How Mae Whitman Survived the ‘Awkward’ Jump to Grown-Up Star

Mae Whitman has been a professional actor since she was 2 years old. But nothing she has done over the course of her career prepared the 34-year-old for how “terrifying” it would feel to bare her soul through song in the new musical rom-com Up Here, streaming now on Hulu.

In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Whitman looks back on acting with George Clooney in One Fine Day, Sandra Bullock in Hope Floats, David Schwimmer on Friends, and more as a small child before making the transition to grown-up TV star on Parenthood, Good Girls, and now Up Here. She also shares stories from the set of Arrested Development, where she received a comedy master class playing Ann Veal (“her?”) opposite Michael Cera.

“Sorry, I’m in bed, I’m tired!” Whitman says when she appears on the Zoom screen in a crisp, white button-up shirt that matches her sheets. It’s the morning before her new Hulu series is set to premiere and she’s a ball of anxious energy as she takes her first sip of a cappuccino and dives into explaining how scary it was to leave her comfort zone behind.

Before she got the opportunity to star in Up Here, Whitman says musical theater “really wasn’t” a part of her life in any meaningful way. “I’ve always been musically inclined, but something I always dealt with when it came to music, especially singing, was that it’s just so achingly vulnerable,” she says. “It always felt like I was baring the depths of my soul, and then I would get nervous, and then I was shaky and I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ And still, it makes me incredibly nervous.”

But at a certain point, after nearly 30 years on screen, Whitman decided that the only way she could “really challenge” herself is to do things that “really scare” her, adding, “It was kind of the only uncharted territory left for me.”

The creative team for Up Here includes the songwriters behind Frozen (Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) and the director of Hamilton (Thomas Kail), among other awards-laden Broadway luminaries. “You can’t all be the best at what you do in one place, that’s insane,” she says. “So it was like, if I could make this happen, it would be amazing.”

As someone who got into show business as a small child after wandering down the hall into the room where her mother—the successful voice actor Pat Musick—was auditioning for a commercial, Whitman seems genuinely surprised that she has yet to be dragged into the whole “nepo baby” debate.

“I mean, I’m so out of it that people ask me for advice on how to get into the business, and I’m like, ‘Be 3 years old and have your mom be doing a commercial and run down the hall!’” she jokes. Whitman thinks it “would have been hard” for her to live a “normal life” and find her way into professional acting on her own, suggesting that she would have been a “wild child” with tattoos all over her face without the discipline of showing up to set every morning at 6 a.m. “I can’t imagine the feeling of launching into the world at 22 and being like, ‘What am I going to do in this big city?’” she adds, echoing the scenario that her Up Here character faces in the show’s premiere.

If she seems oddly grounded for a former child actor, Whitman credits her parents and some of the more seasoned stars with whom she shared the screen as a kid. Recently, she reconnected with one of those actors when she and Jennifer Aniston were both guests on Live! with Kelly and Ryan and ended up having a surprisingly emotional Friends reunion backstage.

“That was totally random, by the way, I had no idea what was going to happen,” she says, before recalling the experience of doing her first sitcom guest role at just 8 years old. “They really took me in and made me feel loved. And I remember [Aniston] was especially maternal and caring in that environment. And so it felt important to me to express to her that that was something I took with me for the rest of my career. It’s shaped who I was and how I am on sets. It felt very cool to be able to just tell her, ‘No stress, but you changed my life.’”

Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.

Making the transition from child actor to adult actor is famously a difficult thing and it doesn’t always work out. Did you feel like it was your decision to make that transition? How did you navigate it?

You know, I hate to give them all this credit, but my parents, their perspective on this whole thing, it was so about open communication. I mean, I didn’t even rebel as a kid, because my parents were basically like, “We talk about things in this family.” It was never “Because I said so,” because I think that would have made me be like, “Well, fuck you, I’m gonna do it, anyway!” They would explain why they didn’t want me to do something or they would explain why there was a risk factor, and then they would entrust me with my own choices. And then I was like, “Well, I don’t want to get in a car with a drunk teen, that sounds dangerous!” It was a very open communication thing and I think that transferred into the career of it all.

And I think also, for women, it’s really hard to transition, because you go from it being about the fact that you’re the best actor to being like, “Well, are you hot?”—even though you’re a kid. “Are you famous?” It can be a very creepy and upsetting pubescent transformation there. And again, I think in general, kids need people that have their true best interests at heart. In this industry, even well-intentioned people, it’s hard to separate the things that people want from you from what is actually the best for the person standing in front of you. And that was always the priority: “Let’s talk about what’s actually best for you.” I was lucky enough that I actually was on a TV show that was really great called State of Grace. It was like The Wonder Years but for girls, and it was right in the weird pubescent transformation: 11, 12 to 13, 14. And so I sort of zoomed through the awkward phase and I didn’t really have to worry about being like, “I’m wearing a training bra. Is that OK, old man?”

