Jemima Kirke Is One Tough Mother

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Jemima Kirke speaks about the superficial dissonance between her latest role and previous ones with equal parts awe and horror. “I’m not even living downtown. I’m uptown,” she says, eyebrows jumping. “I’m probably a Republican.” She pushes a crumb of pesto croissant from her lip into her mouth, then mutters under her breath, “So weird.” The 38-year-old actor, best known for playing the maddeningly devil-may-care Jessa on Girls, is talking about Regan Hamilton-Sweeney, the Armani-clad scion of a fractured Manhattan real estate dynasty on City on Fire, a Gotham neo-noir based on Garth Risk Hallberg’s sprawling novel of the same name that premieres May 12 on Apple TV+.

Kirke is sitting in a coffee shop on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, near where she lives with her two children (with ex-husband Michael Mosberg), 12-year-old Rafaella and 10-year-old Memphis. She has just dropped her kids off at school and will soon head to her painting studio, where the Rhode Island School of Design graduate is working on a series of portraits of people in the dark. “Not pitch-blacks,” she clarifies. “Caravaggio-esque.” After a busy pandemic during which she first starred as a deliciously vindictive high school principal on Sex Education, then as the glamorous Bohemian writer and cuckolded wife Melissa in Hulu’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, and, finally, City on Fire, which was shot last summer, Kirke has found herself in a lay period. “Maybe it's my age that I’m sort of in between right now,” she says. “I’m not as easily cast.”

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Perhaps more than most actors, Kirke has had her most famous character projected onto her, with Girls fans assuming that Jemima and Jessa are indistinguishable. There may once have been some truth to that, but while Jessa refused to grow up, reveling in her own messiness, a decade later Kirke has managed to maintain a free-spirited, no-fucks-given élan while evolving with the shifting roles of adulthood and maternal responsibility. When she mentions taking her Mercedes SUV to the dealership to be serviced, it’s clear Kirke has graduated from the insouciant itinerant in wide brim hats whom she played for six seasons.

“The first seasons of Girls she would show up and play herself,” says Jesse Peretz, executive producer of City on Fire and frequent Girls director. “Lena [Dunham] was writing her to be a more horrible version of herself, and Jemima had an effortlessness and was great from the get-go. There was a defensive protection of not wanting to say, ‘I’m an actor,’ because she wasn’t sure she would succeed at it, so it was like, ‘It wasn’t my idea, it was Lena’s… If Lena wants me to do this, I’ll do this, but what I really am is a painter.’ But as we got to later seasons she finally said, ‘I am an actor and I’m gonna take this seriously,’” says Peretz, who says he sees Kirke as a younger sister. “The shift was gradual but incredible to watch.”

Peretz, who suggested Kirke for the role of Regan, continues: “Coming into City on Fire, it was interesting to be with her playing someone who is a generation older than Jessa. Regan is really in fundamental ways more different than anyone I’ve seen Jemima play before, and she nails it.”

With her hair twisted back in a butterfly clip and “four days of lipstick” stuck in the creases of her lips, Kirke says flatly, “I can always insanely identify with the character in a way that’s perfect to where my life is right now. In the first read I’m like, ‘Oh god, how am I gonna do this?’ And then after the fourth or fifth read I’m like, ‘This is exactly what I need to work on in my life. It’s right here.’ It’s about just putting the lines on top of a version of myself.”

Co-creator Josh Schwartz describes how Kirke reinterpreted the character as written: “It started from a place where Regan is different from Jemima, but because she’s so open and present, all characters end up bending toward Jemima. She has a way of making them feel really lived in.” With Regan, Kirke says she identified with a splintering marriage and juggling the responsibilities of work, family, and childrearing. “She added a richness to the reality of being a mom,” says co-creator Stephanie Savage, recalling a scene in which a hungover Regan takes a beat too long to reply to her pestering daughter.

