Zoe Lister-Jones puts in the work, there’s no doubt about that. With five directing credits to her name, three of those also involve her being the writer and star, including her debut film, Band Aid. It was “sociopathic for [her] to do,” she says of the 2017 film, but it speaks to her dedication to her work, tales of women desperate for more in their lives that are as smart, emotional, and witty as they come.

She’s in full control of her newest series, Slip, which she describes as a “cosmic download” of a creation. The story of a woman who finds herself traveling through the multiverse by way of orgasms — no, really — it’s a deeply personal creation for her, a “test of one’s endurance,” as she takes on the mantles of writer, director, and star. And really, there’s no one else who could play Mae Cannon, no one whose humor is as sharp or could mesh so well with the array of actors she’s chosen to play her spouses across the multiverse.
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Despite not being in a relationship, and definitely not married, Slip struck a chord somewhere deep in me, and it’s because of that that Lister-Jones comes off seeming so cool when I spoke to her. I mean, you must have to have it together on some level to be able to accomplish such a feat as Slip, which asks questions about the very state of our existence, particularly as women in a world where we’re judged for wanting anything at all. It’s that that makes me feel seen — that tale of “what we do with desire and how we contend with the feeling of wanting more” — and it’s obvious how much effort Lister-Jones has injected into the project when she speaks about it, and how proud she is (and should rightly be) of it.

Image via The Roku Channel

RELATED: ‘Slip’ Review: Zoe Lister-Jones Explores Love & Identity in Poignant, Experimental Series | SXSW 2023

In this interview, we talked about how deep and meaningful the series is for both of us — seriously, I cannot believe sex jokes made me cry — as well as where the ideas for the series came from deep in her brain. We discuss her fellow cast members and the flexibility of getting to play both in front of and behind the camera, as well as exploring her real-life fantasies on screen, and what she brought from working on Beau Is Afraid with Ari Aster into her shoot for Slip.

Check out the full interview — edited for clarity — down below, and stream Slip on the Roku Channel.

MAGGIE BOCCELLA: I wanted to say before we got started that this show moved me so deeply. I’m not married, I’m not in a relationship, but it touched me on a really deep level. So I just wanted to let you know that face to face.

ZOE LISTER-JONES: Thank you so much…what you wrote about the show is so meaningful to me. So I really can’t thank you enough. It really was the first time that I shared it with the world at [SXSW]. And your review was the first to come in, and it was such a terrifying moment, and your review, it was so nourishing at a very vulnerable moment for me, and you are such a thoughtful and brilliant writer. So yeah, deeply grateful.

Thank you. It means a lot, and the show was so nourishing for me too. Can you talk me through where this show came from, because obviously it’s very, very personal to you. So where did this idea germinate?

LISTER-JONES: I think with every project that I start writing, it always germinates…well, it starts with a question that I’m existentially grappling with as a person, and I am very interested in relationships and intimacy, and I wanted to create something that had sexual intimacy as its centerpiece, to explore female pleasure specifically in a way that felt unapologetic, and to harken back to eroticism of yore, but through a new lens. But for me, I really wanted to also look at what we do with desire and how we can contend with the feeling of wanting more. And so yeah, Slip was born. It was a cosmic download. I don’t have a great answer for where exactly the idea came from, but I think all of those things were ruminating. And then I thought it ought to be [about] a woman who fucks her way through the multiverse, and it lived in me. It incubated for a couple years, and then when quarantine hit, all of those voices got a lot louder. Those questions became hyper-focused, and then I wrote the season in lockdown.

Image via The Roku Channel

At what point did you decide that you were going to direct, write, and star in it? Because that’s a massive amount of pressure to put on yourself.

LISTER-JONES: Yeah. Well, my directorial debut was a movie called Band Aid, and I wrote, directed and starred in that. That was sociopathic for me to do, having never directed before. But it was a great bootcamp. It gave me the confidence to be able to then apply the tools and skills I learned there into series. But to do it in the medium of television is a whole other ballgame, because it’s really a test of one’s endurance. I always knew, though, that I wanted to embody all of those roles. I love the way that they’re in conversation with one another. When I write, I’m directing as I’m writing, and when I act, I think that’s a really exciting dialogue. But as a director and actor, to be in the belly of the beast with my co-stars and the immediacy of that dynamic…yeah, I do love doing them all, although they are challenging to take on.

Yeah. I cannot imagine, because just as a writer, I’m like, “This is enough. I have my box. I’m going to stay in it.” So to see you do all of that and to produce something that’s so meaningful is just insane to me. It’s insane talent to me.

LISTER-JONES: Thank you so much.

Of course. The one thing that I was really curious about is…obviously when you’re hopping from spouse to spouse, or multiverse to multiverse, you get to meet all of these characters, and obviously, there’s this situation where Mae wakes up and she’s married to them. So they’ve got these whole big backstories to them, these relationships that she has with each person, that you don’t get to see on the screen. You get little tiny hints of it and the writing explains where she’s at, but in terms of both writing and directing your actors, was there any guidance you gave them or gave yourself, as to building these backstories off-screen, or was it just working with what was on the page?

LISTER-JONES: No, definitely, there were a lot of conversations between my actors and I around those backstories, because as you said, in the script and what the audience is experiencing, is Mae being thrust into these lives and having to decipher clues about who she is in each of these worlds. So it was really up to my actors and myself to design a much broader history between us, so that we could feel that we were thrust into something that was lived in.

And it’s also just…casting is so key, and so I was working with brilliant actors who didn’t need too much hand-holding when it came to building out those character histories. But I think what I loved, because I’m an actor myself, is writing roles for actors where they could be wildly different from world to world, because a lot of these characters return in different forms or different roles from world to world. So there’s also a lot of discussion of that…of who they are when I first meet them, versus post-orgasm when we’re smack dab in the middle of a relationship, versus when they might return as a completely different character later in the series.

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I’m curious…as a writer, I know when I write things, I have my little personal favorites. Obviously, there’s a spouse that Mae is trying to get back to, but of the other ones, did you have a favorite?

LISTER-JONES: It’s so hard for me to choose favorites. What was so fun about writing this was that I was definitely delving into real life fantasies for myself. What would it be like to be married to a rockstar? What would it be like to have a kid with a woman? What would it be like to be with a disgusting stockbroker? [laughs] And so it was just so fun to play out those fantasies and comedically get to explore how bleak that grass was that appeared so green on the other side of the world-jump. Yeah, I don’t know. The rockstar is still a fantasy. I think if I had to choose one, that might be it. Although Emily Hampshire, who plays Sandy, we have a kid together in one world, and it is such a beautiful life that I’m a part of, that I think Mae is definitely drawn to, even though having a family has been something that historically has scared her.

One last question for you: Coming out at the same time as Slip is Beau Is Afraid, which is the Ari Aster film you worked on. Was there anything you learned from working with him, either as a director, as a writer, or even just as an actor?

LISTER-JONES: So much. I think Ari Aster is one of the greatest filmmakers of our time, and so to just bear witness to his mastery of filmmaking was such a dream come true. As an actor, he created an environment that I don’t know that I’ve experienced [before]. There’s such a sense of play and experimentation that allows for so much room as an actor to just be wild and to be really liberated. His characters are so complex, and his dialogue can be quite obtuse in the best possible way, and so it was an incredible challenge for me to try and live up to the genius that is Ari Aster. And I shot Beau Is Afraid a few months before shooting Slip. So I didn’t want to invade any of Ari’s space, but I was definitely trying to absorb as much as I could, just cellularly, in terms of how meticulously he designs shots and how much he fits into a single frame. I think that’s something I definitely took with me into Slip.