Feeling Seen

In 2001's Two Can Play That Game , Vivica A. Fox plays Shanté Smith, a confident, self-possessed woman who narrates the film by barreling the camera and telling the audience just how it is. A middle-schooler at the time, Shar Jossell (now a journalist and the co-host of We See Each Other: The Podcast ), heard Shanté speaking to her in more ways than one. And what she heard changed her life. That,...

Before she was directing movies about iconic figures (becoming something of an icon herself in the process) Mary Harron was a journalist. And before that, she was inspired by characters like Rosalind Russell's Hildy Johnson in HIS GIRL FRIDAY -- a woman who is valued for her incomparable skill and undeniable smarts, who can't quite seem to leave her complicated profession behind for what society d...

At just 18, actor Laya DeLeon Hayes already has a decade in film, television, and video games under her belt. She voiced Doc McStuffins, won a BAFTA for God of War Ragnarök , and co-starred with Queen Latifah on The Equalizer . Now she's helming a film of her own in Bomani J. Story's  The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster , a reimagining of Frankenstein that premiered at SXSW and is now in theaters...

Long before becoming a celebrated author of A STAR IS BORED and the newly-released BIG GAY WEDDING, Byron Lane was a small-town Louisiana kid who dreamed of life in the big city. More than dreaming of it, he felt like it was where he was meant to be. Which is why he felt so seen by Bette Midler's switched-at-birth country twin, Sadie Ratliff, in the 1988 Midler & Tomlin comedy BIG BUSINESS. Then,...

When award-winning comedian Liz Glazer watched The Wonder Years as a kid, she thought she was seeing, for the first time a kid just like her: one who knew even as he lived his life that he'd one day look back on all this wistfully. This simple (mis?)interpretation of the show foreshadowed the type of adult she'd grow into: a comedian who is able to weave tragic experience into comedy with ease.  A...

If you've never seen ELECTION, or haven't seen it in a while, you might think of it as a quirky tale of a try-hard shrew-in-training who cares too much about winning an election. But take a closer look and you'll find that Tracy is by no means the villain of the piece. For film commentator, festival programmer, and The Final Girls co-host Anna Bogutskaya -- whose new book is called UNLIKEABLE FEMA...

From her roles in a semi-autobiographical sitcom in 1996 ( Life's Work ) to The Parent Trap to Abbott Elementary , Lisa Ann Walter has played a lot of different kinds of strong, brassy women. And even though standards of beauty and acceptance in Hollywood are always changing, those winds haven't always blown in her favor. But what makes an icon iconic is her unwavering commitment to being her own...

Elle Woods is an iconic character, but not an obvious one from Tre'vell  Anderson, author of the new book, We See Each Other: A Black. Trans Journey Through TV and Film . Leave it to the effervescent Tre'vell to bring their signature FANTI gray-area mindset to their Feeling Seen character choice! In this episode, Tre'vell and Jordan look at what it is about Elle Woods that offered Tre'vell a glimp...

Kara Brown's confidence and self-assuredness have taken her far in her career as a writer, and those are qualities she shares with Katharine Hepburn's Tracy in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY . Of course, with that self-possession comes a set of assumptions others make about you, and getting held to a special standard. Jordan and Kara get into all of this,  bond over their shared memories of the heyday of...

Balancing the dark and the light sides of coming of age, womanhood, and navigating the social order is something filmmaker Nida Manzoor always strives for in her projects (like WE ARE LADY PARTS and POLITE SOCIETY , in theaters now). And she wants to shout one of her biggest inspirations from the rooftops: SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS (1998, Tamara Jenkins), which centers on high-schooler Vivian Abromow...

Director Catherine Hardwicke's latest film is MAFIA MAMMA, and you probably know her as the director of TWILIGHT, LORDS OF DOGTOWN, or THIRTEEN. But did you know that she got her start as a production designer, and that she production designed TANK GIRL? Well, this was after she got her degree in architecture. All this, plus dressing like a building, dealing with on-set toxic events, directing Mon...

Co-star of the new horror film Malum (currently in theaters) Clarke Wolfe knew she related to  Grace Hart in the theater when she first saw 2000's Miss Congeniality . That resonance wasn't all positive. In this conversation, she shares her own inner misfit feelings, and explains how and why she became her own Michael Caine (er, Victor Melling).  *** with Jordan Crucchiola and Clarke Wolfe Help sup...

