Mimi-Rose Howard makes bad, pretentious art. Are you surprised? She's come off as something of a fraud since arriving on Girls as Adam's new, hyper-composed girlfriend. (Nobody is that calm when her boyfriend's ex shows up unannounced. What are you hiding, Mimi-Rose Eleonor Howard? Another name?) But maybe she's not a fraud. Maybe "Ask Me My Name" was just one bad art show, and any ill feelings one has about Mimi-Rose say more about that person's insecurities than they do about M-R. Cosmopolitan.com spoke to Gillian Jacobs about her character's off-putting personality, how she might have reacted to Mimi-Rose were she Hannah, and what she made of last week's abortion scene.

Why is someone like Mimi-Rose — someone with multiple names and a really composed attitude — so annoying? At least she is to me.

She's not leading with her insecurities. I don't think that's to say she doesn't have them, but she doesn't appear to be leading with them. And that can make someone feel less approachable. We feel more comfortable around people who say, "I'm a mess, I'm insecure, I don't know what I'm doing." She doesn't seem to do any of those things off the top. I think her stillness is unnerving for Hannah and Adam at times.

Because they each lead very much with their emotions and insecurities.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think Mimi-Rose is keeping [those feelings] to herself. I don't know if that's a power move on her part or what.

We feel more comfortable around people who say, 'I'm a mess.'

Mimi-Rose tells Adam in passing that she had an abortion, by telling him she can't go for a run. What did you make of that?

Obviously Mimi-Rose considered it to be a very logical conclusion that she came to; she came to a decision and acted on it and told him afterward. My personal feelings weren't relevant. That was how Mimi-Rose handled that situation. It's interesting to see the character of Adam in this very different kind of relationship, with a woman he doesn't quite know what to make of all the time. She seems to be much more rational, cool, calm, and collected about things. She talks about, in that speech we saw on YouTube, how so much of the stress and drama in your life comes out of romantic constructs, and she tries to avoid those and has a very sensible approach to relationships. Which is certainly not how I've been able to go through relationships, but it seems to work for her.

What were your conversations like when you were preparing for the abortion-conversation scene?

The director and Lena and the writers wanted Mimi-Rose to be very calm, cool, and collected, as you see. It subverts a lot of expectations about how a scene like that — or someone disclosing that information — normally plays out. So that was the overall desire.

Do you have any clue what Mimi-Rose's art installation was actually about?

No, and I don't think Mimi-Rose had a full grasp of what it was about either. She had a lot of ideas and maybe had to throw them together more quickly than she would have liked, and they weren't fully thought out.

When she admits that to Hannah, Hannah feels somewhat fond of her for the first time.

Yeah, it's when she is more vulnerable and emotional that Hannah finds Mimi-Rose more sympathetic. It's probably easy for Hannah to look at Mimi-Rose and be like, "Oh, she's got it all together, she's got it all figured out." Whenever your ex is dating someone that you perceive to be more successful than you are, it really adds insult to injury. So it's probably also a relief to Hannah to see that she's got issues as well.

Real talk: If you were Hannah, how would you react to Mimi-Rose touching your arm in the cab?

I would not have gone to Mimi-Rose's art exhibit in the first place. I would have stayed far, far away. The odds of me ending up alone in a cab with Mimi-Rose would have been greatly decreased. It's sort of like wanting to pick at the scab, to show up like that, to either irritate Adam, remind him of your presence, to perversely like seeing Mimi-Rose even though it's painful. There's a whole swirl of emotions going on for Hannah.

Have you ever had a bad breakup like that, where you couldn't get your emotions under control and you were doing reckless things?

I had a much more volatile personal life when I was younger and also, coincidentally, when I was in New York. So it was interesting to be shooting some of those scenes in my old neighborhood. The exterior of Mimi-Rose's art show, where we all come out and catch the cab, was only a couple of blocks from where I used to live. So, definitely, memories of bad relationships past were surfacing after shooting the scene [laughs]. It was a bit of a time warp.

I had a much more volatile personal life when I was younger, and also when I was in New York.

By the end of the episode, are we supposed to respect Mimi-Rose as an artist?

I don't know that the audience has enough information to accurately judge her. Because you've only seen what she considers to be subpar work, right? But I certainly think that it's well within your right as an audience to not like the art that we're seeing in the episode.

Even her book sounds like the plot summary of a fraudulent writer.

Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I wonder what she got famous for. What art was it that Mimi-Rose had so much success with?

You are going to star in a show called Love co-created by Judd Apatow. Is your character more or less functional than Mimi-Rose?

I would say that my character is less composed and is probably wearing her insecurities and flaws on her sleeve more than Miss Mimi-Rose Eleonor Howard.

I love how you keep saying her full name.

It's great. If that were my name I would say my full name at all times. That was one of my favorite lines in the scene.

How did Judd sell you on Love?

Obviously he's someone that I've always wanted to work with. And I met with Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin, who are writing the show, and they talked me through it. And this is right around the time I'd been cast on Girls but hadn't yet started shooting it. When the show was sold to Netflix for a straight, two-season pickup, it also felt like, practically, such a welcome relief for me from the turbulence of Community [in which she plays Britta]. To have the experience as an actor where you have a job and you know that it's going to last for at least two years and you don't have to go through a pilot, then waiting to see if the pilot gets picked up, then waiting to see if you get a full season, then waiting to see if you get a second season — to circumvent all that anxiety and just do the work for roughly 20 episodes felt very appealing to me. I also felt, post-Community, that I would like to do a show that was more in the vein of the dramedies that we see on cable and Netflix, for people to see me do something that's not joke-filled. It's nice as an actor to be in a more grounded, realistic show.

You recently directed the short documentary The Queen of Code, about pioneer coder Grace Hopper. Do you want to direct more, having done that?

Yes, definitely. I'm thinking about one I'm going to do next, but I don't know that I should necessarily say right now. And it's not wildly differently from Grace Hopper; it was a story that was told to me by other women in tech when I was at the Grace Hopper convention. That was a great thing about going there: People were just coming up to me and saying, "You need to know about this woman; this woman did this." I have a very long list now of remarkable women who should be highlighted. That's the fun thing about getting to direct documentaries like this: I get to learn about subject matters I didn't know anything about.

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Patti Greco Writer Patti Greco is a freelance writer and editor based in Brooklyn.

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