Kirke was able to turn a buttoned-up daddy’s girl with skeletons in her YSL Mombasa bag into a broken but flinty heroine with power in her vulnerabilities. Like the Hamilton-Sweeneys, Kirke grew up in her own privileged New York City dynasty of sorts, albeit more bohemian and in the West Village; she is the daughter of Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke and vintage store owner and interior designer Lorraine Kirke, one of four multihyphenate children (sisters Domino and Lola and brother Gregory all have their own creative careers). Kirke’s Regan is in many ways the heart of the show, a post-9/11 Bonfire of the Vanities–esque murder mystery with a plot so knotty it would make Dickens blush. Regan is the viewer’s alluring avatar, mapping the connections between the city’s penthouse habitués and basement squatters.

When Kirke’s character discovers that her husband is having an affair with a younger woman, she lashes out, “I was that girl! And I strangled her so that we could have this!”

“We changed that line to match that Jemima was once playing those girls and also was that girl in some ways,” says Savage, referring to Kirke’s transformation from glamorous wayward youth to divorced mother of two. Peretz, who directed the first episode, says he told Kirke to take liberties with the script in that scene: “The reality of Jemima’s past made that a very true depiction.”

I ask Kirke if she has ever struggled with the sacrifices inherent in having children and juggling a career. “Absolutely, because I had them really young, and there was a part of me that was…not resentful but regretful,” she says. “People don’t want to say the word regret about their children, because it sounds as if I’m saying I don’t like my children. No, I’m saying if I could do it again and get the same exact kids, I would wait till I was 40. But I did it young, and it’s not like I suddenly went from being 24 to enjoying staying at home being a cow and a maid while all my friends were going out and starting careers.” She fingers the vintage pendant charms on her gold necklace chain and goes on. “I happened to get a career on top of it, but then I was resentful because I didn’t have fun, because Rafa was born six weeks before the Girls pilot was shot.” She brought her newborn to the set and said no to every social engagement.

Now the demands of parenting are shifting. “It’s becoming an art form that I didn’t expect it to be,” Kirke says thoughtfully. “What kind of mother do I want to be? How much of my personality do I show them? How much of my history do I tell them about? You’re starting to see your habits and moods in them.” She wakes up at 6:15 to make their lunches (two different meals for different vegetable preferences), then rustles one or both children and one or both hairless cats out from under the covers of her bed, where most members of the household end up by morning. “Sometimes I think about people who don’t have kids when I wake up in the morning,” Kirke says with a throaty laugh. “I think if they experienced this, they would be so much nicer to me. They would be like, ‘How are you alive?’” They spend weekends roaming Greenwood Cemetery. “We try to find the funniest gravestone, like this one that said ‘Rando.’” Sometimes they do trapeze in South Williamsburg. At home they play gin rummy, collage, or watch movies.

For someone who was reluctant to embrace acting, Kirke is an ardent student—and teacher—of film. “They know how to watch anything now,” Kirke says proudly of watching movies with her kids. Their favorite is George Cukor’s Born Yesterday with Judy Holliday. The night before we meet, the family watched Sexy Beast in preparation for the weekly film class Kirke teaches at the nearby Red Hook Art Project, for kids living in the nearby Red Hook Houses. Kirke makes a point to pause the film and discuss different aspects with her kids. “I’m trying to get them to know good acting. I tell them about suspending disbelief, when you truly forget or can’t even imagine the actor having another personality.”

“With Jemima every scene had these layers and layers being revealed,” says Nico Tortorella, who plays Regan’s estranged brother. “She comes locked and loaded and ready to play. She comes to set with questions. She wants to know what the props are, where they’re coming from. She’s a very curious actor,” he says.

Tortorella says he and Kirke also bonded over a shared eBay obsession. “We’re both professional shoppers and spend way too much time collecting weird shit.” During filming, Tortorella was collecting patchwork flare jeans while Kirke was focused on iron-on patches of Golden Age screen sirens. “We would keep showing images back and forth to each other on our phones.”

“One of the most important things for us was Jemima walking me through what this world was like in 2003 New York,” Tortorella continues. He’s calling from a postpartum retreat in midtown Manhattan; the squalls of his five-week-old daughter, Kilmer Dove, punctuate the background of our call. “She lived so much of what the show portrayed. She brought me into her trailer and was really honest and said this is what went down and what it looked like.”

