critic, it’s those guys. So the idea is about me engaging not only with an existential heckler but also with my inner critic. Death is quite mean to me in the show. So if I were to therapize that, there is perhaps a part of that character that’s laughing at me before you can laugh at me.
There’s a good minute or so where the audience assumes you’re engaging with an actual heckler, not your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-star David Hull playing the character of Death. Was that uncomfortable in the room?
It’s really uncomfortable — especially because of the country we live in. We had him alone, dressed in all black, wearing a black baseball cap. Whoever’s playing death knows that for the first 50 seconds they’re introduced, they are going to be hated by the audience. After attending one show, my husband’s cousin was like, “Oh, I was about to go beat that guy up.” Nothing ever happened, of course, and the premise isn’t to make people uncomfortable — but the premise is Death is a heckler. Live, it used to be strung out a little longer. I really tried to make the audience feel like it was real, but it was weird and uncomfortable.
Did you ever have actual hecklers?
I don’t know what’s happening in Boulder, [Colorado,] but we had a couple issues there. The first night, toward the end where the show gets more serious, someone yells, “I thought the show was going to be funny!” Unironically! I tried to work with it. Then the guy goes, “Tell a joke!” So I stopped the show and told the audience, “I understand that all of you think this is a plant, but this is just a fucking asshole. Please leave.” They still kind of thought he was a plant. The second night in Boulder, when we revealed Death, someone just stood up and starts filming him. I went, “Excuse me, what are you doing?” And he was like, “I’m filming him.” I asked why and he goes, “Because he’s cute.” Boulder!
Are you unnerved in moments like that?
There was someone in the audience at a show in L.A. who had severe Tourette syndrome. Security was told, but I was not. This person’s version of Tourette’s was yelling, “I have a gun!” I stopped and her friend says she had Tourette’s and this would happen. The next thing she said was, “I’m stashing cocaine!” This kept happening throughout the show and then the final thing was to yell, “I’m faking Tourette’s.”
Well, were they?
No, I think she had a very specific kind of Tourette’s where she was yelling out almost the most inappropriate thing. I still have a lot of follow-up questions, believe me. But anyone who was at that show, it was really interesting because I had to stop everything and address these various outbursts. In that moment, I was doing all the math in my head: This is not a heckler. This is someone with Tourette’s. I don’t want to stigmatize them, but I have to keep moving on with this show. The audience and I went through an intense experience on that one.
Talking about your daughter being in the NICU and your friend dying makes this whole thing an intense experience for you, right?
That’s the thing! When you add in things like that, it gets even more visceral. Those are pretty intense heckling stories. But, for the most part, I like it. I don’t want to encourage people to heckle at my shows or attack me. But I like it when things go a little off-kilter. It keeps me alive in the moment and it reminds me that this will never happen again. Again, this is not me saying, “Please throw a cellphone at my face.”
Playing in New York and Los Angeles, going on tour, you’re going to meet a lot of your audience. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and so much of the narrative around the press you’ve done for it and since is about mental illness, depression, therapy. I think it’s fair to say people associate you with that, so I wonder if there’s any pressure that comes with it.
I find that, in person, people just want to tell me their stories. And because I’m known for being therapized, I’ve found those people are also therapized. There’s a confessional quality to it. My fans make me feel weirdly safe, because it’s like we’re all in therapy. But there is pressure. All I can do is be honest about my own experiences and be as nonjudgmental as I can. Even in the special, when I’m talking about being an atheist, what I’m really talking about is being a skeptic. I never say, “If you are religious, you’re an idiot.” I would love to believe in something! But I need proof. That’s what I need. All I can do is speak to my own observations and personal experience. I’m not an authority on anything.
On top of the grief of losing a friend and a collaborator, your songwriting process has obviously changed since Adam’s death. How are you navigating that?
