Aya Cash only got 10 total days of rehearsal before she took the stage in London and New York in Giant. In London, she got seven days, joining the company after it had already been performing. In New York, she squeezed in just three, flying in from Toronto after Vought Rising, the upcoming The Boys spin-off in which she reprises her role as Stormfront, wrapped filming. “What a beautiful gift from Amazon and Paul Grellong,” she tells The A.V. Club over video chat. “It was not a given that I would be allowed to come do this, but everybody knew how important it was to me and I’m so grateful.” That’s about the extent of what Cash is allowed to say about Vought Rising. When asked about online suggestions that the prequel series may depict the beginning of Herogasm, Cash flashes a big, tight smile: “Oh, is that what they’re saying? Interesting. We know when it started canonically, and we’re in that time period, so…”
What she can and does talk about plenty is Giant, the new play that just opened on Broadway after a successful run on the West End. John Lithgow leads the play as author Roald Dahl, who’s on the verge of publishing The Witches in 1983. In the show, he has just published a book review which goes beyond criticizing Israel to attack and blame the “race of people” he held responsible for a 1982 attack on Lebanon. Cash portrays Jessie Stone, a Jewish American in the sales department at FSG and Dahl’s main foil in the play. The conversation between Roald and Jessie is the invention of playwright Mark Rosenblatt, but the words of Dahl’s review and of his antisemitic remarks given over the phone at the play’s end are a matter of historical record.
The tensions Giant explores are left open-ended, but Cash is happy to talk to us about them, along with what it’s like acting opposite Lithgow, separating the art from the artist, and her suggestion for a You’re The Worst global takeover.
The A.V. Club: You played this role in London, you’ve done a bunch of theater, but this is still your Broadway debut. How does it feel?
Aya Cash: It’s insanely exciting. I’ve wanted to be on Broadway since I was, you know, a kid. I have to do the job, so I can’t think about it too much. I think if I thought about how meaningful it is every day, I would probably not be able to get through the show. But it’s really wonderful. Ultimately I don’t think that being on Broadway means that it’s better than off-Broadway, but it’s exciting.
AVC: This production traveled elsewhere before it came to New York—I know it was in Madrid–
AC: I was not in that production, and then everyone except my role went to the West End because the woman who played my role couldn’t do it on the West End. She was British and they decided to look for an American. So, that’s when I auditioned and came in. And of course they won all the Oliviers three weeks before I showed up to do my first rehearsal. I was like great, no pressure!
AVC: Well, you definitely rose to the occasion. Jessie’s one of the only characters here who’s not a historical figure—we know who Roald Dahl is, but we don’t necessarily know who Jessie Stone is. What was it like finding that character?
AC: Well, that’s the gift of the play, right? All I have is what’s there. It’s like doing a TV show. Any time you play a not-real character, your writer is your god rather than the person you’re playing as the answer to all the questions. So, it was just about talking to Mark [Rosenblatt] and going with what I saw in the script. It felt very straightforward. There wasn’t a pressure of like, oh, well, they’ve got a distinctive voice, or they have a certain mannerism. I also think there’s more leeway in plays. You know, Elliot [Levey] plays Tom Maschler. Most people don’t know what Tom Maschler was like. Anna Wintour does [laughs] because she knew him. There are people who knew Tom Maschler, but most of your audience is not going to be like, well, Tommy wouldn’t have done that.
AVC: I hear a lot of theater actors say they often find new things in the work from doing it every night. What new things have you found?
AC: Well, first of all, this play particularly lends itself to that because the news every day changes the things I hear differently in the play. It’s impossible to ignore the parallels between then and now. And so whatever is happening in the news affects what I hear in the play. And there are certain lines that pop out or I have a different reaction to, based on that. So I find lots of new things. There’s one that I just felt stupid that I hadn’t found all through England. At the end of the first act, he calls her not by her name. Before, I was just on a train to get him and I didn’t hear that. Now it changed how I play the very end because I hear that specifically as a reason to speak my last few lines. There’s things that feel like, ugh, I feel like a dumb actor that I didn’t get that before. But then there’s things that you’re gonna hear differently because of what’s happening.
AVC: Why do you think it’s so difficult for a powerful person or character, like Roald Dahl in the play, to apologize for very obvious harm?
AC: I think it’s hard for most people to apologize in general. We are attracted to people who have certainty. There’s a reason we like people who have all the answers and who are certain in their answers because it’s much easier than dealing with the gray areas, right? If somebody can tell you, “No, no, no, I know this and that’s it and I can’t be swayed,” that can be very attractive. We as a culture seem to be drawn to that in our politicians, in our stars, in our everything. I think that the idea of apology as weakness is prevalent in our culture, first of all. And we’re attracted to narcissists, in general. [Laughs] Dahl was a bit of a narcissist, but he was also a lot of other things which I think is what’s so interesting about the play is that he can be all these other things and that you know he’s not just just the one horrible human. He and Jessie are able to connect about their kids. He’s kind to some of the people he works with and not kind to other people he works with. He’s many things. I do think as a culture we’re attracted to a certain kind of confidence that doesn’t allow for apology or for changing your mind.
