After throwing herself into her writing-acting career, Nicole Maxali hasn’t looked back. The Filipina-American performer reflects on her hit one-woman show, mentorship with Dave Chappelle, and representing the Asian-American creative community.
by Kristina Bustos
Three nights before I met with Filipina-American writer-actress Nicole Maxali, ABC announced that it was canceling Selfie, a freshman rom-com vehicle for John Cho and Karen Gillan. The sitcom’s My Fair Lady-inspired premise wasn’t exactly original, but the show was groundbreaking in that it starred an Asian-American actor as the romantic male lead—a first in television history. Selfie’s demise prompted fans to sign a petition on Change.org, hoping for the show to get a second season renewal. Meanwhile, Hulu has been streaming Selfie’s remaining unaired episodes.
“I feel like they could pick any actor for that lead, but he [Cho] made that role his own,” Maxali says, adding that “hopefully it’s a gateway to another TV show” for Cho.
Sadly, Selfie is another canceled show for Cho—one of the biggest Asian-American working actors in Hollywood—but Maxali is unfazed by the news as she eagerly focuses on her upcoming projects. Several days after our interview, Maxali performed again on the New York stage for her well-received one-woman show Forgetting the Details, a heartwarming story about an apo’s (Tagalog for grandchild’s) love for her lola (Tagalog for grandmother) who has Alzheimer’s Disease. Back in August, Maxali premiered Forgetting the Details in New York as part of the 18th annual New York Fringe Festival. Through the show’s success, Maxali was able to connect with agents and managers, and she’s now starring in a six-month acting gig for a series of English language-learning videos.
When talking to Maxali about her life in New York, she may sound like a wide-eyed acting aspirant who just moved to the city to make it big. Maxali, after all, was lively and all smiles in our interview on a cold Monday night. Her voice was energetic as she spoke animatedly and at length about her work. But she also swore without flinching and, most importantly, she was candid about her experience as a minority comedian, writer, performer, and actress. As you get to know Maxali’s journey, you immediately realize she is her own woman with her own stories to tell—on and off the stage.
Take for example her decision to choose New York over Los Angeles. It would have been a natural decision to pursue stardom in Los Angeles, but New York offered something different for the San Francisco native. It may also have been a better move for her career.
“In my own experience, I noticed a lot of it in LA is just waiting around for their big break, whereas in New York you can create your big break,” Maxali explains, having moved to New York in September 2012. “And I feel with New York, the energy here is hustle, hustle, hustle and opportunities come to you, where LA it’s just waiting around—waiting to be seen by certain casting directors.
“Agents and managers came to me because of my one-woman show and they do that here,” she adds. “If you have a good improv show, a sketch show or web series, there’s more opportunities for you to actually get to another level and they take notice.”
Maxali is on to something. As the New York Times put it back in June, Asian-American actors and writers are taking over the theater spotlight. Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee opened her play Straight White Men in November at the Public Theatre. At the same venue, critically-acclaimed Here Lies Love ended its uproarious run on January 4. The musical, featuring actors of various Asian descents, told the story of polarizing figure Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines. Two of its stars, Ruthie Ann Miles and Conrad Ricamora (who also plays Oliver on ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder), will then head to the Broadway revival of The King and I, also starring Oscar-nominated Japanese actor Ken Watanabe in his first Broadway show.
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Before New York and Forgetting the Details, Maxali was dropping jokes at comedy clubs in San Francisco. She has also opened for Dave Chappelle. Yes, that Dave Chappelle. We see him as a comedic genius, but Maxali calls him a mentor.
Maxali met Chappelle in 2007 after his show at San Francisco’s Punch Line and was invited to open for him the following night. But when Maxali called Punch Line the next day to find out what time she should arrive to the venue, the general manager said she was unconfirmed and that Chappelle shouldn’t be bringing his own opening acts last minute without telling them. In the summer of 2008, Maxali was again at a Chappelle show in San Francisco and was given another chance to open for him the next night. This time, it actually happened.
“Right before I went on, he [Chappelle] came up to me and he was like ‘You’re gonna do great,’” Maxali recalls. “It was literally seconds before they called my name. All my stress evaporated and I went on and I did really, really good.”
That night was an absolute contrast to when Maxali opened for a prominent Asian-American comedian a month earlier. (Maxali wouldn’t name the comedian because she still sees him in the comedy circuit.) She describes the experience as horrible, both backstage (the headliner was smarmy) and on stage (she bombed). And the male comedians who performed after her weren’t sympathetic, going so far as to tell the audience, “I don’t even know what she said but I’d fuck the shit of out her.”
“This is the kind of environment stand-up comedy is, and it was a rude awakening,” Maxali says. “Not only is it hard to be a female comedian, it’s hard to be an attractive female comedian and you have to be really, really good to get respect from male comics.”
The sexist comments didn’t stop there. As her friendship with Chappelle continued to grow, so did the rumors. Maxali remembers when she first started working with Chappelle, people in the stand-up industry weren’t too happy, to put it lightly. They spread rumors about her and said she wasn’t even funny.
“To hear that within my peer group… is just like ‘Fuck you guys’,” Maxali says. “Just because I’m a woman. You would never say that about another guy. You would never tell other guys, ‘Oh, he only opened for Dave Chappelle because he sucked his dick.’”
“But because I’m a woman, I feel we, as women, who are actually doing our thing and hustling and doing it the right way, we are threatening I think sometimes to men, and they get jealous. And they get fucking catty.”
“That’s why I’m a feminist,” she adds. “Let’s just make this equal.”
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When our conversation moved on to other female comedians, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Mindy Kaling were mentioned in the same breath. And why wouldn’t they be? They are three of the biggest names in the comedy world, and they’ve carved enviable careers—from doing improv groups to working on Saturday Night Live to acting in their own sitcoms to becoming their own “bossypants” as actresses, writers, and producers.
