"Oh, Britta's in this?": Gillian Jacobs on playing a WWII hero and never leaving "Community" behind

When we first meet Gillian Jacobs in the Netflix limited series "Transatlantic," she looks like the kind of madcap Hollywood leading lady who should be trading barbs with Cary Grant, from her flamboyant hat to her tiny dog. But as the real-life heiress Mary Jayne Gold, she's something else  — the real-life World War II heroine who helped some of the 20th century's greatest artists and intellectuals escape from Vichy France. 

"It's a woman who, up until this point, has lived an incredibly charmed life and in this moment, could have chosen to leave," Jacobs noted during a recent "Salon Talks" conversation, "and chose to stay and use her wealth to help out." It's a role as far removed from Jacobs' "messy" characters on "Community" and "Love" as one can imagine. "She's flawed as a person, but in her appearance and her way of presenting through the world, she's not," Jacobs noted. "I could not fall back on any of my familiar tricks as an actress." 

Jacobs shared with us the experience of playing the influential — yet largely unknown — Gold, how being an actor lets her "misbehave" safely and the moments from "Community" she thinks will be following her around the rest of her life.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Tell me about who you are in "Transatlantic" and who the real inspiration for her was.

I play a character named Mary Jayne Gold, inspired by a real woman named Mary Jayne Gold. She was a very wealthy American heiress who was having an incredible life on the European continent in the 1930s, living in Paris, dressing in haute couture. She did own and could fly her own plane in real life. When the Nazis invaded Paris, she, along with a lot of people, made their way eventually down to Marseille, which is the second largest city in France, a very large port city, which was kind of the last free port point of exit in Europe.

She became involved with this group called the Emergency Rescue Committee, which was led by an American journalist named Varian Fry. He had a list of approved names that he could get visas to bring to the United States. There were some incredibly famous names among them, like Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst — some of the most important artists, writers, thinkers of the 20th century. They were all hiding out in Marseille waiting to get out. 

The woman I play took her wealth and helped fund this rescue operation. At one point she rented a villa outside of Marseille. There were all of these artists living together in this villa. In real life and on our show, they created collaborative works together, collages, exquisite corpse pieces. They designed a tarot deck. It is the story of one year of this rescue operation. It has this incredible mixture of art, music, love, romance and harrowing life-and-death stakes.

Anna Winger, the show's creator, describes it as a screwball melodrama. It is funny, it is glamorous, it's romantic, it's sexy, it's creative. It also takes place during one of the darkest moments in modern history. How did you come together to create that tension?

I think Anna was really inspired by a lot of the films that were being made concurrently during the war by European refugees who had made their way to Hollywood. That was a real touchpoint for her. I happened to be a person who's watched a lot of screwball 1930s comedies, so it's something that I've known and loved since childhood. When she said that, I knew what that meant. [I'm a] Carole Lombard fan, and Claudette Colbert, and Rosalind Russell, all of these actresses. Katharine Hepburn was my idol as a child. 

It's really interesting to bring some of the shades of, say, "Bringing Up Baby" or "Holiday," where you have a spoiled, sheltered heiress-type character. But on our show, she's placed in these incredibly serious life-and-death circumstances. It's a woman who, up until this point, has lived an incredibly charmed life and in this moment, could have chosen to leave because the U.S. was not in the war yet. She had the ability as an American to openly leave, and chose to stay and use her wealth to help out. 

From what I've read about the real woman, she had a very torrid love affair, not with the character that's portrayed on the show, but an equally doomed, passionate love affair. Because she had all the trappings of wealth and privilege, the Emergency Rescue Committee would use her, actually have her put on her best, most expensive clothing and go in and try and negotiate things for them. In real life and on the show, she was serving this purpose, but really being pushed so far out of her comfort zone with her work with the committee. It was important to Anna that the whole range of human experience – the drama, the love and the humor at times all exist within this show.

It also illuminates, in a very honest way, the role of women, the role of queer people, the role of Black and brown people, the role of immigrants in the earliest days of the resistance.

