Caroline Aaron Talks Curb Your Enthusiasm and Other Meta Hollywood Projects

These days, actor Caroline Aaron is best known for playing Shirley Maisel on the hit Amazon series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. However, Aaron has had a vast career, appearing in various films and television shows throughout the years. One such film is Call Waiting, a 2004 dramedy which sees Aaron playing an actor playing a sick character in a movie, making her pretty much the only person you see throughout the entire film. Recently, ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with Aaron and we discussed her history with these types of meta Hollywood roles. Aaron also appeared in Curb Your Enthusiasm and Episodes, which star Larry David and Matt LeBlanc playing themselves while living in Los Angeles. Here’s what Aaron had to say when asked if these meta roles specifically appeal to her.

“Well, Curb Your Enthusiasm is different than anything else because it really is, people don’t believe this, but it’s true, it is 100% improvised. There are no written lines, and it’s really scary. It’s like jumping off a building and just hoping that your imagination is the parachute cord that you’d pull so that you don’t crash,” Aaron explained. “And so it doesn’t seem meta when you’re doing it. For people who are brand names, like really big brand names, Larry makes them be themselves. Like Richard Lewis is Richard Lewis, you know what I mean?”

Aaron added, “But I was playing a fictional character that he had actually written, and that was so great. I had to audition and I treated it that way. But the first day I was on set, Ted Danson was in the episode and the AD came to me and said, ‘Okay, we have one more shot until your scene.’ And I’m going like this, ‘What scene? I don’t have any script. What do you mean?’ I was so petrified. You don’t have a script, you’re just sitting there, what you would normally do to prepare, learn your lines, concentrate, think about, no, you have none of that. So you just have to fly by the seat of your pants. And you have such a great support system because you have Larry right there with you, the king of this. So that is really fun.”

“In terms of Episodes, I often wondered this for Matt, who I just adored, adored, adored, is that he’s playing Matt LeBlanc. Talk about meta. And that was completely ‘fictional’ meaning that it was a show that was written, there were very specific scripts, that kind of thing,” she explained.

“Not many people know of that show, it was sort of a little cult… People go, ‘Episodes?’ And I go, ‘Really trust me on this.’ I think it’s just brilliant. I love those writers. And they knew what they were talking about because they were a writing team [like the characters in the show]. One half of them was Friends and one half of them was Mad About You. They’d both been creators of those shows. So they had been through the mill of, let’s say, network television where there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and this was their time, their experience of having gone through all of that and getting to have it be their way. So it was really fun. Really fun, I have to say. I’m so glad you know about it.”

Stay tuned for more from our interview with Caroline Aaron.

Call Waiting is now available to stream on Amazon, Curb Your Enthusiasm is on all HBO platforms, and Episodes is currently streaming on Netflix.