“I am Mae Martin.” The first person to tell me this was not the real Mae Martin, but an itinerant farm worker and sometime model I met on a photoshoot in Derbyshire last summer. To that fidgety nonbinary millennial, the name had become equivalent to an identity; they explained that they hadn’t ever recognised themself in a public figure so precisely. When I recount this to the real Mae Martin, they nod – flattered, but unsurprised. They get it a lot. “I am Mae Martin,” they recite, adopting the role of an overidentifying fan.
The real Mae Martin is a Canadian-British comedian, best known for Feel Good, the semi-autobiographical comedy-drama which they wrote and starred in, playing a version of themselves with exaggerated jitteriness and self-destructive tendencies. The character Mae Martin grapples with the magnitude of a youth spent misusing drugs, prolongs an angsty adolescent relationship with their unnervingly self-contained mother (played brilliantly by Lisa Kudrow), begins a passionate romance with a “straight girl” and confronts the residual trauma of being cajoled into underage sex, then gaslit on the matter of consent. Not all these experiences will be familiar to every viewer, but Mae’s fraught, messy attempts at coping are highly relatable. Each time Mae says something like, “I don’t even know what that means…” it grants viewers permission to be confused, too.
Martin is sitting on a sofa in the library room at Shoreditch House, dressed in black sweats (“athleisure,” they snark in self-disapproval), propped up by multiple cushions to alleviate the soreness of a shoulder muscle they pulled laughing. When I bring up the cliché of reviews that describe talented new artists and writers as arriving fully formed, Martin blurts, “Yeah, I am not fully formed.”
The first season of Feel Good, produced by Channel 4 in the UK in 2020, was propelled by a raw energy. Netflix picked up the show for a second season the following year, just as Martin was more closely contemplating gender in their private life, and the character Mae began to write themself. By the episode in which Mae is addressed as “sir”, sending them stumbling towards self-acceptance as nonbinary – or something post-nonbinary – the television screen might as well be shattering. It’s as if the script is playing out in real life in real time. It’s extraordinary to witness. Or, as I put it to Martin, “What the fuck?”
“Yeah, totally what the fuck,” Martin says brightly. “I don’t think I anticipated that would happen. It’s just through writing it in lockdown, without all the outside feedback and distraction, I did a lot of thinking about gender. Also – in season one, if you introduce a character who has questions about gender and identity, then narratively, you think, oh, well they should resolve that in season two. But then you’re like, oh, but I haven’t resolved that. So you end up doing a lot of introspection and exploration. It really was in real time. It’s funny now looking back – when I talk about the character I say ‘they.’ Because I’m like, well they didn’t know they were they. But they were.”
Late last year, Martin had top surgery. There were only a couple of weeks to recover, over Christmas at their parents’ place in Toronto, before getting back to work as an actor, filming a new role in the second series of HBO’s The Flight Attendant. (“It’s like explosions and gunfights. It’s juicy. Totally out of my comfort zone.”) Martin had been binding their chest during the initial period of filming, so continuity wasn’t an issue post-surgery. “It’s so not the most interesting thing about me,” Martin is quick to point out. “It’s just one facet of who I am. But I know also that visibility is super important. So it’s always a [question of] oversharing and over-focusing on something that’s ultimately just one small part of me.”
The thing is, even a tiny part of ourselves, if neglected or painful, can become overwhelming. Taking the time to tend to that aspect can have significant implications. After top surgery, Martin became freer: able to, for instance, enjoy modelling menswear for GQ. As they put it, “I feel more relaxed about photoshoots as I feel more connected to myself.”
The prevailing tendency in pop culture is to depict gender variance as an avant-garde aesthetic, whereas Martin has a them-next-door vibe: they’re clear-eyed and ultra-blond, a fan of Radio 1 bangers and ballads, dressed in Adidas and Carhartt, likely to compare themselves to Bart Simpson or confess an affinity with Niall from One Direction. We discuss our mutual love of Haim and the 1987 Goldie Hawn screwball comedy Overboard, and how not everything has to be about queer enclaves. “I relate to Titanic,” they confide. “That’s a very straight story.” (Whenever a photographer asks what look they’re going for, Martin replies, “young Leonardo DiCaprio.”)
Ultimately, though, “It’s so frustrating that so much of identity is about comparison,” Martin says. “I just feel like myself. I don’t even feel nonbinary. I just wake up, have a coffee and go to work.”
