Erin Moriarity

By Ashley Paintsil

“Consequently, from now on we estimate and regard no one from a [purely] human point of view [in terms of natural standards of value]. This passage from 2 Corinthians 5:16 could be considered a summation of how Erin Moriarty, star of Amazon series The Boys and Annie January aka Starlight, the burgeoning superwoman she plays in the show, would want to be viewed in the world—Annie for her presumably paradoxical choices made for survival and acceptance and Erin for her mere existence. Despite their differences, Erin says she finds parallels between herself and Annie, especially in the character’s struggle to do the right thing in a complex world and their desire not to be scrutinized at face value. “I think it’s so funny that she’s a superhero in a world with insane circumstances that are so specific and yet I still relate to what she’s going through in a way that feels almost creepy,” she says. “Yet I’m still immensely challenged by the role, which is key because you don’t [want to] just go in and show up and not feel like you’re being challenged because you’re playing yourself.” Erin and her character face the pressure to conform to expectations, but both have taken these presumptions in stride and embrace the growth that comes from navigating these terrains. “You have to play the game and no one is the exception to the rules, and I completely understand that, but the thing is something happens later on as I’ve gotten older, which is that I’ve had people say to me, why don’t you speak up for yourself more?” she says.  “I have to say it’s a muscle that I’m working on.” Aside from staring in The Boys upcoming fourth season, her television credits include Netflix’s Jessica Jones, HBO’s award winning drama True Detective and Melissa Rosenberg’s Red Widow. Her film credits include Captain Fantastic, The Haunting In Wicker Park, Catching Dust, The Watch, The Kings of Summer, Driven, After the Dark, Blood Father, Within, The Miracle Season, and The Extraordinary Journey of The Fakir. She will be adding to her film lineup when she soon begins production on Brantley Gutierrez’s film Lips Like Sugar, which revolves around the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The cast also includes Woody Harrelson, Owen Wilson, Juliette Lewis, Sasha Calle and Kathryn Newton. Erin’s sterling career isn’t without a bit of controversy, though. When broadcast journalist Megyn Kelly accused her of getting plastic surgery and being a poor influence for younger generations, a pack of online bullies attacked her for a myriad of reasons. Erin took to social media to share her feelings about it all. She says writing the post was heartbreaking, but she was not heartbroken, rather “galvanized,” as she put it, by the scores of women that reached out to her in support. “Heartbroken implies I’m hopeless, which I’m not, at all,” she says. Despite being hurt by other people and going through the vicissitudes of life, she says the silver lining is that she does not feel bitterness towards others who hurt her, but an ability to empathize with them.  Read on as the actress waxes poetic with AMAZING Magazine’s managing editor, Ashley Paintsil, about empathy, influence, and being seen for who she truly is.

Erin Moriarity wears a Forte Forte top, Tibi skirt, and Alexander Mcqueen boots. Styled by Donald La

Ashley Paintsil: If I’m not mistaken, you were born and raised in New York. Could you tell me what it was like growing up there?

Erin Moriarty: I feel like I can and I can’t, because it was so normal to me that that the concept of suburbia is foreign and alien to me. Which is so funny because, I didn’t realize that I had grown up in any sort of unconventional way until I left home, and I started to work. I met people from all sorts of eclectic backgrounds. I would say that I grew up in Manhattan and then they would say, ‘Manhattan, like the city the city?’ 5 times. And I was like, ‘I don’t understand this reaction,’ but I’ve gotten used to it now. The point is, that at the time I didn’t appreciate it like all of us, but in retrospect it was the greatest gift I could have been given. I feel like I’ve won the lottery by being born there. It’s funny because a lot of people find the energy there to be abrasive and overwhelming and I completely understand that. There’s something about growing up in a city where every single interest you might have can be indulged in via a class or via a museum. There are so many little pockets of that city, and it’s so eclectic—it’s a melting pot. I grew up amongst, honestly, a much more diverse crowd in New York, and I think that, combined with the inherent just overwhelm almost, but in the best way possible. I would say the abundant amount of culture that is present there— the combination of it all just raised me to feel ultimately grateful for it. But at the time, I wanted the white picket fence. I just wanted to be normal. I was the child of a divorce and I felt very much like a weird child because all the kids that I watched on the cartoon shows were in the white picket fence houses. I wanted to be that with my parents together, but now I’m so happy in retrospect.

AP: Talk a little bit more about that— about how you wanted that life, but you didn’t have it, but some reason, it became a good thing for you. Could you expand upon that?



