Janelle James is used to a more solitary existence. For a decade, she worked as a stand-up comedian, with no one to contend with but herself. Then she received a script that was good enough to warrant answering to a boss—it was Quinta Brunson’s pilot for. “I read a lot of pilots and I’ve tried to write some of my own—it’s very hard,” she tellsover Zoom. “It’s rare to come across a comedy that makes you laugh out loud on paper.
Do you feel like, in order to find Ava, you have to really bounce off the other characters around her? We don’t learn a lot about Ava’s personal life in the show. Have you come up with a backstory for her yourself? Yeah. People think I’m more outgoing, a party animal, and that I actually hate kids. At first, I was like, “You can’t tell TV from reality?” But now that I’ve sat in it for a bit, I understand that’s expected. People don’t know who I am. This is my first television role and I’m kind of reclusive. So they only have Ava to identify with. Now, I’m taking it as, “I’m doing such a good job that people think I’m actually Ava.