But there is one woman to which Maxali bestows true “icon status”: Margaret Cho.
Maxali looks up to the Korean-American comedian, actress, author and most recently, talk show host. (Starting January 10, Margaret will co-host TLC’s first late-night talk show titled All About Sex.) Maxali, who enjoys self-deprecating and awkward humor, loves that Margaret “keeps it real” with her comedy style.
“She’s amazing…and I love her writing,” she adds. “It’s just a shame they cancelled her show.”
The show Maxali refers to is 1994’s All-American Girl, which didn’t feature an actress who fit the formulaic “All-American” archetype. Instead, it starred a Korean-American (Cho) as she tried to live under the roof of her traditional Korean family. Yet, with poor ratings and behind-the-scenes issues, All-American made it only one season.
In her personal life, Maxali has built many friendships with fellow female artists since moving to New York. But it didn’t used to be like that. Maxali revealed that in her college years she was “that woman” who wouldn’t make female friends because she thought they were bitches—at least, not until her aunt and a girlfriend sat her down to give her a different perspective on male friendships.
Maxali shares how she learned from these women that men may only want to be friends with her because of one thing—sex. And she understood she needed to forge more relationships with women. Maxali recalls that when she dated a DJ, she ran into women who were “insecure and catty” but that changed when she left the party scene behind and transitioned into her standup and acting careers. Eventually, she realized there are “really dope, intelligent, wise, creative women out there” who she wanted to call friends.
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When Maxali eventually decided to step away from the stand-up mic to focus more on her writing and one-woman show, she hoped her mentor wouldn’t be disappointed. Of course, Chappelle wasn’t and offered a thoughtful gem that Maxali still remembers: “You know what, you’re doing your own thing and you’re doing something that no one has ever done before. And you just have to do whatever you need to do and follow your heart. [If] you don’t want to do stand-up, then don’t do stand-up,” he said.
Maxali is at home on stage. She’s been acting since she was 15 and went to even more auditions in her early twenties. It was then she started to notice the stereotypical roles offered to her based on her appearance: car show models, for example. So Maxali took charge and joined San Francisco’s Bindlestiff Studio, a performing arts community for Filipino-Americans. Bindlestiff Studio encourages its artists to write original material and perform plays that break the stereotypes.
“It was like you can be a lead in a play with some real human experience, not just like the side character that just comes in and walks out,” she says.
When Maxali wanted to showcase her first one-woman performance, Bindlestiff Studio was there for her. The studio helped produced Identification Please for its three-week run at Bay Area’s The Thick House in April 2009, a story about Maxali’s spirituality which she wrote in 2008 under the guidance of Totally Biased host, W. Kamau Bell. Bell and Maxali continued their partnership in Forgetting the Details. The piece started off as a 20-minute performance Maxali did at Bell’s workshop, but Bell encouraged Maxali to turn it in to a full-length show. He praised it as the best writing Maxali had ever done. In November 2011, Maxali premiered Forgetting the Details at Bindlestiff Studio.
“My grandma raised me and having someone so close to you go through something like Alzheimer’s, I think it’s very hard,” Maxali shares. “And I really wanted to show that Alzheimer’s wasn’t who my grandma was. She was this very vibrant, fierce woman raising a little Filipina-American girl.”
Maxali’s parents had her very young. Her mother took four jobs and her father “wasn’t in a good place” when they had Maxali, an only child. That’s when her grandmother came into the picture. Maxali wrote Forgetting the Details to pay tribute to that “fierce woman” as well as to show how her family dealt with the disease. Today, Forgetting the Details has received favorable reviews from critics, including her mentor Chappelle, who called the show “funny, heartwarming, and funny again.”
Due to the late stage of her Alzheimer’s, however, Maxali’s grandmother wasn’t able to see how she was honored. Neither did her father, who passed away suddenly before the show’s premiere. But the family members who saw Forgetting the Details were supportive, especially her mother and uncle, who took on more supportive roles after her father’s death.
“My uncle, I was worried [he] was gonna disown me after the show but [he] actually had tears in his eyes and was like ‘I’m so proud of you,’” Maxali recalls.
Maxali did have to convince her mother, however, that she belonged on stage. Like many Asian-Americans, Maxali butted heads with her mother to pursue a creative career path. Her mother wasn’t happy when Maxali quit her news media and non-profit jobs to focus on her acting and writing. But that all ended when Forgetting the Details was accepted into the New York Fringe Festival. Maxali’s mother attended the last show and saw how her daughter captivated both the audience and the people in the industry.
“At that point she was like, ‘You’re gonna make it,’” Maxali says.
“Make it” is what Maxali plans to do not just for her, but also for her dad. After her father’s death, Maxali became committed to carrying out her dad’s “last dying wish”; on the last day she saw him before he passed away, Maxali recounts the moment when her dad encouraged her to live in New York to pursue her art. Seeing it as sign, she followed through with her dad’s wish.
And Maxali has even bigger plans for Forgetting the Details, including adapting it into a film and showing it off at Sundance Film Festival. Aside from winning an Oscar, Maxali wants to be known for her writing and producing while working with artists of all colors.
“I feel like a part of my success has come because I’m not doing it just for myself,” she says. “And that intention is there. I want to do this for not just Asian-American actors but actors of all ethnicities, people of color, women of color.”
For now, the writer-actress plans to stay in New York and continue to treat the city like “her master’s program,” absorbing and using whatever resources she can get ahold of to keep pushing forward and giving back to the New York creative community.
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Kristina Bustos is a contributing writer for The Riveter and Digital Spy. She was an editor at fashion blog The Blay Report as well as a contributor for Honey, Essence, and Audrey magazines.You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @krisbustos.
