Katja Blichfeld’s personal reinvention
We should all be talking more about High Maintenance, a show sort of about weed but really about the human condition.
Last season’s episode “Grandpa” is unlike anything else I’ve seen on TV, but do yourself a favor and start with their original webisodes and work your way up to the current season on HBO. ”Rachel” is also not to be missed (Dan Stevens plus Rachel Comey, swoon).
Emily Gould’s recent profile on co-creator Katja Blichfeld gives a look at half of the real-life (former) couple behind the show. I particularly like the story of her career trajectory.
Before she was known for High Maintenance, Blichfeld was a casting director, a job at which she was very successful (she won an Emmy for her work on 30 Rock) and at which she arrived via an indirect path. Born in Long Beach, California, to Danish parents, she grew up attending Evangelical Christian schools, where she was taught that much of pop culture was the devil’s doing. “Like I couldn’t watch The Smurfs,” she explains, “because of witchcraft and sorcery.” She spent a couple of semesters at Long Beach City College, dropped out, moved to Chicago, worked in admin at a university, and then, in 2004, followed a relationship that had begun on Friendster to New York. “We were watching a lot of movies together, and the way that I would talk about movies was always very actor-centric. And I remember this person saying, ‘You should be a casting director.’” Blichfeld decided she’d try to get an internship. She made a list of people she wanted to work for, topped with Jennifer McNamara, who had just won a bunch of awards for her work on Sex and the City: “She, being a casting director — you know, very good at seeing potential — saw it in me, lucky me, and took me on.
The life-imitates-art-imitates-life aspect of Blichfeld’s breakup and the show really gets me, too.
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