Schwartz and Savage also mined Kirke’s personal experience while fine-tuning the script. “Jemima brings so much candor to the part,” Schwartz says, “and brought all the elements of her life into the role: her colorful family, being a mom, transformation from being this girl at Don Hill’s to being an adult with real responsibilities.”

At the time the show is set, Kirke was 17 and was a Don Hill’s regular, like Samantha, the quixotic photographer groupie whose murder sets the show’s plot running. Kirke and her St. Ann’s high school pals, Paz de la Huerta, Stella Schnabel, and Zac Posen were mainstays at the Soho club’s famed Thursday night parties, the early aughts’ answer to Studio 54. Kirke says she spent that year toggling between pasta at Bar Pitti and trolling Search & Destroy for vintage T-shirts.

At the moment of the August 2003 blackout, which provides the climatic crescendo of the show, Kirke was in the middle of a bikini wax at J Sisters on East 57th Street. “My legs were over my head and I said, ‘Do it fast, the wax is hot!’” She draws out the ‘o’ in hot, her voice retaining a cosmopolitan British inflection leftover from her first 10 years living in the UK. She then walked the three miles home in embroidered Indian house slippers. Today, 20 years later, she wears scuffed, red suede ballet slippers with a short-sleeve, pale pink cardigan with picot stitching, and camo print pants.

She’s currently in the midst of a studio sale, selling more than a 100 items from her closet (the last stoop offerings included a box of unopened Girls DVDs and made it onto Page Six). For red carpet events, she tends to borrow from New York Vintage, like the flame-red beaded Bob Mackie column she wore to the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in March 2023. Earlier that month she made the rounds at Paris Fashion Week, sitting front row at Givenchy and Isabel Marant, often next to Lisa Rinna. “Nicest woman at Paris Fashion Week,” she says. “I still don’t know who she is—a housewife?” (The season before, Kirke was a runway model for Batsheva and Collina Strada.) Kirke uses a workout app called OBE that Aubrey Plaza turned her on to when they were filming the vestal satire The Little Hours in Tuscany; they would use John C. Reilly’s oversized apartment for their exercise routines. “He would put out towels and water for us,” she says, “as a joke.”

In the manner of Vanna White she shows off her black spiderweb quilted Charlotte Olympia handbag, designed by her cousin, Charlotte Dellal. A pink Moleskin is nestled inside and filled with dense, tight script. Kirke has been keeping a diary every day since she was 12; this volume was begun last September, soon after she finished shooting City on Fire. She makes a point to do The Artist’s Way, a guided series of journaling exercises, once a year, but she admits, “I’m not doing therapy at the moment because I’m sick of talking.”

We leave the coffee shop and amble down Van Brunt Street, and Kirke points out her neighborhood haunts, like the record store where the owner plays 45s and Kirke sits on a nearby stoop to give a thumbs-up or down, and the Mexican bar where she and her kids get tacos. She turns, heading toward her painting studio. “There’s a vulnerability and sexuality to her portraits,” Peretz says, “like she’s bringing a lot of herself into the way she’s seeing and painting her subjects.” As her own profile shifts with age and life’s turns, Kirke seems ready to take on whatever the next role may be, both onscreen and off. Her portraits may no longer be Jessa characters or Don Hill’s dreamers, but they will always be undeniably Jemima. I ask Kirke what it is about painting portraits that appeals to her. She pauses, squints at the sun, then says with a shrug, “I’m just good at them.”

Photographed by Sebastian Kim
Styled by Tina Chai.

Hair by David von Cannon. Makeup by Yumi Mori. Nails by Yuko Tsuchihasi. Shot on location at Hotel Barrière Fouquet’s New York.

In the top image: Max Mara coat ($4,590), top ($495), and briefs ($395); Bulgari earrings (from $2,950), necklace ($64,000), and bracelets (from $6,950); Gianvito Rossi mules ($795).

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