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My mother once told me a story about falling through the ice when she was skating as a child on a pond that hadn’t properly frozen over. She said when she took her jeans off they stood up on their own because they were so completely frozen through.
That is how Shoshanna feels to me—like a pair of frozen jeans, a material that should not, but in this rare instance does, stand up completely on its own.
I like to joke that she came to being like Aphrodite, emerging fully formed from a seashell out of the ocean. When I made my audition tape, I did not prep beyond learning my lines. I ran those four pages over and over and over again until I could say them upside down and sideways and probably backwards, if put to the test. And then when I went to record my tape, I did a single take of the scene.
Sometimes when I’m really in the moment, it feels similar to how I’ve heard people describe rage blackouts. You remember the moment before and the moment you come to, but everything in the middle is a black void of nothingness. That’s what it was like: as if I, Zosia, went offline to make space for Shosh to take over for that period of time. She came out of me as if she had been a part of me forever, lying dormant, just waiting for the time to arrive when she could come alive. Like a ghost possessing my body. I just had to open myself up to her and she was right there.
I always feel for the characters I’m playing; I imagine every actor does. But normally I do not feel things as the character when I’m simply reading their lines on the page. My characters are usually separate from me, third-party entities that exist in a play world.
Except for Shosh. She was both a part of me and a person outside of me that existed on her own, whom I loved and had a relationship with. When she broke up with Ray I wanted to show up at her apartment with wine and takeout and hugs. When she lost her virginity I wanted to take her out to celebrate. When she sounded off at the beach house I wanted to call her and tell her I was proud of her. I wanted to visit her in Japan. I wanted to congratulate her on her engagement. Every experience she had felt wholly and utterly real to me.
Playing Shosh was one of the greatest joys of my life—especially when they’d let me improvise. They would keep the cameras rolling and just let me go and words would tumble out of me like a frantic, girly, Technicolor dusty-rose yawn. There was a scene that we shot during our first season where I’m meant to be doing yoga in my apartment and I’m saging my bedroom in preparation. There were some scripted lines, but then, like they always did, on our last take they told me to just go for it, to improv whatever I wanted.
I think they let me go for a solid five minutes, but it felt like five hours. It just kept coming out of me: Shoshanna setting intentions and wishes as she saged her bedroom, walking back and forth over a yoga mat. I could have kept going; she could have kept going.
There is also a shot during the “Crackcident” episode where she is running down the street in Bushwick high on crack. The camera was mounted on the back of a car that was tracking in front of me as I ran. And as we did it again and again, our director, Jesse Peretz, just told me to sound off, and so I did. In that moment, yet again, I was not Zosia Mamet acting. I was Shoshanna Shapiro, high as a kite on crack cocaine for the first and only time, spouting absolute nonsense about absolutely nothing while running through the streets of Brooklyn in the middle of the night. I was her, she was me, and we were one.
It’s funny, then, that she is the most intrinsically different from me of any character I have ever played. She is girly where I am a tomboy, owning 10 different kinds of hair products to my not even knowing how to use a blow-dryer. She is positive where I am jaded, always looking on the bright side where I lean more toward the let’s-catastrophize-this camp. She loves a tight fit and a cinched waist and a high heel, whereas I prioritize comfort over all, always looking for the closest thing to baggy pajamas that I can get away with in the real world. She is a speed-talking energizer bunny who loves pink and is more than likely running a Fortune 500 company and on her second marriage to a highly successful hedge fund manager. I need nine hours of sleep to be fully functional, my favorite color (if I’m being honest and not saying navy) is black, I barely graduated high school because I couldn’t pass algebra, and I married another actor.
I’ve often said the trickiest scenario I run into with fans is when girls come up to me expecting to meet Shosh and instead they get Zosia. I am the foul-mouthed, tattoo-covered, teenage-skater-boy, spicy-margarita counterpart to her pink-velour-wearing, champagne-with-strawberries, bubbly sorority girl-ness. We could not be more different if we tried. When girls used to come up to me wanting to connect and commiserate with her, instead they would get a “Hey, man” and most likely dirty hair, my voice five decibels lower and 25 RPMs slower.
It killed me to see the wash of disappointment over their faces when they realized I wasn’t her. I always wanted to apologize and suggest we get her on the line so she could make us both feel better. But sadly I do not yet have that power. I tried to at least share in their love for her, which sometimes made the situation moderately better. But overall these encounters served as a reminder of just how truly other than me she is, and yet how whole she feels to me.
Perhaps she is a ghost from another time. Maybe she is even a relative of mine that I inadvertently called to the present. I will never totally know, nor do I ever truly want to understand the magic of her. Somehow, it feels like putting her under the microscope would diminish her power.
Instead, I am content to just feel eternally grateful and fortunate that I got to commune with her for that period of time. That she picked me. That Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner and Sarah Heyward and all our other brilliant writers helped create her three-dimensional existence and allowed me to be the one to play her—Shoshanna, Shosh, Shoshers.
I do not think I will ever stop missing her, or wondering what she’s up to, or wishing I could call her and catch up. But wherever she is, whatever she is doing, I know that she is killing it, that she is looking fabulous while doing it, and that she is always and forever having the last laugh.
From Does This Make Me Funny? by Zosia Mamet, to be published on September 9, 2025, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Zosia Mamet.