Patti Harrison on Her New Hinge Campaign and Online Dating Green Flags

Courtesy of Hinge

Patti Harrison was dying to be in Hinge’s new ad campaign. Well, not literally. But the comedian and actress did recently pay a visit to a fantastical version of the afterlife where she presided over a legion of fuzzy dating app icons who had been deleted by people in successful relationships. The new commercials, part of Hinge’s fifth “Designed to be Deleted” campaign, premiere today, and they give Harrison the chance to showcase her outré sense of humor along with an incredible set of pigtails.

“I got the email about it and I was like, ‘Oh, brother, a commercial thing. We’ll see,’” Harrison jokes, when I ask her why she decided to partner with the dating app. “It ended up being so incredibly cool and out-there and weird in a way I was not expecting at all.”

In addition to being a match for Harrison’s signature strangeness, the campaign is meant to showcase Hinge’s inclusiveness of LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender daters — an effort Harrison says “is objectively good for society,” especially if it means “people can use a dating app with an interface that isn’t designed to break them down mind, body and soul.” Beyond the delightfully odd ads, the star is also contributing to the app’s Not-so Frequently Asked Questions feature, in which artists and creators like King Princess, Mimi Zhu, and Jari Jones share candid feelings about sex, dating, and relationships.

And Harrison has plenty of thoughts on these subjects, as she proved during a recent chat with Them, sharing her opinions on everything from dating app “green flags” to including group photos on your profile. Below, Harrison talks about becoming the Oracle, getting recognized on Hinge, and bizarre marine organisms.

I assume you went full method for your role as the Oracle?

Yeah. Well, a lot of people don’t know this about me, but I did die for this role, which was really hard to do, because I love life. But I died and so I was just kind of learning what it was like to be a ghost spirit in another realm. That was harder than people would imagine it is, because it’s just so freaky. There’s so much freaky stuff happening on the other side. It was really cool, though, that the other realm let us film the project there because it’s just kind of a scary space. There’s a lot of ghouls and demons flying around.

So yeah, I was full method, I was fully dead. But I’m back. I got my passport stamped and everything. It was an incredible experience. Unforgettable. I will say, when I died and went to another realm and shot a commercial there and came back, I would describe that experience as unforgettable.

What are some green flags on a dating profile?

I like when people can be sincere and earnest and there’s a little bit of humor sprinkled into their profiles. I don’t like when it’s all sarcastic. If you can bear the minor discomfort of putting yourself out there and answering a question on a dating profile that’s visible for everyone to see with strong sincerity, I think that shows that you’re willing to be vulnerable. It’s a good quality, I think, to be earnest.

I think we’re in an age of people thinking that dating app profiles are so eye-rolly, like, “It’s so embarrassing. Who gives a shit? Whatever.” So they don’t put any effort into their profiles or all their answers are jokes. And you can’t really get to know anything about a person that way. I don’t think sarcasm is a second language. I really don’t believe that. So when people put something about sarcasm in their dating profiles, that’s a red flag to me. I steer clear. But we’re not talking about red flags, we’re talking about green flags. And earnestness is a green flag in my opinion.

Speaking of sarcasm, do you find that people try to out-funny you? And if so, how does that go for them?

I mean, that’s its own hell. I am definitely not a super famous person by any means, but because most of my entertainment career has been spent dating people in New York and L.A., I do get recognized every once in a while. Sometimes people will message me and right out the gate, they’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, I liked that thing you worked on.” And I appreciate them coming out and just saying that they recognize me, because then I usually send them a message like, “I have boundaries about dating people who recognize me, so I have to say no, but thank you for the nice message and good luck on here or whatever.”

But sometimes people do a more insidious thing, which is a slow con. They don’t say right out of the gate they recognize me, but all their messages will be these insanely graphic jokes because I think they’re trying to appeal to my sense of humor if they recognize me. So if someone right out of the gate starts making these really weird, bizarre sexual jokes, I’m usually like, “Somewhere down the line this person’s probably going to be like, ’Oh, by the way, I saw that show you worked on that I love.’”

I don’t want it to sound like I don’t like jokes! I love when someone has a sense of humor. It’s awesome. A sense of humor is deeply tied to a sense of play, and a sense of play retained into your adulthood is the spice of life. But sometimes people just joke around a lot because they’re nervous or they’re so horny that they can’t stop making jokes, because it’s kind of like thinking about baseball to get your boner to go away: “Oh, if I just quote Big Bang Theory a bunch of times and say ‘bazinga’ a bunch of times, my boner will go away and this interaction will go better.”

On a Hinge profile, what’s the right blend of pictures of you and pictures of you with other people?

Profile picture has to be just you, or cropped. I think it’s good to have photos that show that you’re social, and you’re around other people. And if people don’t have photos of them with other people, that’s OK because I think some people don’t want to post pictures of others online if they’re not able to get everyone’s permission.

But I think if your profile is all group photos, I’m going to expect that I get to have incredibly intimate, passionate sex with every single person in every photo because I’m dating a communal organism that’s kind of like... I can’t remember what those things are called. It’s that mass of communal organisms that float through the sea that have a really powerful sting. It’s like a jellyfish, but it’s not.

That’s what I’m going to want out of that relationship, is just this mass of people who all are conjoined, where they’ve been a group so long that they’re actually attached at the skin, and one eats from one hole and they shit out the other end sort of thing. Not Human Centipede style; that’s its own IP. That’s a horror idea. My idea is based in an idea of fantastic love and exploration and positivity, so…

Yeah, it’s like a grove of aspen trees—

A what?

I think aspen trees are all one organism or something. Anyway—

Really? Oh, are they interconnected at the root or something like that?

Yeah, they’re all one big thing. I was just trying to make the analogy pretty…

That’s kind of freaky. That’s like if you saw a group of people standing together on the corner of a street and you just thought, “Oh, these are people waiting at a stoplight.” But then you slowly looked down and you saw that they were all holding hands, but not holding hands, they’re kind of doing it sneakily, they’re all holding the tips of each other’s fingers or something like that. That’s what those trees sound like to me.

Good rom-coms are rare. Good queer rom-coms are even rarer.

Did you get to keep any of the furry Hinge app icons?

No, but they did offer the possibility. When I travel, I pack my suitcase to the point that nuclear fission is happening inside, and it’s prone to exploding. So I just didn’t have any room for it. But I thought of making one at home, maybe out of all my hair that’s on the floor and things like that, because they were very comforting to be around.

Speaking of deleting things, what are some of your favorite things to destroy?

You know those kind of strudel crisp things that you can put on top of... It’s a wafer cookie sort of thing, but you can put it on top of coffee or a hot chocolate and it deteriorates, and it doesn’t look good when it deteriorates? You think it’s like “oh, a sweet and a coffee, that’s such a classic combo,” but when you watch it, it’s kind of like a Cronenberg movie. It looks like flesh that’s kind of... Do you know what I’m talking about?

A stroopwafel?

Yeah, there it is. A “stroop.” “Stroop” is the word, not strudel. You know so much about trees, you know so much about stroopwafels. Encyclopedic! Yeah, maybe those. The other thing I would say I enjoy destroying is a relationship between a man and his mom.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Originally Appeared on them.