It’s impossible to sit on the streets of New York alongside Ilana Glazer without attracting some notice. We’re only three minutes into our coffee on a breezy morning in May when a woman in a black sundress stops mid-stride to stare. “Sorry—I just want to say…yeah, you’ve definitely changed my life,” she says nervously. “Thank you.” Glazer chirps back, “Thank you. Appreciate it. Bye, love ya,” She politely laughs and remarks on the bystander’s “cute energy” before sinking back into our conversation.
Sidewalk adoration is to be expected for the comedian, producer, and writer who cocreated and starred in the hit Comedy Central series Broad City. The show premiered a decade ago, in a simpler time—back when you could lose yourself in a Bed Bath & Beyond and Hillary Clinton was only a lighthearted cameo away from an assumed presidential win. Across five seasons, Glazer and her creative partner Abbi Jacobson attracted a devoted fan base by reflecting the 20-something New York experience as they’d lived it, complete with sweaty subway rides, surreal detours through seedy St. Mark’s Place, and schemes to acquire that month’s rent. By the time Glazer and Jacobson pulled the plug in 2019, they’d generated oft referenced memes and introduced the concept of a JonBenét Ramsey Beanie Baby.
Long Island–born Glazer was in her early 20s when she and Jacobson started playing fictionalized versions of themselves via a web series that spawned their show. In those days, she says, fan interactions skewed intense. “When Broad City was on TV and people would see me, they would think I wanted to smoke with and fuck them,” she tells Vanity Fair. “And it was just like, ‘No, dude. What? I’m truly looking at these grapefruits. This is a really aggressive energy.’ It’s been so nice to get older, where people seem to understand that I’m not my character. I’ve had clarity and understanding that I’m not my character.”
After closing the door on Broad City, Glazer released her debut comedy special, 2020’s The Planet Is Burning, appeared in Apple TV+’s The Afterparty, and cowrote and starred in the 2021 A24 horror film False Positive. The latter project, she told VF at the time, was “a container for some of my anxieties about growing up and moving on and letting go.” Glazer’s new movie, Babes—which she cowrote and stars in alongside Michelle Buteau—is a comedic reckoning with what happens next. “In having a child myself, I gained so much, but I also lost,” she says.
Over the course of our hour-plus chat, Glazer continuously steers us back to the perspective she’s gained since becoming a parent to her nearly three-year-old daughter with husband David Rooklin. “I don’t know if you have this experience of identifying older than you are,” she tells me between sips of her cortado, “but I’ve always been a nerd. I’m 37, and I’m so happy to be 37. You know what I mean? I felt like when I was a teenager I wasn’t doing enough teenage stuff. When I was in my 20s, I was building my comedy career and focused. And now, I feel so aligned.”
On her latest album, Taylor Swift sings, “My friends all smell like weed or little babies.” In Babes, Glazer’s Eden comfortably occupies the valley in between. After discovering she’s pregnant while on a mushroom trip with her best friend Dawn (played by Buteau), Eden decides to raise the baby on her own.
Those looking for echoes of Broad City will find them. Eden runs a yoga studio out of her fourth-floor walk-up apartment that feels like an elevated version of Ilana’s SheWork. There’s a breast-pump-burning scene in the film soundtracked to Shania Twain, who was a recurring gag on the sitcom. And then there’s the fractured bond between freewheeling Eden and the more practical, settled Dawn, which parallels what might’ve happened between onscreen Abbi and Ilana if we’d seen them move into their 30s.
Was Glazer hesitant to pen another project centered on the complexities of female friendship after Broad City? “Nope,” she says without hesitation. “Not a shred of doubt, baby. Not a shred of damn doubt.”
“I don’t want to watch bad shit about female friendships that’s fake or boring or not funny and not heartfelt,” she continues. “But good shit, really quality, deep, funny stories about female friendship with stakes, that feels like it comes from a seed of authenticity and has retained that genuineness? I’ll probably be doing it for the rest of my life.”
The comedic indignities of pregnancy and its many bodily fluids are “the sauce” of Babes, says Glazer, which she cowrote with friend Josh Rabinowitz when she was newly pregnant. But the way friendship morphs with motherhood, “that’s the meat.”