A.V. Rockwell's feature debut won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year. Now it's in theaters, and anyone who goes to see it won't be able to miss the love and honesty in her depiction of New York City. So perhaps it's not surprising that she brought us a character from another New York City coming-of-age movie (albeit about a different borough than her native Queens). It's Troy, the...

It's our final show of MaxFunDrive 2023, and we're breaking out the big guns and weird masks to bring you this thoughtful conversation with director Brandon Cronenberg. Eschewing our usual movie character framework, Jordan and Brandon dig into the very idea of why and how we see ourselves, in film and in our daily lives. A special time of year means special episodes! Head over to maximumfun.org/jo...

Join, upgrade, or boost your Maximum Fun membership at maximumfun.org/join to get access to this full episode and over 500 hours of bonus content from MaxFun shows. And thank you! Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinfeelingseen   Feeling Seen is hosted by Jordan Crucchiola and is a production of Maximum Fun.   You can watch video...

MaxFunDrive 2023 is comin'atcha like CGI Spidey slinging and swinging from rooftop to flagpole!  Become a member and support FEELING SEEN directly by visiting maximumfun.org/join We're celebrating by getting the current Jordans of Maximum Fun together. It's Jordan, Jesse, Go! host and Bubble creator Jordan Morris, talking about Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man , featuring future Babylon star Tobey Magu...

Producer's note: When we prepped Jordan's new intro to this amazing interview from April of '22, I had jotted something down like, "who could have dreamed back then that he'd go on to win all the awards." Jordan rightly called this out, because (as she says here) she, and other critics, DID dream that. What I'd meant was: it seemed like one of those performances and films that you hope will be bot...

Daniela Taplin Lundberg has made her mark in Hollywood doing something that’s become increasingly rare: creating authentic and artful films that are made for adults and appeal to a wide audience. These are movies like The Kids are All Right, Beast of No Nation, Nanny, Harriet , just to name a few. Today she talks with Jordan about Thelma and Louise – and in particular the affinity that she felt wi...

After Bring it On , before Ant-Men, Peyton Reed directed a cheeky little period/genre parody called Down with Love. Its stars (Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor) were what brought 10-year-old Kyle Turner to the DVD rental house, but it was supporting character Peter McMannus (David Hyde Pierce) that he identified with, even years before he truly clocked what it was he was identifying. Sounds like...

Director and  production designer (and former child actor) Francesca Maldonado shares how Rebecca (aka Tank Girl) from 1995's TANK GIRL was formative in her life, and offers perspectives on Hot Girl Representation, Valley Girl pride, and what's missing from movies now and in the past. Then, Jordan has one quick thing about an upcoming Amazon series called Class of '07 . *** With Jordan Crucchiola...

Throughout the much-lauded, jam-packed runtime of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, Stephanie Hsu shapeshifts from depressed, suffering Joy Wang to countless iterations of the fabulous big-bad Jobu Tupaki. But the flashy confidence of Jobu Tupaki might be a misdirect from the pain she's feeling -- Joy's pain. Cyrus Cohen, film critic and programmer for NewFest, gets into it with Jordan on this we...

There are a lot of fantastic women in Women Talking , but when Jordan first saw the film in theaters, she was immediately  struck by the powerful performances of the movie's matriarchs, one of whom is played to hilarious, heartbreaking perfection by today's guest, Sheila McCarthy. Sheila tells us about identifying with Liza Minnelli's Pookie Adams in The Sterile Cuckoo — a feeling that she had whe...

As co-creator and showrunner of the show YOU, Sera Gamble knows that one way to fight the gender and romance stereotypes that we've been taught by popular media is to subvert them. In WALL-E, she saw a movie relationship that  offered not only a relatable "female" character, but a relationship paradigm that was worthy of celebration. She and Jordan talk about robots, TV writing, and fighting the p...

Comedian Gianmarco Soresi is brutally honest with us this weeks: he deeply relates to Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham!) in Milos Forman's 1984 classical classic, Amadeus . But while Gianmarco can own his Salieri-like insecurities, he can't let it keep him from pursuing virtuosity.  Then, Jordan has one quick thing about... Gianmarco on James Corden His half hour, "Shelf Life" *** With Jordan Cr...

Before writer, producer, and director Roxanne Benjamin was making V/H/S shorts or directing shows like Nancy Drew   and The New Adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch , she was a disaffected youth who was so recognizable as a Daria that classmates called her by the famous MTV character's name. Now, she joins us  fresh off the streaming release of her new movie, There's Something Wrong With the Ch...