Peacock managed to bring the Punky Brewster crew back together for a successful revival, but it wasn’t just familiar faces that showed up for the big occasion. The show added several new characters to the mix, and that includes the talented Jasika Nicole, who plays Cherie’s girlfriend Lauren on the show. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak to Nicole all about the series, and we talked all about how Laurent fits into the Punky family, how important it is for people to see more LGBTQ relationships on screen, the big proposal, and more. First though we had to talk about the original series and the effect it had on her growing up.
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“When I was a kid, I felt like it was the only… I grew up in the ’80s and I was a little bit younger than their age, so I watched it on TV, and all the programming for kids at that time was cartoons,” Nicole said. “It was animated stuff. There weren’t a lot of television shows that were kind of dedicated to including a younger audience. Not that I didn’t watch Dynasty with my mom at night. I obviously did, but Punky Brewster felt like it was for me.”
“When I was a kid, I really identified with Cherie’s character because she’s such a rule follower and she was always trying to keep Punky out of trouble, which resonated with me. But there was this part of me that really wanted to be a Punky, that could recognize that there was a privilege in being able to just march to the beat of your own drum and be funny and quirky and weird,” Nicole said. “I think that growing up I was too scared to be that kind of a person and so now, as an adult, I can look back and say, ‘Oh, wow. I grew into my Punkyness.’ I’m still a Cherie in a lot of ways, but I feel like I grew up with the values that they were preaching in a lot of ways. Not preaching, but sharing with their audiences.”
“So I think that is one of the reasons that people are excited to see it come back, because it was wholesome content all those years ago and really trying to pinpoint how important family is, found family, family that you create and nurture yourself whether or not they’re blood-related to you,” Nicole said. “That is obviously a huge part of, I think, a lot of people’s lives now, as we’ve expanded our ideas of what family is and how it can look. Obviously, within the LGBTQ community chosen family, it’s important to us. I think for all those reasons it feels like the story of Punky and the world that’s Punky still feels very relevant today, to us. Honestly, it’s the only reboot that I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. I get why they’re bringing that one back. I want to see where Punky is today. I want to know what Cherie’s doing,’ in a way that I just haven’t felt about all the other reboots.”
It doesn’t take long to see that Lauren fits right in with the Punky family, and Nicole couldn’t be happier with the character, and also appreciated that the show just organically brings her into the mix.
“I think that Punky and Cherie’s characters are so well known, obviously. Even if you didn’t watch the Punky Brewster show when it was on, I feel like people who grew up at that time knew about Punky and knew what she stood for,” Nicole said. “She’s just a very dynamic personality and so obviously they would need to bring somebody else dynamic onto the show to play Cherie’s girlfriend, and I think that Lauren’s that exact character. She’s a lawyer, so she’s very smart. She’s certainly very articulate, but she’s also just a goofy person who wants to hang out and have a good time with everybody. I think that is the reason that her character is included in Punky’s family so seamlessly.
“One thing that I love about the show is that there is never any kind of introduction that the audience sees where Punky goes to her kids and she’s like, ‘All right, Aunty Cherie has a special friend and you’re going to meet her.’ You know what I mean? They were like, ‘This is Cherie’s girlfriend. Welcome her into the family. Let’s have a barbecue,’ and it was as simple as that,” Nicole said.
“I think she fits in really well with the group too. I love, I love the kids on this show. They were probably the people that I hung out with the most when we were shooting this. They were great. So I hope that reads. I hope that people can tell that Lauren really loves hanging out with Punky’s kids,” Nicole said.
We get to see the whole family celebrate a wonderous occasion during the proposal episode, which actually sees Lauren proposing to Cherie. It wasn’t just a proposal from Lauren to Cherie though, as it also allowed Jasika and her partner Claire to live out the proposal moment they never really had the chance to have.
“Yes, and it’s so funny because when I auditioned that was one of my audition scenes that I had the audition with. My partner Claire who I’ve been with for almost 15 years, we’re married, but we never had a proposal. It was a decision that we were going to get married. This was seven years ago, but actually, even before that, we had to get a civil union because marriage wasn’t legal in New York. So we had to do that so that they could move with me to Canada. Then when we came to California, we were going to have to get a domestic partnership. There were all these backwards running around to making your relationship legal in the eyes of the government so that we could have property together or even if we decided to adopt or something,” Nicole said.
“So here we are seven years after our actual marriage where we never were like, ‘Let’s get down on one knee and propose.’ We were like, ‘All right, we’re buying a house. We need to get this done.’ It kind of felt like this thing that we were marking off of the list. So we got to live that proposal, and I can’t tell you how fun it was to shoot that scene, as myself and for my audition with my partner. So then actually to be on the set and to be doing it with Cherie, it’s kind of living a different version of your life in a lot of ways, honestly, that I’d never been able to do before, because this is the first queer character that I’ve ever played on network television, even though I had been out my entire career. So there were a lot of little bits and pieces that I absolutely loved about this particular episode,” Nicole said.