But then there was Arrested Development, where you’re playing this character where the whole joke is how awkward she looks.

Yes, Ann Veal, all neutrals, all the time. I mean, [Arrested Development creator] Mitch Hurwitz is such a brilliant genius. Alia [Shawkat] was my best friend from State of Grace. I became best friends with Michael Cera, we were all really close, so I was always hanging around. And yes, people are like, “Weren’t you offended?” And I’m like, no, I would so much rather be the character actor who has interesting things to do than the version of what people have wanted from lead women in the past, which is like, “Be quiet, be sweet, wear a tank top, don’t make waves.” And I was like, no, I’m going to have my ears pierced and I’m going to be in all neutral shades, preaching Jesus in this weird TV show. I would so much rather do that.

I could see having that perspective now, but it’s impressive if you had that when you were, what, 14 years old or something?

I know. But I’d already been acting for like 12 years!

Do you remember the description for Ann when you went out for it and how you approached the audition?

Yes, it was so strange. I think the weird thing about Arrested, too, is it was a completely new territory. I remember when Alia booked it, she was like, “I got this show and I don’t really know what it is.” It was improv, but it wasn’t. And the jokes happen, but they’re really fast, and they’re not really jokes, and then they come back later. Everybody was kind of like, we don’t know what this is, but it’s good, whatever it is. It was like one of the first shows, I felt like, comedically, that didn’t assume their audience was stupid. And it elevated the whole comedic sensibility of television.

But I do remember, there had been a prior iteration of Ann at the end of Season 1. And I think their initial gag was they were going to keep replacing Ann so that she was a little bit different every time, which is also hilarious. But then I came on there and I was like, “These people are my friends, I love this,” and they were like, “We’re just gonna keep this Ann.” My favorite thing about her was that—yes, keep it as flat, as neutral, as nothing—but then she’s a fucking pervert! Underneath, she is a weird, repressed pervert who’s eating eggs, who wants to, like, fuck, basically. She’s like, I want to get into that secular zone and I’m going to use this poor teenager to do it.

It seems like, in the beginning, there were a lot of jokes about Ann. And then when you came back after that long break for Season 4, you got to do a lot more, right?

Yes. I was like, the joke’s on you, guys. I am having a child with Ben Stiller, I’m making out with Will Arnett. But that’s the thing I loved about her. She is so unassuming that you completely don’t pay attention to her, and now she’s in the entire power position, where boys are weeping over her, Gob is jealous, and she kind of becomes the main power source. And another thing I really loved about her is she’s one of the only characters that Lucille loves. Lucille hates everybody and then Ann comes along and Lucille’s like, “I like her,” even though for all intents and purposes she’s everything that Lucille would hate. And everybody’s like, “Her?”

It’s just so good. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s everything. So talking about that transition from child to adult actor, did Parenthood feel like the first real grown-up job in some ways?

You know, I think in some ways. The amazing thing about that show, for me, that really stood out was [creator] Jason Katims is someone who—it was the first time I had worked on a set where all the leaders were basically like, “We trust you.” We improvised so much on that show. And in what universe do you have 21 series regulars that all actually love each other and get along and enjoy coming to work and never fight? It’s unheard of. There is a real tendency in this industry to lead by fear and [Katims] was so secure in what he’d put together that he just let us be ourselves. And I think it comes through the screen. All of that love, all of that stuff, it’s genuine.

The rap on the show, for good or bad, is that it would make you cry in every episode.

I know! And it’s so funny because we didn’t try to do that. I picture that everybody was like, “Oh, and then in the script it says, ‘Amber cries.’” It was never written. None of that was written in. But when you’re working with those people and there’s vulnerability there, you can’t help it. Now you can’t get a tear out of me to save my goddamn life, I’m a brick wall. But then, I would go home and just stare at a wall for three hours and try to drink water because it was like the craziest catharsis every single day. It was genuinely like group therapy every day of your life.

Yeah, it seems like it’s not that it was manipulating people to cry, it was showing something so real that people had that real reaction to it.

Every single one was a real reaction. People would always be like, “Here I am, crying again.” And I’m like, yeah, how do you think we feel? I barely have eyes after doing this show for this long.

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