Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Nikki Levy

Nikki Levy has built an illustrious career in film and television helping others develop and amplify their story. But the harsh reality of the industry is that it takes years before a project becomes more than an idea. Hungry for action, Nikki decided to put together a live show called Don’t Tell My Mother! Little did she know then that this event would turn into a global brand that now includes three Audible Originals. Pop Culturalist caught up with Nikki to learn more about her journey and the release of her latest Audible Original, Coming Out Party: A Pride Celebration.

PC: How did you get started in this industry?
Nikki: I’m from Queens, New York. I always loved movies. I had a huge crush on Eddie Murphy. Like huge. My favorite movie was Coming to America. On his thirtieth birthday, I sent him a birthday card. I was eleven or twelve at the time. He sent me back an autographed picture that said, “Peace and love, Eddie Murphy.”

I went to Sears in Manhasset and I bought a very expensive twenty-dollar frame. I still have it to this day. It’s in my house. I love him, I love movies, and I love comedy. I used movies to escape from my absolutely dysfunctional, crazy household growing up.

I went to Northwestern for film, writing, and screenwriting. After that, I worked at Oxygen in New York. I was the thirty-seventh employee in Chelsea Market in ’99, ’00. Then I moved out to LA in ’02. I had to start over as an assistant. I was either going to do casting or development. I actually cast Zach Braff movies in college. I worked a lot with Zach Braff from Scrubs.

I decided to go the development route, which means coming up with ideas, working with writers, breaking stories, all of that. I started at the bottom here in LA. I worked my way up the ranks. I was at a production company at Warner Brothers for a long time. I was an executive at Imagine. I did Frost/Nixon and a bunch of comedies that have never seen the light of day. Then I ran a company at Fox. Now I spend part of my life at Dreamworks TV at NBC Universal. I make kids’ and family comedies.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Nikki: I have two answers. When I moved to LA, I moved here without a job. I got laid off from Oxygen. I came here with unemployment. I subletted my place in Park Slope. I knew I wanted to be an assistant for someone, which is often how you get started. I wanted to be an assistant for someone who would care about me. I needed someone who I could learn from. I was fine doing any of the grunt work, and I did plenty of it, including washing a ton of silverware. But basically, I wanted to work for someone who I could learn from and who wanted to see me learn too.

I found a mentor in this woman named Alison Greenspan. She ran Denise Di Novi’s company at Warner Brothers. We made Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and a lot of really cool female-driven movies. I got this job working for her. I worked for her for two years. She became my mentor. She helped me get the next couple of executive jobs. It’s hard to make the jump from an assistant to executive because that’s what everyone wants to do. The business has shrunk—so much that the jobs are fewer and farther between.

That was sixteen to seventeen years ago. She’s still my mentor and one of my best friends. She’s a sister to me. She’s a producer on For Life, that big ABC show. Not to mention, she produces everything in the world. So having a mentor is honestly the number-one thing. I love her so much. She’s incredibly important to me. She signed the ketubah for my wedding. She signed my marriage contract in August.

The second thing was starting this live event Don’t Tell My Mother! It ended up inspiring the Audible originals because I was so burnt out on the business. I started a live show about eight and a half years ago because I was burnt out from the business. Everything takes so long. For movies, I can develop something and five, ten years later, it’s still an idea or it’s still a script.

I started the show because I missed writing. I missed performing. I missed something happening immediately. That’s the beauty of live theater. As a fellow New Yorker, you get it. That’s the coolest thing. You go to a show and have a good time. You grab a drink afterwards. I started this because I needed to get myself being creative again. I needed to be writing again as opposed to shepherding writers. At the time, I thought I was going to do this show once. I was going to have fun, and then I was going to move back to New York. I had a whole plan. I had visited. I had done interviews and everything.

I truly did it for fun. The theater took all the ticket sales. I was like, “I’m going to find comedy actors, comics who I love, and I’m going to work with them on these stories that they wouldn’t want their mom to know.” I thought it was a fun angle, and I felt personally connected to it. There’s a saying in Yiddish that means “go with God.” I thought that would be it and I’d move back to New York.

But I quickly realized as I was looking at the New York landscape that my life may not be perfect if I moved back to where I’m from. Then literally we sold out the show. We sold out the show in a little lobby of a theater. It wasn’t a big space. I felt like I finally had a reason to stay. I was thirty-three. It was a real turning point in my life. I felt like I had made something that made me feel like, okay, I have a reason for being here. It’s literally the reason I have not left Los Angeles.

