On our first remotely recorded podcast actress Jane Levy told HFPA journalist Henry Arnaud how the stay-at-home order affects her. Levy stars in the TV show Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlists where she plays a recently promoted engineering manager at a tech company. “The show exists in a fantastic reality and is about a young woman who is a coder living in San Francisco. She is neurotic, she has a mathematical brain, very logical, not exactly musical or musically inclined. She has an experience with a magical MRI machine and after that, she has the ability to hear people’s thoughts but she hears them through song and dance.”

She did a musical Bang Bang Baby in 2014, but she finds singing intimidating. “Professionally I am very inexperienced singing. I never had voice lessons. I find it to be scarier and I put more pressure on myself to be good.

Dancing is easier for her.“I took dance lessons as a kid up until age 13. With dancing I just enjoy it and I don’t care as much, which probably makes me a better dancer than singer just because of my mental process. 

Her character Zoey embarrasses herself often. That is part of the show’s charm. “That’s the genre of our TV show. Sometimes it is like farce or it is even clowning, very Lucille Ball where you step eyes wide open into a trap and the audience is, “no, no, no, we see that you’re going to fail in this situation.” But that’s the fun of it.

Is she like that in real life? “No, I don’t think so.”

Listen to the podcast and hear how she started her career; how she calms herself; what makes a good actor; the similarities between her real mom and her screen mom; why she is interested in musicals; why actors are emotionally vulnerable; why hair color matters; why she fits into the horror genre; what she thinks when fans are tattooing her face on their bodies; why she likes teamwork; whether she thinks comedy is more difficult than drama; what kind of dance lessons she is taking; what instrument she plays; what side of Zoey she doesn’t like; how was it working with Renée Zellweger on the TV show What/If