Yes, absolutely. This is a story I was totally unfamiliar with as well. I did not really know anything about Varian Fry, the Emergency Rescue Committee. I'd obviously heard of the city of Marseille. I knew it was a legendary port with a very famous history. But I didn't understand how Marseille has existed throughout time as a place where people from all over the world seem to meet and how that really came to be during this period of time between 1940 and 1941. I love that about Anna's vision of the show, that it includes all of that.

You wrote that famous Lenny Letter about Juilliard, a moment in your life where you realized you could push back against authority. This is a story about ordinary people, very different people, saying, "Actually, no."

Yes. For a lot of the people involved in this effort in real life, they did not come from a governmental, military, any kind of background that would have prepared them for this moment. Varian Fry was a journalist. There are people from all walks of life. Albert Hirschman went on to become one of the most famed economists and a professor of the history of economics. But in this moment in time, they had the opportunity to help and they rose to the occasion.

I find the story inspiring in that way as well. I don't know too many Hollywood stories that are about World War II before the U.S. has entered the war. As an American too, to be thinking about this moment, what does 1940 mean? I don't recall too many projects that I've seen about this period of time.

It's also so much a story about, what does this moment mean? What does it mean in 2023 to be looking at the world and saying, "What can I do? What should I do?" One thing I love about this character that you don't see a lot now is how she uses her wealth to fix problems instead of creating them. 

I don't know that much about her life leading up to this point would lead you to believe that she would've responded to this moment in this way. She went to a boarding school in Italy. She came from incredible wealth. She clearly wanted to live outside of the United States. She had a drive to go live on the continent and have a different life than 99% of women of her era. She was never married, never had children. She was already making some choices that were unusual for the time. But I think that her wealth afforded her the opportunity, the ability to do a lot of the things that she was doing with her life. 

It seems like you have an interest in women from history who have done interesting things, as a director and a podcaster. Is this something that you're always looking for in your career, ways of telling these women's stories that we haven't heard before? 

It probably stems from childhood. I always liked history. I was the kid watching Katharine Hepburn movies as a young child. I'm always interested in those stories. Probably my mom pushed me in that direction a lot when I was a kid. I had a lot of Greta Garbo biographies. It's kind of odd.

Now, as an adult, I have this interesting ability – because of just being broadly documentarian, actress, sometimes writer, amateur reporter – to continue telling stories. I'm drawn time and time again to stories of women who are achieving things in industries that you would not think that they would be participating in, in eras long before people remember women were actually involved in these industries, whether it's silent film era Hollywood with female writers and directors and producers, or the computing industry. I'm drawn to it over and over again.

You're also drawn to characters who are a little messy. Yet in your real life, you're famously very sedate. You don't drink, never drank, never did drugs. Is acting for you an outlet for that side that maybe you get to play out this?

I think acting is a very safe way for me to misbehave without consequence. It's safe. It's probably in the ways in which kids with make-believe play, test out boundaries, because as you said, I'm very sedate in real life. I've been fortunate enough to get to play some messy women. That also makes the part of Mary Jayne Gold appealing to me as well, because she's not messy. She's making mistakes and she's flawed as a person, but in her appearance and her way of presenting through the world, she's not. I could not fall back on any of my familiar tricks as an actress. I had to be a beautifully put-together, coiffed lady, which was a fun challenge.

Who still likes to party.

Who still likes to party, still having fun, but it's a very far away from Britta or Mickey from "Love."

You gave a quote that really stuck with me, where you said you've been told that even though you don't drink, you have a relationship with alcohol.

Oh, yeah.

That is incredibly insightful. It's informing choices you're making as an actor. It's informing parts that you want to take on. Tell me how that came about. 

Well, therapy. There's addiction in my family. I've chosen to not drink. That's something that therapists have talked to me about because I made a hard and fast rule for myself as a child that I've stuck to in reaction to other people's drinking. Alcohol has still played a large part in my life, even though I've never drank myself.