EM: Yes. I wish I’d learned that lesson for my twenties, [because] it feels like that’s an applicable thing. Our entire lives, in other words, something right now might feel deeply uncomfortable, or something right now might feel like it’s wrong for you, or however you want to vilify or demonize it, and it always in retrospect. This might be a coping mechanism. It’s not with New York, but often is the case that in retrospect we learn that there’s going to be clarity that we gain from the situation and we’re going to benefit from it and metabolize it in a way that will make us who we are. I grew up in New York feeling like I went to a very wealthy private school and my family was not wealthy like the other kids. I felt immediately alienated because of that. And just in retrospect again, which is the theme here I guess, I can’t believe that there is this weird ability to gain popularity just because you wore certain brands of clothing, that even to this day I couldn’t afford, and children wearing it. I don’t fault anyone for that. I mean, I think they should be able to have whatever they want. It’s the concept that they gain popularity. It felt like there was a dismissiveness towards anyone who had less money. I think that that impacted me so much later on in life to the degree where now, when I’m on set, or I observe anything that could be maybe sort of feeling like a high school situation, I have to defuse it. It needs to be a safe place. It must, because I felt that before and I was very lucky to have a great education, but that was really difficult. I do think that there were a lot of components: the going back and forth between my parents’ houses, not having them together, and not having the consistency of one home every night. That made me feel, at the time, frustrated. Looking back, I see that it was such an amazing opportunity to have an individual relationship with both of my parents. They could never be together. I can’t even imagine it so. New York City was New York. It’s an amazing place, and I will always love it, and it made me who I am, and that might involve my cynicism, but it also involves an inherent lack of judgment because of how much you’re exposed to.



AP: With that idea of lack of judgment—I read something that you wrote in an Instagram post that was in relation to online bullying and people criticizing you for your appearance. So you said,  ‘This does break my heart. I’ve opened up a vein for this role, and this kind of trolling is exactly what this role [Annie] would speak out against. Everyone is going through their own battles. Let’s not add to that. I will never intentionally and especially publicly, add to yours. This is only strengthened my empathy muscle. And to anyone who comes at me I see you. I don’t hate you. I only empathize and forgive you.’ Do you feel like the life that you lived growing up, your experience, really helps you empathize even when people are not so nice to you?

EM: I grew up with the kind of parents that were really incredible at teaching me how nuanced things were from a very young age. There was an inherent lack of judgment in our household. I feel very fortunate that they really allowed me to be who I wanted to be. Of course, they’re very liberal, they’re very accepting. They’re New Yorkers, right? But also, they’ve been through a lot in their lives. The thing that I’ve noticed, funnily enough, is that— and this is assigning purpose to something without the attempt of glorifying it— but I’ve been through some hard things and I’m not [going to] be hyperbolic about how hard they have been because I’ve not been involved in any catastrophic war. There’s always that initial need to sort of claim that one is keeping their problems in perspective is the point, right? I feel that way more and more as an actor because of how we’re treated. It feels like a necessary compensation. So to continue, I feel like I have gone through enough and been hurt enough by other people, and in general, one of many benefits that I’ve gained from those experiences and the necessity to grow up really fast—growing up in the industry from 15, and then some very adult matters coming into my life later on, that I didn’t have any peers to look to for empathy. It didn’t make me feel bitter towards other people. Funnily enough, it’s made me feel more like you don’t know what anyone is going through. They could be going through the worst day of their life and also you get older, and I do things that I never thought I would, and I have to accept, and that I’m still a good person. That is something that I think about a lot. You cannot come from the standpoint of having this moral high ground that so that many people do if your identifier is being the moral person because it puts you in a position of a lacking the humility to evolve if you do fall into a hole, which I have time and time again. It’s cliche, but hurt people hurt people, right? I do want to say that it was heartbreaking for reasons that will forever be hard to articulate, but the cool thing was that coming out of that experience I did not feel heartbroken. Ultimately, I felt very galvanized by the amount of women that came to me, and told me things. It was very healing. I’m not [going to] say that I healed them, they more so healed me. We shared experiences and we have so far to go, but that alone made it worth it. That alone made me feel galvanized as opposed to dejected because heartbroken feels like it’s implying that I’m hopeless, which I’m not at all.

AP: If I’m not mistaken, you’ve played two Annie’s in your life. I read that you played Annie the beloved child adaptation [of] the production. Then Annie January is a woman whose innocence was stolen from her from birth, if you will. What has that been like playing, Annie aka Starlight?

