It’s not quite true that just because Dollface stars Kat Dennings, an actual Cat Lady is prominently featured.
The surreal sight of a woman suddenly appearing with a remarkably realistic cat’s head is just one of the many surreal, comic, strange effects in the Hulu series, which begins Season 2 Friday and stars Dennings as Jules.
“Well, the Cat Lady we established in Season 1 was kind of like all of Jules’ fears,” Dennings, 35, said in a Zoom interview. “The fear of being alone and being a ‘cat lady,’ like being a woman alone with a cat.
“That’s like something that society has told women, ‘It’s bad and don’t become a cat lady.’ Of course. It’s a 30-year-old woman and it’s so silly. But that’s where the Cat Lady started.
“We have the amazing Beth Grant, who’s an incredible, tremendous, iconic actress, playing the Cat Lady. And in Season 2, it becomes less of a fear and more of an empowerment thing. Because the Cat Lady is one of the more badass characters in the show, she’s kind of like Jiminy Cricket mixed with like the fairy godmother in ‘Pinocchio.’”
Dollface is Dennings’ follow-up to the long-running hit 2 Broke Girls.
In Season 1, Jules was a little bit of a trainwreck. She abandoned her friends after college to be with her long-term boyfriend and just gave up all of them.
“Then after their breakup she comes crawling back. So in Season 2, she’s laid down that groundwork with all of them and they have a very strong friendship. It’s a post-pandemic kind of fantasy, where Jules thinks she’s going back to work for the first time. To be fired. But it says she gets promoted.
“So it turns her whole world upside down and she has really questioned what she’s doing and what she actually wants. So her arc is about discovering who she is, what she wants and whether she actually likes what she’s doing.
“Tough life lessons, but you know, she almost gets there.”
Dollface has fun considering the complexities of feminism. Jules works for a company called Woom, a riff on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wildly successful company Goop.
“It’s worth acknowledging this lifestyle brand. It’s hilarious,” Dennings declared, “because they sell like $400 eyebrow brushes or whatever. So that’s what Goop is about and that’s a really fun thing to play with because Jules is of course the opposite of that.
“She has no idea why you need an eyebrow brush to begin with. It’s very funny that she works there.”
Written by Stephen Schaeffer for Boston Herald, article published on February 10