“No, I mean, like, on Earth,” Konkle said. “I dunno, it’s Becca’s bat mitzvah,” Erskine replied. “Who are these people, and why are they here?” Konkle muttered. “Oh, my God, this party is amazing,” Erskine said. Konkle, as Anna (tall, laconic, slouched), stood behind her, glowering, in the throes of a fatalistic mood brought on, earlier in the episode, by a lesson on the Holocaust.
The women took their places, in a buffet line, and the episode’s director, Dan Longino, called “Action.” Erskine, as Maya (short, hyperactive, impish), jiggled her body to the beat. Teen-age extras and white-haired elders in yarmulkes checked out a station for making airbrushed T-shirts. playing the 1998 techno-pop song “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” as a triad of sequin-clad hype dancers did the Running Man on a laminate dance floor. A camera crew was filming B-roll footage of a d.j. At about 11 A.M., they entered a banquet hall inside the Pacific Palms, where the party had been staged in period-specific teenybopper style. The women were preparing to shoot an episode from the show’s third season in which their younger avatars attend a popular girl’s bat-mitzvah party at a country club. Their junior-high burlesque is a sight gag as well as the heart of the series more literally than most teen pariahs, Maya and Anna have trouble fitting in. Erskine and Konkle don’t convincingly pass among them, but that is the point. It’s painful, but so is being thirteen.Īll other middle schoolers on “ PEN15” are played by adolescents: the popular girls, the other outcasts, the unrequited crushes. (“My orthodontist made a mistake,” she said.) The mouthpiece cuts into Konkle’s gums and makes it nearly impossible for her to eat or drink. The women then moved to an adjacent costume trailer to complete their “ PEN15” looks: for Maya, a black bowl-cut wig that resembles a giant porcini mushroom, similar to Erskine’s haircut in fifth grade for Anna, a set of protruding pop-in braces that mimic the ones Konkle had to wear-twice. Beside her, a hair stylist twisted strands of Konkle’s fine blond hair around the neck of a tiny curling iron, creating bouncy corkscrews. “I was made fun of for being hairy-I had a deep insecurity about that,” Erskine told me. In the makeup trailer, Erskine sat in front of a vanity mirror as a stylist wearing a face shield used a felt-tip pen to paint hundreds of tiny strokes onto her upper lip, creating the illusion of a faint mustache. The women, who are both thirty-four, are co-creators and co-stars of “ PEN15,” a Hulu series in which they play versions of themselves as teen-agers, the thirteen-year-old best friends and misfits Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone. It was a sizzling August morning in 2021, but inside a hair-and-makeup trailer parked at the Pacific Palms Resort, an hour east of Hollywood, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle were returning to the year 2000.
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