Why do you think Marcel has aged so well as a viral star? Laura Bennett: Your first Marcel the Shell video short was released in 2010. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. I spoke with Slate about the genesis of Marcel, the pressures built into the “relatable” label, and the way motherhood has shaped her work. It’s one of two films Slate worked on that are nominated for Oscars this year she also plays a tacky laundromat customer in Everything Everywhere All at Once. A mockumentary-style portrait of the relationship between Marcel, his grandmother, and a filmmaker played by Fleischer Camp, Marcel is both sweetly funny and a moving depiction of grief. More than a decade later, Slate and Fleischer Camp have been married and divorced, Slate is remarried and mother to a 2-year-old daughter, and Marcel is the star of the Oscar-nominated feature Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. (One discarded prototype, Slate told me, involved a miniature boom box instead of a shell.) She and Fleischer Camp ended up making a trio of stop-motion animated short films about Marcel, and the shell became a YouTube sensation. She named this creation Marcel Fleischer Camp assigned him a shell for a body, a single eyeball, and a pair of plastic doll shoes. She and her then-boyfriend, Dean Fleischer Camp, were packed into a hotel room with a group of friends during a trip, and she started channeling her discomfort into a tiny, crackly voice. She was fired after one season because, she’s said, she and the show simply “didn’t click.” It was in the weird, uneasy period of her life after SNL that she first came up with Marcel the Shell. She started out doing stand-up and then got cast on Saturday Night Live in 2009, where she made headlines after accidentally cursing on air. ![]() “I do feel very vulnerable and very fragile,” she told me. Her work takes on themes that might seem like surprising fodder for comedy-loneliness, kindness, loss. But Slate’s emotional openness is clearly more than a shtick. It’s the kind of fondly diminutive language so often applied to women in the public eye who talk a lot about their feelings and make jokes about body hair and gastrointestinal issues. Jenny Slate tends to attract the same kinds of adjectives again and again: relatable, quirky, authentic.
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