Sydney Lemmon Has Killer Instincts

“Are we breeding or are we killing?” Sydney Lemmon asks me, her hazel eyes studying our victims. Several bees had intruded on our diner lunch, flying perilously close to our faces. They had been interrupting the flow of our interview, on the collision path with our gesticulating hands. The 34-year-old actress devised a wily distraction with her coffee saucer and a mini jug of maple syrup. Now a few bugs, feasting on the pool of nectar, were held at our mercy.

Contemplating murder is a familiar mode for Lemmon, whose latest gig as a co-lead in Max Wolf Friedlich’s hair-raising Broadway thriller Job requires her to spend every night pointing a gun to a man’s head. She plays Jane, a frazzled millennial content moderator who’s been placed on leave from her tech company after a public meltdown. The man is Lloyd (played by her Succession colleague Peter Friedman), a boomer Berkeley therapist tasked with assessing whether she’s fit enough to return to work. Over the course of 80 minutes, the two engage in a tête-à-tête, the coiled Jane unraveling as she shares her alienation from virtue-signaling college friends, confusion toward an ex-who’s-not-her-ex, and trauma from the graphic onslaught of horrors she witness at her job. She loves that job though, because it gives her a definitive purpose, a moral quest. And it’s this pursuit of morality that leads her, in more than one way, to Lloyd’s increasingly claustrophobic office.

The play is so tense that when it ended, I beelined to the nearest bar for a martini. Lemmon, who’d done stints on TV and film (Succession, Tár), had auditioned for it during the pandemic. “I auditioned on Zoom! I had the gun, like pointing at the camera,” she says. “Max said he cried.” Job debuted at the SoHo Playhouse last September, moved to the Connelly, then made it to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater this summer, where its run has been extended to the end of October. Once the play is over, Lemmon would like to get back to making folky singer-songwriter music with her younger brother Jonathan: “I miss him so much.”

How did the script for Job come to you?

I got an email from producer-dramaturg Hannah Getts. I was in California, at Willie Nelson’s 90th-birthday concert at the Hollywood Bowl, which was an extremely good time. Kris Kristofferson was there. Roseanne Cash was there. Ethan Hawke was there as a host. Willie Nelson was singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” with his son and I was like [makes frantic phone-scrolling motion]. Weird vibes.

What was your immediate impression of Jane on the page?

I was like, Oh, this is impossible. I have no idea how this gets done. There’s so much going on for this little lady, right? How do we balance all of her many, many parts into one person and get the story of what’s being told? I was so attracted to the sheer question of, how does an actor approach a role like this?

I hadn’t done a play since drama school. So when I got this part, I was learning on the fly. In Russia, they rehearse plays for seven months before bringing in an audience. We don’t have a system like that in the United States, but I’ve gotten to live with Jane for a year. That has given me access to parts of her and her psyche that I never could have imagined when I auditioned. I don’t have pretty much anything in common with Jane, but there’s so much of me in her.

So you’re not a Bay Area tech worker with an ex-situationship dangling in the background who hates their college roommates, but you share some of her anxieties and search for what it means to be a good person. Is that what you mean?

You’re good. That’s really good. It’s more like this transference. The horrors of what happened to Jane have not happened to me. But there have been horrors that have happened to me, and you transfer it over. I’m saying one thing, but a different experience is living through me.

What research did you do to immerse yourself in the world of the play? You’ve mentioned reading Anna Weiner’s memoir Uncanny Valley. 

We gotta get Anna to the play. Anna’s going to be like — she’s me. 

I don’t know Anna, but I fucking love that book. I think she went to Wesleyan. Max went to Wesleyan. My first job was working at a café in the town that Wesleyan is in. And so it was so easy for me to imagine her there on that campus, how that then brought her to New York, and then how that brought her to the Bay. Uncanny Valley was super critical to getting inside the body of the character.

I read every Sarah Kane play as a sort of morale boost, of like, it’s okay, there’s an audience for this. Sarah Kane writes plays that are thorny and dark. And Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty was very important for me.

How did you channel her hysteria? Is it that, as you’re riding the waves of the play, your body is carrying you to that moment of crisis? Or do you have to prepare to enter that crazed mind-state?

There is this element of riding it. My work for the play every night is to get the waves up, so that once the lights are on and the play has started, I can just go. I should just be riding it with Peter. That’s when you call on yourself, and it’s like, What life have I lived? There’s some energy that clamors inside me that needs release.

Does this take a toll on you psychologically? 

I don’t watch reality TV unless I’m doing this play. I will crush RuPaul’s Drag Race. Actually, the last few nights I’ve been watching the DNC, which is, in a way, reality, right?

But that’s stressful.

Girl. I was just sobbing watching the DNC. Huge emotional release.

How did the play change from moving from SoHo Playhouse to Broadway? Was it harder to work with a bigger space? 

Definitely, at first. But then the body’s incredible. You just acclimate.

Scott designed this incredible set when we moved to the Connolly. The set was the same, slightly enhanced but the same idea. When we moved to Broadway, the set was the same, slightly enhanced, but same idea. I think it speaks so much to his core of credibility as an artist that when he was doing this little off Broadway play, and then when that play went to Broadway, the vision was exactly the same.

Being born in Hollywood, and having a famous grandfather, did you always want to be an actor? 

I wish I had one of those stories where I just knew, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t until I started tepidly walking toward the idea of doing school plays. My family moved to Connecticut and I went to the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, which was the magnet school, that’s where I felt like I found really like minded people and I felt at ease. I would get into my car, leave my public high school, go to magnet school till six, come back, and do the school play at the public school.

