Jenny Slate: Chris Evans is truly one of the kindest people Ive ever met
Jenny Slate is speaking for the first time since she and Chris Evans broke up a few months ago. Slate sat down with Vulture for their big interview and… oh my God. Like, I enjoy Jenny Slate. I think she’s funny and charmingly neurotic and I get that her brand is “quirky girl next door.” She’s confessional because that’s part of her personality and part of her brand as a comedienne and actress. But she literally devotes the bulk of this interview to analyzing her relationship with Chris Evans. And it comes across as… too much. I feel sorry for her, for real, but… my God. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
She & Chris used to compare themselves to animals: “We used to talk about what kinds of animals we were. Chris said it’s like I’m a chick riding on a St. Bernard’s head. We’re an odd match.”
She & her ex-husband are still friends: “We’re good friends. That’s why we got divorced. If we didn’t get divorced, we wouldn’t be able to be friends and we wouldn’t be able to do our work. We had just grown apart, and we love each other. It wasn’t easy, but not bad.” She pauses. “No, it was bad. But not essentially bad.”
When she first met Chris: “I remember him saying to me, ‘You’re going to be one of my closest friends.’ I was just like, ‘Man, I f–king hope this isn’t a lie, because I’m going to be devastated if this guy isn’t my friend.’” The first time they went out to dinner, as co-workers getting to know each other, she remembers insisting they split the bill over Evans’s strenuous objections. “If you take away my preferences, you take away my freedom. Then I was like, Oh, man, is this dude going to be like, ‘Ugh, this bra-burner.’ Instead, he was like, ‘Tell me more.’”
Her marriage was dissolving. Vulture says her marriage was dissolving around the same time she was working on Gifted with Chris, when “all she wanted to do was hang out on the porch and drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Chris kept organizing group activities and she would begrudgingly participate. “Chris is a different speed than me — I think he really did just jump out of a plane for an interview. And so when he was like, ‘Game nights,’ I was like, ‘This is annoying. This guy’s like a sports guy. He’s the kid that likes P.E.’” But finally his enthusiasm won her over. “I first really liked Chris as a person because he is so unpretentious. He is a straight-up 35-year-old man who wants to play games. That’s it. I was like, ‘I’d better not discount this, because this is purity.’”
Getting to know Chris: “What’s the same about us is not just that we’re from Massachusetts, which was such a delight, but Chris is truly one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, to the point where sometimes I would look at him and it would kind of break my heart. He’s really vulnerable, and he’s really straightforward. He’s like primary colors. He has beautiful, big, strong emotions, and he’s really sure of them. It’s just wonderful to be around. His heart is probably golden-colored, if you could paint it.”
They didn’t fall for each other on set. “To be quite honest, I didn’t think I was his type. Eventually, when it was like, Oh, you have these feelings for me?, I was looking around like, Is this a prank? I mean, I understand why I think I’m beautiful, but if you’ve had a certain lifestyle and I’m a very, very different type of person — I don’t want to be an experiment. If you are a woman who really cares about her freedom, her rights, her sense of being an individual, it is confusing to go out with one of the most objectified people in the entire world… I’m considered some sort of alternative option, even though I know I’m a majorly vibrant sexual being.” And especially when random ladies would come up to her at CVS, “being like, ‘Oh my God, is that Chris Evans? He’s so hot!’ You’re like, ‘How dare you? That’s my boyfriend. But yes, he’s so hot.’”
She didn’t leave her husband for Chris: “When Chris and I started dating, my husband and I had only been separated for a couple of months.” The divorce actually went through while she was at the Sundance Film Festival, after she and Evans broke up. “Even though we had an amicable divorce, I think that’s still something that you need to mourn. When you get separated from somebody that you actually care about, it is the destruction of a belief system. That is really, really sad.” Throughout all of it, the divorce, the new love, she says, “I just didn’t have the tools. And I didn’t think very hard about that, to be honest. I wanted to step into the light. Chris is a sunny, loving, really fun person, and I didn’t really understand why I should be prudent.”
Are she and Evans on good terms? “We’re not on bad terms, but we haven’t really seen each other, spoken a lot,” she says. “I think it’s probably best. I’d love to be his friend one day, but we threw down pretty hard. No regrets, though. Ever.”
To be so vulnerable in a national/international interview is an odd choice, although throughout it all, Slate seems like herself. You know what I mean? She’s not “performing” vulnerability. She actually comes across as neurotic, vulnerable and still dealing with the breakup and the end of her marriage. If she says her marriage was done before she started dating Chris, so be it. I was going to say that she’s learned some important lessons about love and privacy and more… but I’m not sure she really has learned those lessons, judging from this interview.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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