AVC: I do think there is a lot of ambiguity in Dahl’s work—it’s very dark, especially for children. I know you were a fan of his work before this–
AC: Totally, I grew up with all of his books, and the movies were obviously so big growing up too; Willy Wonka and The Witches with Anjelica Houston. Those were things that just feel like an ingrained part of childhood. I didn’t even realize. I knew nothing about the controversy until I read this play. It just was not in my orbit.
AVC: I had a similar experience. I remember my third-grade teacher reading The BFG to us and having that fond memory from childhood, and hearing the disgusting things from Dahl taints the memory I have a little bit.
AC: But for me—and again, I think it’s really individual—but… how many great artists have we discovered are horrible to their wives, who are complete bigots? I mean, there’s so much great art that comes from very complicated people. I think it’s individual, but for me, it doesn’t taint it for me, for whatever reason. I have a harder time watching a Woody Allen movie or listening to an R. Kelly album, but that art seems to be about the thing that we’ve learned about them and that makes it hard for me to engage with the art. Versus Dahl, it doesn’t feel so related. I’m not necessarily reading antisemitism into The Witches in the way that Jessie is clocking it might be construed. I think our discomfort with paradox is something that we should all be paying attention to. The fact that he was an antisemite and gave us these beautiful children’s books, holding those two truths actually feels like part of good work of understanding what paradox is because right now our our culture just decides it’s one thing or the other. And social media pushes you to binaries. And I think what we all need to be doing is actually being able to hold both.
AVC: That’s an interesting scene: Jessie says The Witches could be interpreted as an antisemitic allegory because Dahl said this other stuff. Because I agree with you, I don’t think the book is a one-to-one allegory. With the extra context, you could make an argument. Dahl keeps asking her to debate him, but it doesn’t seem like he actually wants to have a debate. He keeps interrupting you. Do you feel like there was an actual debate, or is it this powerful man plowing ahead, to an extent?
AC: I don’t know if Dahl and Jessie enter a debate in the sense of, like, a respectful exchange of ideas. But I do think the play does that. Meaning, I think the audience gets the debate even if it’s two people unwilling to engage in the other’s ideas—obviously Dahl more so than Jessie. It’s hard because everybody sees something different in the play, I think, and I don’t want to put my idea of what the play is on it. But I think there are different ideas very well represented in the play, if you are listening.
Aya Cash and John Lithgow in Giant. Photo by Joan Marcus
AVC: Tell me what it’s like to act opposite John Lithgow every night.
AC: Easy. He’s great. That makes it easy. You know, a good actor makes you look better. I think it’s a gift, to me, to be able to act opposite him. He’s an incredibly kind, warm human being. It’s just really fun to go up against him in that way because there is none of that offstage. There is no combat. We love each other a lot offstage, it’s not such a problem. [Laughs] I get asked that a lot. Of course, there’s some intimidation at first, but it normalizes so quickly because it’s my job. One of the great things about being in theater is that when you’re all on stage, there is no hierarchy. You’re all there to make the play work and to do your job and to give as much as you can. It doesn’t feel that different. Look, John is one of the greatest actors of all time but I feel that every single person on stage is incredible. So it’s like, great! We all are just there doing the thing. Because John’s entire body of work I’ve seen over again since I was a kid, there is that intimidation knowing all the different things he can do, but we’re all just doing this one thing together. And I think everyone’s incredible. So it’s all the same in some ways.
AVC: There’s no slouches in the cast, that’s for sure. Your character has to go tête-à-tête with him the most. What surprised you about his acting process?
AC: This is my interpretation, I wanna be clear, because I don’t know if this is his experience. He’s able to craft a performance and then fill it up every night in a way that is surprising. It doesn’t change drastically. There’s certain lines that he can say the exact same way every night but it all comes out perfectly natural as if it was the first time. There’s other actors who every time are a little different, and John is able to…he’s like the perfect balance of technical and emotional-intuitive. He knows this is where he needs to be, and this is the laugh, and this is the idea of how you need to say this line to get this to work, and then it’s just completely filled. I think lesser actors you kind of get one or the other. Super technical, and then I’m always left a little empty, or you get intuitive-emotional, in which it’s thrilling and exciting and beautiful and sometimes terrible. [Laughs]
AVC: I have to ask before you go: I see shows like Girls getting a huge resurgence thanks to some millennial nostalgia. What’s it going to take for that to happen to You’re The Worst?
AC: I think talk to Netflix about licensing it. We need to send it out because it never really got international. I mean, I think England maybe got it for one season. I think we need it to get on a streamer that, you know… I’m like can I get in trouble for that? I don’t even work for them anymore! [Laughs] In some ways it’s lovely. It’s like a little secret, that show. When someone comes up to me and goes. ‘I love You’re The Worst,’ I go, I do too! Because I do. It was so special. So if it never goes further than that I do feel like we’re a little cult community and I love my worsties.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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