‘Carousel’ Marks a New Chapter for Jenny Slate — No Clowns Required

Rachel Lambert‘s sensitive and smart adult romance “Carousel” offers something rare, both to audiences and its performers: human drama that feels genuinely real and earned. The Sundance premiere stars Chris Pine and and Jenny Slate as a pair of estranged high school sweethearts, who reunite long into their adulthood and struggle to marry their long-simmering love for each other and the demands of everyday life.

The day after the film‘s premiere at the festival, Lambert, Pine, Slate, and co-star Abby Ryder Fortson visited the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, to chat about their film and the ways in which its deep-feeling story mirrors the kind of work they all want to do. For Slate especially, the film gave her the chance to step into a new chapter of her career.

“In general, the film is very different than any film that I’ve performed in,” Slate told IndieWire. “The characters are getting in their own way, sometimes they’re connected, sometimes they’re entangled, a lot of that is wonderful. But the romance, for me, is undeniable and it’s separate from its end result. ‘Will they or won’t they?’ That’s not what romance is. Romance is about a hunger in the heart and comforting someone in that way and feeding them in that way and finding that strange home with another. All of that, and it’s sexy.”

All of those elements combined to offer Slate the kind of role she feels like she’s just starting to be able to fully embrace. “I’m really happy to be at a point in my life, as a woman and as an actor, where I’m being asked to play people, who aren’t clowns and who have sex and who make mistakes and who are thinking things through and who have to listen well, or not,” the actress said. “I honestly just felt like, ‘Wow, I’m so fortunate that Rachel saw me as the person and Chris saw me as the person who could do this,’ because because I knew that I can, but I’m just starting to do that type of work and that felt great.”

Pine and Abby Ryder Fortson shared their similar feelings about the film and the unique roles it offered for two performers eagerly looking for something a little outside the box. The duo play a father and daughter whose obvious affection for each other is often at odds with his taciturn nature and her unresolved emotions surrounding her parents’ recent divorce.

‘Carousel’Courtesy of Sundance Institute

For Ryder Fortson, best known for her breakout role in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” Lambert’s script was a real rarity. “Especially as a young actor, a lot of the roles that I see out there for people my age are … ‘Oh, you’re someone’s daughter, you’re the lead characters’ kid, that’s what you are.’ You always a supporting [role] in their lives and [you’re] not always a character with your own full life,” the actress said. “What I love so much about Maya, and what I connected to originally two years ago when I first read the script, was that she was just a full being with her own fears and wants and dreams.”

She added, “I feel like learning how to take control of your own voice is something that really connected with me and is an arc that you don’t always see for a lot of younger people. It was a really lovely story to get to be a part of [and to] tell, someone overcoming their own anxieties to be able to find their power.”

As small town doctor Noah, Pine is tasked with feeling his way through a series of deeply relatable challenges, from changes at his office to raising his daughter to navigating a romance with Slate’s Rebecca. That was new for him, too, and just as refreshing.

The film is “sort about the daily tasks of life that have no more drama than what the daily tasks of life involve, and I certainly had never been offered a script like that, I’d never done a script like that, the language of the script is language that haven’t really tackled before,” Pine said. “My favorite word, the quotidian minutiae, you know like texting my daughter or having lunch with my daughter or talking to her about going on this program, they’re very, very like seemingly undramatic things that in its totality is dramatic, because this is the human experience. For the most part, we’re not all John Wicks, so I was really excited about that, trying to find the drama in the seemingly banal.”

Watch the complete conversation with the “Carousel” team in the video above.

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