When Martin speaks about the friction of other people’s projections, they tend to use the verb bump. As in bumping up against. Watching their older stand-up routines – Martin is only 35 but has been performing for more than two decades – I detect hesitation each time they refer to themself as a girl or woman. Martin nods. “It always bumps for me. And because things were written about me, about my comedy, from in my teens – so then you’re trying to figure out who you are, but you have headlines like Lesbian, Canadian and Female Comedian…things that are influencing how you see yourself.” With the label lesbian, Martin says, “I’ve always pushed back on that.” For starters, it erases their bisexuality.
Lockdown was a personally generative period for Martin, finding themself out from “under a microscope” and the burden of continually defining themself socially. “I love to be alone,” Martin says. “I feel like I need a good percentage of my life to just sit and play the guitar and write and think.” Recently, they penned a song called “I Lost My Keys”. I remain intrigued by the goofy title, having refrained from prying further because music is what Martin does to relax: “It’s nice to do something creative that I’m not trying to monetise.” Martin may eventually decide to put the track out. For now, I’m left to imagine the panic and frustration conveyed in the lyrics of “I Lost My Keys” – with that knack Martin has of sharing something specific, maybe weird, possibly banal, and finding it connects on a universal level.
Comedy requires other bodies. The philosopher Henri Bergson proposed, “You could hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others.” He wrote, “Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.” The social aspect is integral to Martin’s newest hour-long stand-up, Sap. It’s a nostalgic affair, a jumble of discovery, alienation and shame, reminding the audience of puerile bath-time temptations, pubescent party mishaps, early days of the World Wide Web, daft tattoos and a pro-trans analysis of Beauty and the Beast. It’s the stuff that people, especially Martin’s fellow millennials, know but didn’t exactly notice, or haven’t thought about for years.
And though it’s taken a long time to shake off the interpretations of other people, at the same time, the confidence required to do so benefits from forging connections with other other people. Martin lights up when recounting the giddy, schoolboy-ish camaraderie they shared with creative partner Joe Hampson while writing Feel Good: “We’d plank. We’d do press-ups. We’d throw balls around. I got into asking him for gum and then throwing it out of the window. We got told off a lot.” Employees of the production company offices would remind them, “You can’t rock on the chairs.”
Hampson and Martin are now at work on two films in which their neurotic, quotidian sensibility is dropped into beloved genres (specifically rom-com and thriller, the latter entitled Gene). Martin is also in development on a teen thriller-comedy series with Netflix. Their imagination, it’s evident, is in high gear. Our conversation quickens when we discuss the narrative possibilities and namecheck genre-fluid movies like Shaun of the Dead, crowdpleasers that playfully layer the familiar with the unexpected.
Another philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, defined the comic as the disjuncture between what we had expected versus what we actually experience. He called this a “contradiction.” But when we’re not on the stage but in the street, being someone who defies expectations can make social interactions harrowing. Take the undue burden placed on gender nonconforming youth, expected to placate the surprise they elicit in those they encounter. “You’re like, why is everyone reading me this way? I remember middle-aged women forcing me out of the girls’ changing room when I was ten, because I had my towel around my waist and short hair. And being so confused, because I don’t feel like I want to go to the men’s changing room, and I don’t feel like I’m safe in the girls’ changing room. So I remember just sitting there with wet hair, in between the two changing rooms. It was like the perfect metaphor…the chlorine drying on my skin and waiting for my dad to come out of the men’s changing room.”
Martin adds, “But yeah. People are so…it’s always about other people’s anxiety around it.”
There’s a hackneyed adjective often deployed to describe challenging storytelling: unflinching. In Martin’s writing and acting, the flinch is actually at the heart of things. The character Mae has a uniquely wide-eyed flinch, as well as a tendency to clear their throat, scurry, twitch, evade. Mae panics viscerally, as if drowning. Yet they also attempt to connect with other characters – hugging, trusting, doubting, bumping up against and learning about themself through the collisions. “What I liked about writing the other characters in Feel Good is you get to have that central character try out different methods of dealing… recommendations from other characters that often don’t work,” Martin explains. “And you’re just trying different things on for size.” Mae demonstrates the kind of openness to suggestion that can lead us to enlightenment, but can also trip us up disastrously. In their personal life, Martin ruminates, “Sometimes you wonder if your whole personality is just a combination of coping mechanisms and adjustments that you made several decades ago.”
