Jenny Slate Is Ready to Fall in Love Again

Jenny Slate got a haircut. A short bob, it frames her wonderful face. She invites me inside her charming Craftsman house in Los Angeles, where she lives with her very cute, very elderly dog, Reggie. She’s been here a year, and the inside is light and airy and filled with ceramics and beautiful flowers and plants that spill out into a lush garden. The kitchen, where we’ve settled, as people do, has green wallpaper with a houseplant pattern, and a Sesame Street sign commemorating Slate’s recent appearance on the show, during which she had the distinct pleasure of working with Cookie Monster. “I asked the puppeteer if I could smell him, and the guy was like, ‘No one’s ever asked that before,’ ” she says. “And I was like, ‘Really? People don’t come here and just smell how they smell?’ Like, that seems like the first thing you would do.” He smelled like a stuffed animal, she says.

The haircut, something of a drastic move, was inspired by a couple of things. Firstly, a rat. Mind you, Slate’s house is very clean. But it’s also surrounded by fruit trees and vines and was built in1912. And it’s the time of year when animals enter homes—it just is. At least that’s what the exterminator told Slate to make her feel better as he seta trap. “And so anyway, one rat came in. And in the middle of the night, I hear what sounds like a wall falling down,” Slate says, wincing. “The exterminator had said the rat would just kind of ‘expire,’ but it struggled in the trap for, like, an hour. I heard it struggle and rest.” The next morning, Slate discovered that it had busted out of the box and “commando crawled” across the kitchen. “There was blood and it just…I was like, I don’t even know who to call,” she says.

Staring at the dead rat, Slate confronted a frustrating reality: Despite her best feminist efforts, her knee-jerk reaction was to wish she had a dude to fix her problem. “I kind of gendered it, and that really bummed me out,” she says. In her defense, she’s had romance on the brain. “You get to a point where after a while, you’re like, it would be nice to be in love again. That’s a major thing,” she says, not naming names, but also not needing to. The internet is littered with sad takes on her 2016 divorce from writer-director Dean Fleischer-Camp, as well as “investigative” GIFsticles tracking her subsequent on-again, off-again, now very much “off ” relationship with Captain America’s Chris Evans. Anyway, these feelings, combined with her stereotypically feminine response to seeing a dead rat, got her thinking about her hair.

“I was looking at myself in the mirror, and this is really odd, but I was like, ‘Why do you have long hair? You don’t even want it.’ And then I was like, ‘I have long hair because there’s a part of me that thinks that’s what men prefer. And I think it’s better for auditions.’ And so I called my friend Lang, and she came over and got rid of the rat. And then I called my friend Nikki, who cuts my hair, and I told her, ‘I only look like this because I am deeply trained to please an industry and cis-hetero dudes. Can you cut my hair into a triangle the way that I want it?’ ”

The triangle looks perfect. And it’s also practical for this never-ending L.A. heat wave. When it comes to her hair, Slate likes shapes. She refers to her last noteworthy cut from three years ago as “the ball,” a circular pouf with curly bangs inspired by Bernadette Peters in The Jerk.

Slate might be ready to fall in love, but she’s less enthusiastic about the modern ways people find it. “I feel like an old lady, but I don’t want to meet someone on a computer or phone,” she says. A single male friend told her recently that he wanted to meet his future wife at a friend’s birthday party during the day. “It was one of the most romantic things I’ve heard,” she says. “And that’s kind of how I feel about it, too. I like the idea of meeting somebody at a dinner party filled with people you already like.” Her slightly more aspirational version of this fantasy goes as follows: “I get invited to some weird eco-tech summit to do stand-up, and I meet a really warmhearted scientist who loves the earth.” It sounds like a job for Captain Planet, but Slate points out that he only shows up in times of peril. The whole “coming on strong and then disappearing” thing is something she would rather avoid. “I have experienced it and don’t love it,” she says. “Yeah, usually that guy does not really care much for the earth.”

This month, Slate makes her own comic-book turn as a scientist named Dora in Marvel’s Spider-Man spin-off Venom. Her character was originally written for a man, and the role is serious,“though I’m always making, like, 50 more facial expressions than I think I am,” she says. Since debuting her noncomedic side in 2014’s Obvious Child, which, as of this writing, is streaming on Netflix, she’s been hard at work expanding her résumé. She’s just returned from Norway, where she spent two months filming The Sunlit Night, in which her character, a painter, flees heartbreak and Manhattan crowds for an isolated artists’ colony above the Arctic Circle. She has beautiful, multicolored hand-dipped candles as souvenirs of the experience. “The sun never sets there, like, at all,” she says.

Jenny Slate as Dora Skirth in Venom.

YouTube/Sony Pictures

Right now, Slate is excited to be back home and has been working on feeling comfortable being by herself—although not alone, exactly, because Reggie is a constant companion. She scratches his fluffy white head and smiles. “I’m pretty open and flexible, and I like the idea of getting into someone else’s world,” she says. “But it’s taken me a while to understand why it’s nice to be alone. I mean, if somebody swept me off my feet today, that would be great. I’d be ready for it, because in a lot of ways I feel the nicest about myself that I’ve ever felt.” And being nice to herself is the kind of Sesame Street lesson she’s continually having to relearn. “At first, being alone, I felt scared and maybe ashamed or cast off or something. Being divorced can make you feel that way because it’s such a major term, like, ‘Oh, I’ma divorced person.’ ” When the topic turns to dream roles, she admits she doesn’t have one, but that she just might be living her dream life, right now, at this moment. “It’s an unbelievable thing to say out loud, and it’s not like I’m sitting here in a mansion with a pool, but I live in a beautiful old house that’s just big enough for me and my dog and maybe one other person,” she says. “It’s filled with plants, and I’m surrounded by flowers that I planted on purpose. I like myself and I’m peaceful, so this is it.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2018 issue of ELLE.

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