Maya Erskine on ‘PEN15’ Season 2 & Countering Asian-American Stereotypes in ‘Plus One’
A couple years before she started writing PEN15, Maya Erskine read the script for a rom com called Plus One. The film had already been cast, but its creators—Erskine’s New York University classmates Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer—asked her to assist with the table read. Immediately, she fell in love with the story and the character Alice, a raunchy, unapologetic twenty-something who falls in love with her best friend, Ben, after they agree to spend the summer as each other’s plus ones to weddings.
“What I loved was she was a flawed person, and it wasn’t through the gaze of a guy,” Erskine says. “We weren’t seeing it through Ben’s perspective of having her fit into what his idea of a perfect woman is....
