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Actress and author Emily Hampshire has a lot on her plate lately. In addition to starring in The Roku Channel’s Slip, alongside writer-director-star Zoe Lister-Jones, she’s got a handful of other projects in the pipeline, including the “funny and smart” horror film Appendage, adapted from director Anna Zlokovic’s short of the same name, and Bloody Hell, a coming of age film about sex and sexuality.
She’s also the mind behind a brand-new graphic novel Amelia Aierwood: Basic Witch, a new creation featuring magic and teenage yetis that she describes as the “most amazing experience [she’s] ever had,” and I believe her when she says it. She’s wildly enthusiastic about everything she says, including her work with Lister-Jones on Slip, where she plays one of many spouses that the creator’s Mae encounters on her sex-fueled journey through the multiverse.
It’s hard not to grin ear to ear talking to her, as she talks about her work and her costars with such enthusiasm. It’s easy to see why she ends up as one of the highlights of a show packed to the brim with insane talent – her enthusiasm translates to the screen, even as she plays an overworked wife and mom of a toddler. In this interview, we broke down what it was like for her to work with Lister-Jones, and the kinds of things that informed her character, Sandy, that didn’t make it onto the screen. We also discussed Amelia Aierwood and the possibilities for the young witch’s world to expand, and why she loves working with new directors on interesting stories.
Check out the full interview, edited for clarity, down below, and stream Slip on The Roku Channel.
MAGGIE BOCCELLA: You were so funny in this show that is so incredibly funny overall. Your episode is probably my favorite out of all of them, and I wanted to know what made you want to get involved with something like this.
EMILY HAMPSHIRE: I was sent the scripts. I was sent all of them, which is a rare thing. You don’t usually get that. And I thought I was just going to read my episode, but I just binged them all. They were so good, so smart, so well written. I couldn’t believe that Zoe wrote all of them and that she was starring in it, directing it. It was just incredible, so I was like, “Yes, yes.”
It’s such a compulsively bingeable show, you don’t want to put it down. It’s insane. But obviously, you’re one of many spouses in this show, to put it a certain way. You’re playing a character who’s got this massive backstory to them, and this version of Mae and your character have a backstory. You never see that on screen, so was it all in the script, or did you have anything else to work with in terms of coming up with that backstory?
HAMPSHIRE: I did feel like there was so much in the script in our first meeting, like when Mae and Sandy first meet at the bar. It was an 11-page scene. I don’t know if it ended up that way, but there was so much backstory in that that it really informed me with this life. So yeah, I felt like it was a lot on the page, even though you didn’t see it happen. That was what was great about Zoe’s writing, too, is that everyone was a full person, not just a one-off character.
Did you have anything that you came up with personally that maybe didn’t make it into the final cut that you were keeping in the back of your head?
HAMPSHIRE: Oh, gosh. Well, there was stuff about…I don’t know, I can’t remember if this made it in, but there was a lot of stuff about Sandy being raised religious and that her father was a minister or something. I can’t remember if that even made it in, but that was something that I really thought a lot about, because being raised that way and then being a queer woman, there’s a conflict there that forms a human differently.
Yeah. I loved the whole…it was ridiculous in the way that you’re dealing with the kids screaming and everything at the birthday party, but it was so fresh and so natural, and both you and Zoe did such a great job with that. What was it like working with her specifically?
HAMPSHIRE: Yeah…again, I had no idea what to expect with her as a director or acting with her, and each stage of it, I was newly in awe. I just couldn’t believe how great a leader she was, not only with the cast but with the crew, and she was just so chill in a way that I don’t think I would be if I’d written this thing, directed it and was starring in it. I’d feel the pressure, and you’d never know it from her, so I was just constantly impressed and inspired.
I wanted to spin a little bit away from Slip to talk about your book that you wrote, Amelia Aierwood: Basic Witch, because that’s just come out. What has that experience been like? That’s obviously different from acting, so what has that been like, putting that out?
HAMPSHIRE: The most amazing experience I’ve ever had that I didn’t know I wanted. Just to be able to have something in your head and then have someone draw it, and then they make a stuffed animal of it. [She holds up a stuffed animal of one of her characters and laughs.] It’s the greatest thing that could ever happen to me. I am obsessed with these characters in this book, and I’ve never done book signings before, but to get to go and do these things and see these kids devouring this book before I’m finished [with] my Q&A, and then having these really intelligent questions about Spaghetti the Yeti, it’s just amazing.
Is that something you want to keep doing going forward? Keep making more of those?
HAMPSHIRE: Yeah. I want to do another one of these. To me, Amelia’s world was always a world that I wanted to turn into a show and into a musical and into an Amelia-verse, so that’s the dream.
I will say, I definitely want one of those little Spaghetti the Yeti stuffed animals now. That is adorable.
HAMPSHIRE: I know, and he’s a teenager so he has acne here. He’s Amelia’s brother who she accidentally turned into a Yeti, because she was trying to keep him warm but she’s bad at magic so she’s screwed it up. But he’s amazing. I love him so much.
I love him, and I love the graphic novel as well. But I wanted to talk a little bit about a different project that you did called Appendage, which has been screening at a couple of film festivals. Obviously, between that and Slip, you’re doing a lot of really interesting genre stuff that plays with the limits of what we can imagine. Is that something you’re interested in going forward, this sort of quirky genre stuff?
HAMPSHIRE: It’s funny, I feel like I’m just interested in a great story, and if they happen to be a genre one, amazing. But when I was doing Appendage, I was also doing this movie, Bloody Hell, that was a coming of age mother-daughter story that there’s no supernatural stuff in. And I just thought the script for Appendage was so funny and so smart, and then I watched the short of it that Anna Zlokovic did, and it’s brilliant. [And with] Appendage, even when they were finished with the movie, I found out they were looking for the voice, and I was like, “I want to be the appendage.” But I didn’t want Anna to feel like she had to cast me, so I sent in an audition, slipped it in, and so I’m the voice of the appendage now. It was just so special. I like working with a director, a new director, who has such a unique and specific vision. Especially a female director, it’s inspiring to me. So yeah, it’s a cool movie.
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