A label that Martin does self-identify with: comedian. Moving from Canada to England for a year as a child – “in Oxford near a big, muddy field where I could see badgers and rabbits; it was pretty magical” – their latent performer came to the fore. “I was eight and I would dispense tickets at lunch, and then do a show for the other eight-year-olds. It was just me doing press-ups, or Ace Ventura impersonations or Bette Midler songs. But I swear people were into it, and I loved it.”
Back in Toronto, Martin began going to, then gigging at, comedy clubs at the age of 13. “It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen – I loved all the drama and the interpersonal, and wanted to be part of that.” Hearing this, I admit that before we met, I’d been speculating that their younger self would’ve been drawn to the craft of comedy while alienated by the backstage scene. “Oh, no! It was purely the social that appealed to me at first, I think.”
But surely these clubs, besides being the sexiest, were also pretty sexist? “Comedy is such a good microcosm of society,” Martin says. “Especially touring, you sense where people are at with cultural ideas. So when I started, I’d be following guys who would… go up and be homophobic or whatever and get a laugh – and then you’d go up after that. But now I think things really have changed where I don’t think you would get a laugh anymore in your average comedy club for being homophobic.”
Martin’s comedy is self-deprecating and gently philosophical, a far cry from the long-reigning standard of ranty monologues spewed by disaffected dudes. Martin allows earnestness in, as opposed to, as they put it, performing in sunglasses. In the noughties, one of Martin’s heroes, Sarah Silverman, adopted an ironic persona – a squeamish, ignorant proto-Karen – as a way to smuggle in a social critique, but still fit in with the bilious stand-up culture of the moment. Martin admires how Silverman has more recently stated that comedy is not evergreen: “As society evolves and changes there’s things you just wouldn’t say now, and you just have to keep listening and evolving. It’s not that hard to not be offensive.”
Currently, the loudest voices from the comedy circuit are those bellowing about censorship, something Martin finds disingenuous. “It’s so interesting that it’s become this lens. I guess it’s because there’s this wider debate about cancel culture, about ‘wokeness’. That now you can’t talk about comedy without talking about what you’re allowed to say. But it’s sort of not true – because you are still allowed to say whatever you want. There’s just going to be a reaction.”
This is linked to what Martin calls “immediate feedback” – the reciprocal relationship with an audience in figuring out which jokes resonate. “I’m lucky that I don’t mind bombing,” Martin says. “If anything I kind of love it. And I love watching people bomb. There’s something so heroic about somebody not landing a joke.”
Martin is in love with the live nature of stand-up – its ephemerality in contrast with a television show which stays terrifyingly etched in stone. They’ve resisted rewatching Feel Good so as not to pick up on “a million little things” they would do differently, and mention they’d like a do-over of their young adult book Can Everyone Please Calm Down? A Guide to 21st Century Sexuality that was published in 2019.
I email later to ask what they’d change. “I guess a big change would be that I’m nonbinary, and my feelings about my own gender have evolved since I wrote it. So I’d probably delve into that a little more,” Martin replies. “I would also probably have refrained from using my high school crush’s full name because I think it freaked her out. Sorry, Katie.”
Mae Martin may not be fully formed, but they are self-determined, more so now than ever before. “I’m at a place now where…” They take a moment to place their specific experience within the context of wider cultural currents. “All the conversation is focused around pronouns and things like that, and I’m like, however you read me is fine. I know how I read myself. It’s funny when I hang out with my friends’ kids, so many of them refer to me as he instinctively and intuitively. And I’m like whatever. I’d love for us to reach a point where gender didn’t have to be the defining aspect of our identity, but we’re far from that.”
In late January, at an early performance of their show Sap at the Los Angeles club Dynasty Typewriter, Martin interrupted a sequence on colonial constructions of gender with the caveat that they felt simultaneously reluctant to dwell on the topic of gender yet compelled to talk about it – because everyone else is. Martin began to pace rather than bounce; the discomfort was still trademark Mae Martin, but also signalled how being under the trans umbrella seems to place people under obligation to speak out politically. Through a nervous laugh, Martin ad-libbed a line about preaching to the choir.
I found myself wondering if this was an instance in which the real Mae Martin wouldn’t mind if the material bombed. As if the “ideal feedback” to get from audiences one day would be: we get it, it’s cool, you can move on to talking about other things.
Photography by Heather Glazzard
Makeup and hair by Jackie Saundercock using IT Cosmetics and 111 Skin, Living proof and GHD tools
Styling by Nathan Henry
Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of Gay Bar: Why We Went Out.
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