The Canadian comic Mae Martin knows his new limited series of Netflix, which combines cheerful comic elements with the genres of horror and thriller anxiety inductors, may seem like a dramatic deviation for anyone who is familiar with their standing routines and their semi -autobiographical show, “feel good.”
“It’s fun because it doesn’t feel like a game for me,” said Martin, who identifies as non -binary and use them/pronouns, NBC News. “It feels thematically in the same universe as everything I do. It is introspective, and there are issues on adolescence and identity processing.”
“Wayward”, who opens Thursday, stars Alex Dempsey, a police officer who has just moved to the small seemingly picturesque town of Tall Pins with his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon). During one of his first days in the city, where his wife grew up, Alex crosses two students from the local academy for “teenagers with problems” who desperately try to draw their escape. When he begins to investigate a series of unusual incidents, Alex suspects that Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette), the enigmatic school leader who shares a personal connection worrying with Laura, could be in the center of all the problems of the city.
“Alex is a kind of audience’s eyes and tries to assemble everything. It is so seductive to be in a city that is so acceptable and progressive on the surface and offers everything that has always dreamed,” Martin explained. But in the course of eight episodes, Alex, who is a transgender man, “is dealing with his moral compass and also with his intense desire to have that nuclear family and the conventional acceptance he has always wanted.”
After Martin jumped to fame internationally during the Covid-19 pandemic to cook the romantic series of “Feele Good” dramas, in which they touched a fictional version of themselves, some spectators may have expected the writer to create a new project that felt similar to the autobiographical in a similar way. But Martin said they have been wanting to make a show for decades established in the context of the “adolescent industry with problems”, a term used for the wide range of controversial youth residential programs aimed at adolescents with difficulties.
“My best friend Nicole was sent to a teenage institute with problems in the United States, and left for about two years,” said Martin, who grew up in Toronto. “That aroused my interest in some of the most shaded practices and the really strange origins of that industry, which date back to self -help cults in the 1970s and this really theatrical behavioral modification.”
At first, Martin thought that the series would be more a classic story of majority in the “stand by me” or “Holes” line. But after learning of the heartbreaking experiences of her best friend in one of those unregulated schools, where she remembered being hungry, deprived of sleep and forced to dig and stand in her own tomb during the night, Martin could say that a story about teenagers with problems with her will would be much more in line with classic horror and thriller films like “Fargo”, “go out” and “Baby of Rosemary.”
Over time, Martin said, they were more interested in looking “directly how many young people are pathologized at such an early age, just having a fairly normal reaction to a sick society.”
“When you take children who are in crisis and your reaction is punitive, you take away the opportunity to go through all normal development milestones, and you attribute labels that really affect how they see their own potential,” they said.
Martin said that they have found themselves more and more thinking about “the state of the world that we are transmitting to young people and in the intergenerational conflict.”
“As we age, let’s suppress much of our sensitivity and our critical thinking and even our empathy only to survive in the world,” Martin said. “Therefore, we cannot avoid the kind of young people of gas light of their correct observation that the world is crazy, and that there is a lot of hypocrisy out there.”
From the beginning, Martin said, they knew they wanted to play Alex. While his gender identity is only explored in passing, “much of his internal yearning is connected to that and how he looks at himself and wants to be seen in the world,” especially as a husband and an expectant father, Martin explained.
“The program was established in 2003, and I think there was not much fluidity about non -binary identity at that time and not many of them/them,” Martin said, adding that interpreting a man “simply made sense” for them. “Who knows where I will end up in that spectrum? But it seemed quite natural as an actor, more natural than I would have been interpreting a woman.”
As creator and co-showrunner of “Wayward”, Martin is one of the few LGBTQ writers in Hollywood who are guiding their own main projects. While they said they try not to think too much about their public profile when creating their projects, Martin said it is “scary” to be a creative queer at a time when President Donald Trump and conservatives have been attacking and recruiting legal protections for the queer community, especially trans and non -binary people.
“What makes things difficult is when things are charged politically, as they are now, it makes it even seem having A trans character or a gay character is a political statement and immediately puts his project in a niche category, “Martin said.” It is madness that his career can be affected by political changes like that. “
Martin said they see their visibility as a prominent non -binary comedian in the current climate as a double -edged sword. On the one hand, they want to tell stories that will arrive at the widest possible audience and, hopefully, in turn, they create more empathy for the LGBTQ community. But at the same time, Martin said, they know that their mere existence can be seen as a kind of political declaration.
They said they would welcome an environment in which the identity of a LGBTQ character was “simply incidental”, instead of a definition characteristic of the project, “and the approach is actually in these greatly universal issues and stories.”
In “Wayward”, for example, “there are nuances that are specific to the strange experience that I think that queer people will relate and relate, but those things are quite identifiable for anyone who has experienced some kind of otherness,” Martin said.
Martin speculated that the intensive reaction against the trans community is connected to representations of trans people who have focused disproportionately on transphobia, intolerance and trauma.
“It is part of the trans experience, but it is just a small part of a human experience,” they said. “The more we can have diverse characters that are defective, fun, strange and identifiable, that make mistakes, that have relationships, I think that would be more useful.”
Martin acknowledged that there has been a contraction in the production of various stories, but plan to continue “hidden subversive things” in more conventional projects.
“I will keep my head down, I will continue to flood people with scripts and I hope to mount and do my part,” Martin said.