EM: I like that you said Annie. It’s so funny— it’s been such a ride, and that’s the most productive way of putting it.
I did the math the other day, [and] this show is [going to] go on for a long period of my life. In other words, I started it when I was 23, and I am about to be 30. I grew up on the show and my perspective on it has been so wildly different than the person that I look to every day who’s like a family member like Laz [Alonso], but he’s just in a different place in his life, and I love that about our show. I’ve always loved working on a show with a spectrum of ages, and being the youngest, to be honest, just because I like to be around people who I don’t know. This is going to sound like I’m implicating others, but I’m not. I’m implicating myself— I’m projecting onto others. My life was work. When I was younger it was just work. I lived to work and I did not work to live. You get onto a set with a bunch of adults and they have a more fully rounded perspective. I feel like I now as a result—not just because of that—but because you work so hard and you get to a point where you realize other things are more important. Growing up on the show I feel like I’ve grown up with a character and it feels very weird to say that and almost like I’m not supposed to. However, it has been such a challenging role, which is why I feel comfortable saying that, because as an actor, you don’t really want to play a character that’s very much like yourself. And, by the way, she is the moral compass of that story and I wouldn’t be the moral compass of any story, but I do think that there are parallels. It just goes to show that we’re all very unique and yet we’re all very similar. There is this journey that could be considered not universal. Everyone has their thing. [I] think it’s so funny that she’s a superhero in a world with insane circumstances that are so specific. Yet I still relate to what she’s going through in a way that feels almost creepy. Yet I’m still immensely challenged by the role, which is key because you don’t [want to] just go in and show up and not feel like you’re being challenged because you’re playing yourself. I don’t feel like that. I just feel like I hope it speaks to young women in the same way that it has helped me and spoken to me, and not in terms of the way I’ve played her, in terms of the way they’ve written her. Because you know, every character on the show ultimately shows their dark side and I think that there was a weird moment this past year where I felt like I played this character on the show that went through a plot line that addressed the topic of #MeToo and outwardly said that I would never strike from taboo if I felt like it was productive. There is such an interesting thing that happens with her throughout her arc thus far, which is this earnest desire to just do the right thing and she doesn’t know what that is necessarily. It’s very difficult to know what the right thing to do is constantly as a woman in this industry. I’ve just tried to do the right thing, but it’s really hard at certain points and I feel like there’s a parallel there. So, it’s been cathartic, amazing, fun, and growing up with those people around me—that cast. And in that role has just been a very impactful experience.

AP: There’s sort of a progression and a tension between Starlight’s upbringing and the realities of the life she’s unwittingly become a part of. She has to embrace it in a sort of twisted way, regardless of the brutalities that have attacked her wellbeing at some point by the people and the environment that she’s found herself in. What do you think people can easily misunderstand about Starlight?

EM: Well, I think that it’s kind of cool that she would even be hard to understand to some people because I love those types of roles. It feels like they’re far more nuanced in the roles that I formally, or many women have formally, even been able to play. So that in itself implies something good to me, [because] I feel like you meet her and you want to put her in a box and then she immediately breaks out of that box. First episode, she’s confronted with a situation and she makes the, by definition, wrong choice, right? But it’s about the way she metabolizes it, and then turns it into action and finds some strength from it. It galvanized her. It puts a propeller behind her butt, so to speak, and so I love that she’s constantly surprising me and surprising the audience. I would say that it’s just another facet of her paradoxical personality. That concept of us being paradoxical being a bad thing is so funny to me because it really does feel like the human condition—we’re all paradoxical to a degree. You can be the good girl and you can make wrong choices. Or you can have this experience happen with your mother and have your entire world just completely, as you know it, really be, as far as she’s concerned—has all been a lie —her entire upbringing. I think that the repercussions of that on another show —they might not have the ability to show how that impacts anyone, not just a young woman, but anyone. And I really appreciate that they do not, and they will not dismiss her emotional experience, [because] it is a traumatizing thing to go through at the risk of using trauma, because it’s a word I feel like that’s overused. I do think she has severe trauma over the sexual abuse, and then her mother, then Huey last season. But he’s back, obviously they resolve things. I think that whenever something like that happens to me. It just goes back to what we were saying before. If there’s something that completely rocks your world in the most negative way, and you go through a rock bottom it will ultimately, and no doubt, in Annie’s case, because she is who she is— make her a better person, and I think that she had to question whether or not she wanted to be a superhero, obviously because everything came into question. I hope that we do a good job of not prematurely having her recover from that experience, because we can dismiss emotional experiences for the sake of progressing the plot line, and our show runner [is] too intelligent to do that. So, that’s really cool to me that she can go through all the sensations, all the feeling she’s about to go through in the season that we’re about to see and continue to surprise people. But, in a way, that feels so human to me. Do you know what I mean?