Everyone had this lofty ambition to be this artist, and maybe they were fumbling, but it’s what they wanted to do. We did Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertold Brecht. We did a production of The Seagull — I have such clear memories of this girl on the bus ride home back to Glastonbury with her composition journal wrestling with the character of Nina. Everybody loves Chekhov now, but witnessing a 16-year-old girl, who’s probably the real age of Nina as written, grapple with it, that’s just a beautiful, tender thing.

Was there a role or moment growing up that convinced you you wanted to do acting for real? 

I remember I read a play by Naomi Iizuka called Polaroid Stories, and I’m pretty sure it was based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis. And I remember reading that and thinking like, Oh my God, this material is so exciting. To get to go into these psychologies. My eyes opened to the fact that more texts like that surely existed out there, that was a really sort of seminal moment of understanding the potential that good material held.

So obviously, having read the script for Job, you know that the big reveal is coming. When you’re performing, how are you thinking about the initial scenes? How do you want the audience to understand Jane initially? 

It’s the biggest challenge, having this sort of amnesia. She does something right at lights up that’s inexcusable. There’s no recovery, and then Peter and I negotiate moment by moment how to get back on track. Jane believes she’s made an honest mistake, and so they try earnestly to get back on course until it’s become just beyond a doubt evident that maybe it wasn’t a mistake. And then it’s figuring out what happens next.

So at the beginning, she’s just what she presents as, which is a very stressed worker desperate to get her job back. You’re not subtly threading anything in at the beginning to indicate that she might be on a different mission.

No. She sees him. She has a gut reaction. She’s like, Fuck, I did it again. I’ve had another episode, exactly like what happened at work when I got on the desk and started screaming. Can we please carry on like I’m safe? Can we just maybe continue. So she puts the blame on herself and her trauma until so many details are revealed that it’s like, No, I was fucking right.

It is almost like through the process of talk therapy, she unlocks what’s she’s buried until she reaches that classic moment of epiphany. And then she uses it against him. 

I would say that she’s not unlocking herself. He is feeding her. It aggravates me when people are like, He’s innocent. I’m like, Read the text.

So do you think he’s feeding her this information intentionally? Or is he just not very careful? 

That’s an amazing question. I ask Peter that. I’m like, So did you do it? He’s like, Don’t ask me that. Peter and I really don’t talk about the play at all ever. We’re buddies, but we mostly just laugh at how the shows went or how many people in the audience dropped their cell phones.

But have you reached your conclusion about what’s happened? Or are you still revising? 

No. My character has to have a really firm belief of what she thinks is true. And during the course of the play, she can question whether that’s a mistake, but ultimately she knows it’s him.

You phone bank for Knock for Democracy. You’re watching the DNC. Clearly, you have your own philosophy of how to affect change in the world. How are you thinking about Jane’s question of what it means to be good in the world?

There’s this part where Lloyd basically says: Anyone could do the job that you’re doing. This isn’t skilled work. You’re just subjecting yourself to this torture. And Jane says that someone has to do it. That’s actually true. In January of this past year, Mark Zuckerberg, all of the CEOs from big companies, sat before the Senate and had to justify the content available on their platforms. This work is outsourced overseas to other countries. When Zuckerberg was asked what he’s going to do, one of his responses was we’ll have more people doing content moderation.

In the real world, as you’re saying, content moderator jobs are often outsourced to people in places like the Philippines or Sri Lanka. Jane has the attitude of a “higher level” employee, like a software engineer. She’s doing low-wage labor while being presented to the audience as a swaddled, upwardly-mobile Silicon Valley type. What do you make of this?

We’ve had discussions in rehearsal when our director, Michael, has said we’ve named the CEO Matt and Matt knows Jane’s name. Jane is an asset to this company in the world of our play. That is maybe a departure from how things are operating. There are lawsuits. There was a fellow from Africa who had horrifying PTSD. And when I look back at that article, it just makes me very sad. But numerous times that I’ve had people at the stage who are saying, I am a content moderator. Or there was a girl last week who was like, I go to Berkeley and I study content moderation. Apparently, that’s something that you can study now.

My theory on it was also that almost all tech jobs are shitty in some way. Even if you are a software engineer, what keeps you going is the feeling you’re valued and Matt knows your name.

Anna does a great job of spelling that out in her book, like the beer that flows on tap at WeWork. We’re working for the mission, right? And then it’s, Oops, you all got laid off. Fucking die. The next day, it’s like, okay, the seven of us who remain are working for the mission.

How do you react when tech workers share their stories with you? 

It’s intense. When I read this play, I was like, this is so unrealistic. And yet, once a week, someone has a very personal story that really echoes the content. I had someone high up at Google say she was there the day before someone came with a weapon and killed themselves on campus. What can you say? All I can say is I really hope that you feel supported and that you have the support that you need. Last night, I met a guy who was a psychiatric nurse, and he read my character to filth. He was like, I know exactly what you are. Then before I could say don’t he had already come out with the diagnosis.

What do you want to do next? 

Well, filmmaking, certainly. I’m really excited about the idea one day down the line of getting to direct and produce films, direct plays. There’s a project coming out soon that I’m really excited about, which I did not write, but produced with a friend who went to Yale College while I was at drama school. It’s called The Philosophy of Dress, about basically two designers in the cutthroat New York City fashion scene who become unlikely friends. But really, there’s like, horrible underbelly of ambition and competition. And it’s sort of a dark comedy.

Do you think you and your brother would ever release an album together?

I would love nothing more.