Actress, writer, director, producer, Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder, and Worldwide Orphans Foundation ambassador Amy Poehler is a popular dream BFF, and it’s no wonder. One of the “SNL” alumna’s best known roles is Leslie Knope, the feminist icon at the heart of NBC’s dearly departed “Parks and Rec.” And Poehler has long been outspoken in her own feminism. But in a candid new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she acknowledges that her views of gender equality are still evolving thanks to some self-reflection. “I’ve been trying to unpack my own deep institutionalized misogyny,” she says. “Our generation of women, Gen Xer women, we desexualized ourselves. And that stuff gets really ingrained. I grew up in a time where trying to sympathize or empathize with the male experience was how I was able to be included in the experience.”
The multi-hyphenate continues, “Women are constantly criticized for being too emotional. Can we be allowed to be as messy, as all over the place, as inconsistent, and as mediocre as men? Do we have to always be patient, special, nurturing, adaptable?”
Poehler’s feature directorial debut, female-led ensemble comedy “Wine Country,” hits Netflix May 10. The set saw Poehler “slowing everybody down, reminding them that they didn’t have to come in and score.” Describing the women starring in the comedy about long-time friends visiting Napa to celebrate a birthday as “assassins,” she explains that they “parachute in to other people’s movies and they’re the funniest part of the movie. They just kill. But many of them have not necessarily been in the entirety of a movie, with a continuing arc that we’re going to stick with.” The cast includes Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, Emily Spivey, Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, and Poehler herself.
“Unlike Coppola, I did not drive anybody to have a heart attack on the set,” Poehler jokes. “It was the anti-‘Apocalypse Now.'”
Being around talented and encouraging women is nothing new for Poehler, an exec producer on “Broad City,” “Russian Doll,” and “I Feel Bad.” “I’ve had the incredible good fortune of being around supportive, interesting women who are not looking to take each other down,” she emphasizes. “And I am a very competitive person. But it’s never in response or reaction to somebody else’s successes or failures. And the few times I’ve stepped into that world, on other projects, it’s very ‘Art of War,’ where I’ve laid down my shield very fast. It’s like, ‘Oh no, that’s not how I operate. I don’t work that way.’ And usually it’s very disarming because there are a lot of women who have had different experiences and rightfully don’t always trust the people they’re with.”
Poehler describes her next directing project, Riot Grrrl-inspired “Moxie,” as a “coming-of-rage story” which features “a lot of super young voices.” And collaborating with young voices encourages her to grow. Poehler describes, for example, how “Broad City” creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer influenced her thinking about how women choose to represent themselves and their bodies. “They’d be doing a scene where they would be cleaning an apartment in their underwear. And I’d be like, ‘You know you guys don’t have to be in your underwear.’ And they’d be like, ‘We wrote this,'” she recalls. “My generation was like, ‘Wear baggy clothes when you improvise, be one of the guys, don’t use your sexuality.’ And women younger than me are like, ‘Uh, my sexuality is my own, I can use it however I want. It’s one of the many things about me. And I’m in control of it.’ And it’s like, right, right, right, right, right.”
Head over to The Hollywood Reporter to see why Fey thinks Poehler is “taking the work of the women of early ‘SNL’ — Gilda Radner, Jan Hooks — to the next natural progression of being proactively, actively feminist in her work,” and to hear more from Poehler.