I worked with different people, in different ways, on every song in the show to explore that very question: “What is my songwriting after Adam?” It’s something that I’m still exploring. Look, I wrote songs before Adam, but he was going to be my forever guy. Something tangible, that I am better at for having working with him, is that I used to subvert the rhyme in pursuit of the joke. With comedy songs, you want there to be a laugh-out-loud joke. If it rhymes, you’re often able to see that coming. But Adam was a stickler for rhymes in this wonderful, structural way. I’m much harder on myself now. I push myself to make things rhyme and be funny. That’s the standard.
When Crazy Ex-Girlfriend hit so big, critically, how did the response impact expectations for your own career — and then how did those expectations differ from the reality that followed?
We hit critically, but our ratings weren’t great. We were on The CW. We were a cult show, but we had the lowest ratings on network television — of every show. But we still had a show for four seasons. It was a weird cognitive dissonance of being a big deal and also not a big deal. I deal with that in my career even now. I was on this show, I won a bunch of fancy awards, but also I’m still auditioning for movies. The red carpet is not rolled out for me in the ways that you’d think when you hear someone has a Golden Globe and an Emmy.
Do you think Hollywood knows what do do with you?
Sometimes? I think it confuses people that I’m a creator who also really wants to act [in other projects]. Acting for acting’s sake is tough. It’s not that it feels more competitive than writing, but it does feel like there are more actors than writers. (Laughs.) So, for lead roles, it’s still projects that I’m writing for myself.
That idea of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend being a big deal and also not a big deal really interests me, because it feels like the type of show that is not allowed to exist anymore.
My daughter has gotten into listening to the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend music. My husband started playing her my songs when I was away, so we now have a child-safe playlist on Spotify without all the songs with curses. She calls it “mama music.” I am forced to listen to a lot of myself singing. If anyone passed my car, with the window open, they’d think that I was an egomaniac. But every time I listen to it, I think about how I can’t believe this got on TV. There’s a song called “Man Nap,” which is just about how men should nap. This was on The CW. It was a bunch of hotties and then us doing the dorkiest, most random stuff. If there are many Earths and universes, I do think this is the only one where Crazy Ex-Girlfriend gets made … and definitely not now. We got so lucky.
What is your daughter’s favorite song from the show?
She really loves “Oh My God I Think I Like You,” a filthy song! It begins with the lyric: “You’ve been tearing me up for a week and a half.” So we told her it was about someone who had adopted a baby bear. Then we stopped playing it for her. (Laughs.) I just got her into Ace of Base, which I’m very proud of.
You and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna had a few things in development after the show ended. Are you working on anything right now?
We’re always trying to work on something. She and I got really busy with respective things. There’s nothing coming down the pike from us at the moment, unfortunately.
This is two years ago now, but I don’t think I’ve read much of your take on Reboot being canceled after one season. That show seemed almost engineered to be a hit. Were you surprised things went the way they did?
We had little warnings, updates on the numbers. It premiered in this really unfortunate moment. I can’t speak to what was going on at Disney or 20th or Hulu, but I think there was some sort of crunch. The numbers weren’t stellar, which is fine — if you are a critical darling. And we got good reviews, but you didn’t see us hitting any flashy top 10 lists. It’s a shame. I think it was really funny. But because didn’t ascend to Abbott Elementary’s skyrocketing heights — and I should say that Quinta Brunson and the cast of Abbott were so supportive of it — I think [Disney] was waiting on the awards-y stuff. When that didn’t come, it doomed us. I was very surprised it didn’t get a second season. We all were.
Before I let you go, how is your dog? Your anxiety about her eventual death is one of the throughlines to the special.
She’s good! But she’d been throwing up a lot this past year. I thought she was just being gross. Dogs are nasty, right? But I asked a veterinary internist and she was like, “Uh, no. Get her checked out.” Turns out she has some sort of chicken allergy, so now we feed her a special hydrolyzed protein diet. She stopped throwing up. But she’s amazing, and she’s almost 15.
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