There’s also an episode that allows the characters to finally live out their prom with a fun ’80s theme, and the episodes were some of the biggest highlights of her throughout the season.
“Their prom, exactly. Yeah, it’s really great. I feel these are episodes that resonate so much with the queer community and Cherie and Lauren’s storyline isn’t the focal point of the season or anything, it kind of goes in and out, but it’s something that I think will stand out with a lot of queer people, like this idea of being able to redo these big, historic moments in your life,” Nicole said. “I think that it’s something that a lot of people will be able to say like… I look back at my prom and it was really s*****. I can only imagine how different the experience would have been if I were able to go… I was not out in high school and, honestly, I hadn’t even had a real conversation with myself about what my sexuality. Might be because I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and I was biracial, and I already had too much on my plate.”
“I was like, ‘There’s a chance I like girls and I’m not going to give it any space in my head.’ I really was like, ‘Better compartmentalize it and graduate from high school, and just keep moving on with my life until I had more space to really figure this stuff out.’ Thankfully, I did get to a place where I could think about it honestly and say, ‘This isn’t something that you have to be scared of.’ But I think that when I was a kid, because I didn’t have any examples to follow… I didn’t even know that you could be black and queer or black and gay. I had no examples and the only times that we would see it on television, they were these really traumatic, scary storylines that basically communicated to you that it was a bad thing. It was a bad thing to be gay or to be queer or to be trans or whatever. So you internalize that stuff,” Nicole said.
“The more that we get to see relationships like this depicted in healthy ways in television, the more often other people are going to see them. They don’t even have to be kids. Anybody can see something on television and say, ‘Oh my gosh, it is not scary to be that thing. It is not terrifying. It is not a bad thing. I’m not a horrible human being because I am this way.’ I feel like it’s a simple, sweet episode,” Nicole said. They propose to each other and it’s great because the actual real-life implications of that are so much deeper to the queer community than maybe the straight community recognizes. They see it and they think it’s cute and sweet, but this is life or death for a lot of people in the queer community. So I feel really lucky to be a part of a storyline that’s trying to depict black queer love in such a positive, nurturing kind of light.”
With season 1 out in the world, if we get a season 2, do we get to see the wedding?
“I would imagine that you would, because it seems like sitcoms really love to operate around some big event. The 80s block party was one of the big events in the first season. So I could absolutely imagine their wedding being a focal point of Season 2, if we get to have one,” Nicole said. “But beyond that, one of the things that I love about sitcoms today is that they’re… this would happen to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air too. It was a sitcom and it was funny and it was over the top and it was silly, but they made sure to take the time to really dig into real issues and not just dismiss them or skim over them because, ‘Hey, we’re a comedy show. We’re a 30-minute comedy. We can’t really get into that stuff.’ I hope that Punky Brewster goes that route. Another show like One Day At A Time comes to mind. I know that they deal with a lot of real life stuff that’s happening.”
“In terms of Lauren and Cherie’s relationship, yes, they’re in love and they’re getting married and they have this beautiful family that they’ve created around them that supports them, and all of that is wonderful, but I want to see some real life implications of why queer relationships are different than straight relationships,” Nicole said. “We obviously know that love is universal and that looks the same no matter what your race, your ability, your sexuality, but it’s the way that the world treats you that that makes your love have to be looked at through a different kind of lens.”
Nicole also makes her own clothes and has a fashion blog when she’s not filming. One of her most recent projects was to redo her living room pillows, but things went slightly awry and she ended up with some fabric that definitely had a superhero vibe. So, what do you do with it? Well, make a cape of course!
“So I’m going to redo all the pillows in our living room and I want to do them… bear with me, bear with me, okay? So I bought what I hoped was this nice, nighttime, dark, rich blue velvet for my couch pillows, and what I got was Superman blue,” Nicole said. “So I’m sitting here with four yards of Superman blue velvet fabric. Every time I see it I think, ‘I got to make a cape out of this,’ which is hilarious because what am I going to wear a cape to? I don’t know, but I can’t let this fabric go to waste.”
“So I have been thinking about a superhero costume, but here’s my thing: if I were to make some kind of costume, I feel like I would create… I actually drew a superhero once. She was called Supergirl and she was just fighting misogyny around the world and she had this big G on her chest. So maybe I’m going to try and bring her to life or maybe a super maker, like somebody who’s able to craft something out of any kind of material. She’s like a MacGyver, but for fashion,” Nicole said.
Punky Brewster season 1 can be streamed right now on Peacock, and let us know your favorite part of the season in the comments or by finding me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!