AP: You’re now slated to star in the upcoming neo noir thriller Lips Like Sugar, which is a bit of a dark and daring role, probably a bit far from how you grew up. Why, this role now?

EM: I love the dark roles because they are so interesting to me, especially when they’re roles written like that. That role, without ruining anything, is a dark role. It’s exploring the dark part of the female psyche that we haven’t been able to explore, perhaps enough. I know I keep referring back to the gender thing, but it happens to be very present right now because I think things are changing, and I’m noticing the change, and I’m grateful for it. But the character is such an emotionally complicated human who has been through more than anyone that I know and the darkness of it is something that—I just again having grown up in New York, having grown up with the family that I did—I have a family full of psychologists. My grandfather was the co-founder of the American Society of Addiction and my father has been sober for 40 years.
He would tell you that. He has been very active in that community. And so, I only say that because you grow up with a father like that —he’s been sober since before I was born, but grew up with my dad, who is the most special human being I know, who is my favorite person and such a good human, and you know that we’re all capable of doing things if we’re put in the right circumstance, or if we’re raised in the right in the wrong way or not, the wrong way. But if you’re raised under circumstances that are really difficult or something happens in your life you never know what you could be capable of doing, and he didn’t even do that much. But it leads me to a place of not judging this specific character and the darkness she is in, because I was exposed to the potentiality of darkness in humans. It wasn’t present when I was growing up and I was exposed to the fact that it doesn’t make them evil. But this is referring to her specifically in the character, because she’s going through a lot of mental health issues that are very complicated still to this day and unfortunately, mental health issues in 1984 were very stigmatized. We’re still stigmatized, but I love the darkness, and I think that the fact that I don’t look at anyone who is coming out of a situation that might be comparable to some of these amazing friends of my dad that I’ve met who have gone through the program as well. It’s a lack of judgment, and it’s the desire to play a character that is so different from Starlight, but not arbitrarily. It’s the lack of judgment I’m able to feel, and I want to play a role that has those kinds of issues, to do those characters justice— to evoke at least a little bit more sympathy from the people that might need it. And then maybe it will help people feel less alone who can empathize with it.

AP: You talked a little bit about how you’ve gone through some very difficult things, and no one’s life or career is without challenges. How do you think you’ve been able to navigate the low points and the high points of your career, because both of them are different in themselves?

EM: Listen! I don’t know if I can say that I’ve done it right, but I’ve learned there’s no wrong or right. I think that I’ve really tried. I’ve done so much therapy that I’m probably over-therapized by this point. I do think that can be a thing. I’ve done every neurological and mental health modality. There is transcendental meditation. I’ve done all of it —the things that are scientifically proven to help. I’ve just done because I find that my brain and my body— there’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score and it feels like my body has kept the score of some of these characters and I have to shake it off. So, I do those things as a necessity. I think that when the personal stuff comes into play it’s just been a really interesting point in my life where I’ve had to really prioritize things in a way that I didn’t expect to quite yet, and I don’t mind at all. It’s been a really amazing lesson to learn that I really felt very codependent with my career for so long. I realized that one day—the concept of being codependent with others was something that I had heard of, but I’d never heard of someone discussing about it in terms their own career. I did feel like I got value out of my own career, all my value— my self-worth. I felt like my mood was dependent on whether or not I was employed and I felt like I was satiated if I was incredibly busy and that hasn’t completely subsided. Like everyone else when they start to reach an age where they’re not just blinded by ambition, I’ve been put in a situation that has mandated me being present for my family, and I’m very grateful for it. I’m very grateful for it because my head was completely in work, for so long, as it needed to be. I had to learn that there was a world outside, and I feel very fortunate that I can even do that, right? But navigating the highs and lows of the career stuff, I always just try and use all the modalities I know to help myself. And then, I just, I’ve tried too hard to cling to the wheel of perfectionism my entire life and getting things right and getting things like an A on the assignment, including therapy. So, I’m just trying to let that go at this point and I’m trying to not handle situations the right way. I’m just trying to do everything I can to put my oxygen mask on. That’s what I’ve learned, because it’s funny, you can try so hard to do the right thing with that stuff that it can be a disservice to you.