Working on "Love" in particular, made me really think about all of that more in-depth because the character was attending 12-step meetings. It made me think much more deeply about that. Any time you're in a family dynamic and there's addiction involved, it has an impact on everyone, regardless of the choices that the children make as adults.

You were also really deeply haunted by "Go Ask Alice."

Oh my God, yeah. Did you read that New Yorker piece about how it was all made-up and it was this very straight-laced? It's a total scare tactic book written by this woman, basically to frighten people out of doing drugs. It worked on me. I was already primed. It's an absurd book now that I think about it as an adult, but it deeply scared me as a child. Yes, I owned a copy of "Go Ask Alice," but like I said, other circumstances had basically led me to where the book was. It was more affirming my paranoia.

Generations don't even know how scary this book was for so many.

I feel like kids today would not be scared. They'd be too savvy to be scared by it. But yeah, it worked on me.

I have to ask you about "Community" because it's happening.

It's happening.

You're going to start shooting this summer. We've talked to Alison Brie before. You've all stayed close over the years. When did you all decide this is the moment to bring it back?

It's never our decision as the cast. It's never been our decision. Yes, we've all stayed in touch continuously. The decision to make a movie that comes from people in fancy offices. They're not asking us "Now do you feel like making the movie?" There's so many factors involved. I think that we are bonded to each other for life. It was a very singular experience and one that has led us. It's the closest I have to siblings, I think.

People have very strong feelings about Britta. I want to know what your relationship with her is as an actor, going in and playing someone who is one of the less sympathetic characters. 

I just don't judge her as a character. I feel like you can't be commenting on what the character's doing as you're doing it. Whatever they presented me with, I just tried to do it to the best of my ability and not really concern myself with how sympathetic I was going to be. I felt like that would be a disservice to the writing and the show itself if I was shying away from the way they were writing the character.

Is there a moment or a scene that you feel particularly proud of in Britta's run?

I think of the moments that people always now reference to me, which is the pizza dance. It's just funny, these small moments that you do one day for 20 minutes on set that live on forever. 

I can't think of a moment in particular. I loved her because she just kept trying. She just kept trying. She was undeterred by how much they made fun of her, which takes a really special personality type. She wanted to be a therapist. She was completely unqualified for it.

I have an overall fondness for her. I liked my Halloween costumes a lot. Dan would basically let me pick my Halloween costumes. The squirrel was my idea. It was supposed to be a T-Rex, but it kind of looked more like Yoshi Dragon Turtle. I enjoyed all of those a lot.

It was really fun because it's what you think Hollywood is like — walking around the back lot, dressed in a crazy costume, going to lunch. We would have that experience all the time as the cast of "Community," walking around the Paramount lot all dressed in whatever the theme was of the week and going to get a coffee at the Coffee Bean on the lot and suddenly we're all zombies.  

I feel like the line, "Oh, Britta's in this," is going to follow me until the day I die. Anything I'm in, no matter what it is, tonally, how different it is, like Mary Jayne Gold, "Transatlantic," it'll be "Oh, Britta's in this?" Jim Rash has given me the gift that will go on forever.

"Transatlantic" is a closed loop. There was an end, but have you thought, what if you got to explore Mary Jayne's story going on?

Yeah. An amazing part about this show for me was I love art. I'm not an art historian. I'm not studied in art, but I have some very good friends who are artists. Through them, I feel like I have a cursory understanding of art. I went to college in Lincoln Center. There are those Marc Chagall huge paintings at the Met Opera. To realize that this woman I'm playing is part of how Marc Chagall came to be in the United States, how those paintings came to be in New York, gave me goosebumps. Some of them wound up in Mexico. People wound up all over. But I would love to continue to follow that. She later in life did move back to France and died in France. What an incredible life. Varian Fry's life post this moment was very hard and tragic. There's more story there. Or we just get the whole team back together and we play different people this time.

"Transatlantic" is streaming on Netflix.