PC: Having launched this brand over nearly a decade ago, what’s one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
Nikki: That’s a great question. I have an unsexy answer, and I have a fun answer. The very, very, very unsexy answer is it has to do with making a show that always feels tight. It’s like you’re dealing with people who are great performers. You want to give them the leeway to tell stories. But there’s something that I have learned, which comes from my theatrical experience, is everything needs to be curated. I now know every show needs to start with someone who’s a comic. It doesn’t have to be the most famous person, and often it isn’t. But it has to be someone who’s going to set the tone. It’s a comedy. It’s going to be fun and tight. Then it’s making sure that my show doesn’t go over an hour and a half. You always want to leave people wanting more as opposed to it being too long. Now, that’s something I’m constantly learning and not achieving a lot of the time because theater is theater. Everything isn’t written word for word. But it’s about the lineup, the order of the show, and then how long it is. That’s a producing thing.

The other thing that I would say is so important—and this is going to be very controversial—is writers are not necessarily performers. A writer can tell a story about rescuing ten cats from a burning building and you want to tweeze your arm hair out one by one. But an actor or a comic could tell a less high-stakes story and you’re hanging on every single word. In terms of the experience of the audience, I love working with actors. I love working with performers. If you also write, great, but I don’t really care. The joy of this whole experience is the amazing actors.

If we talk about the special, we have Angelica Ross from Pose, Rosanny Zayas from The L Word, Kate McKinnon from SNL. They haven’t necessarily ever performed their own words. But they’re used to reading the words and delivering brilliant performances from Emmy Award-winning writers. They bring incredible stage prowess and acting chops, but they often haven’t written and performed their own words. I get so much joy working with someone who has never done this before. I use all of my development skills, and I sit with them on the phone. We do conversation after conversation. We craft their story. We find the comedy. We find the heart. We find that three-act structure so their story is like a movie in fifteen minutes. The audience is on the edge of their seat.

I’ll use Angelica as an example. Angelica joined the Navy when she was a teenager and presenting as male. Angelica was held out the window by her feet by these guys in her unit, accusing Angelica of being gay at the time. What the hell is going to happen? Literally Angelina is hanging by her feet out of a window on a base in Japan.

It’s not about being a good writer. It’s about being vulnerable. It’s about knowing what to keep and what to pull out so that we can direct an audience to what they need to pay attention to and listen to. Then you get to witness them and they’re like, “Holy shit. I just told my own story.” Watching an audience respond to that vulnerability, humor, and perspective is so freeing. It never gets old.

PC: Speaking of that Audible special, you have a new one coming out on June 4. How did this partnership initially form?
Nikki: I knew people over at Audible. So Don’t Tell My Mother!, the live show, has always been focused on diverse storytellers. I’m a gay lady. You can go to any comedy club here in LA and see an amazing plethora of white, cis, straight men performing. You can go any day of the week at any time and you’ll find that.

For me, I’m interested in stories that haven’t been told. I’m interested in people that can share stories from a cool and unique perspective. I’m interested in my community, which is women, queer, and folks of color. That’s important. That’s what the show consists of. Not to say we don’t love great straight men. We have had wonderful straight men. But I will say the majority of our audience is folks of color, queer, and women.

We’ve always done a fun coming-out special. I pitched that to Audible. I’ve been working with them a little bit. They would sometimes use some of our stories on some of their other shows. But I said, “Hey, what if we had you guys record our coming-out show, and we can do something fun for Pride Month?” They were like, “Let’s record it and see what we can do!”

They decided to make it into a special three years ago with Lance Bass and I hosting. Lance was on the show. It did really well. Then the next year, they wanted to make it an Audible Original, meaning you can’t hear it anywhere else—it’s made specifically for Audible. The production value is great. It’s something that’s going to come out specifically during this time. It’s going to be free for members for all of Pride.

It did great last year. We had Tan France from Queer Eye and I hosting. Then Shangela, who became a good friend, was in that special. She was in that Audible Original. So this year, they asked if we would do it again. I was like, “Hell yeah.” I asked if Shangela and I could host it together because I love her and her story. She’s smart, kind, and funny as hell.

PC: Tell us about Coming Out Party: A Pride Celebration and what fans can expect?
Nikki: It comes out June 4. Shangela and I host it. Normally, we would be hosting it together in a studio, and we’d prepare it like that. But I had to record it here in my home in LA. Shangela is living and quarantining with her grandmother in Paris, Texas. The special is about being out of the closet, but literally we recorded our parts in our closets. I was in my coat closet. Shangela was in her grandmother’s shoe closet.

It’s stories—some are live, and some are recorded in people’s closets. Usually it’s all from the live shows we do in LA, but because of corona, some people had to record in their homes. We have Rosanny Zayas from The L Word, and it’s her story of her first kiss and first love in high school. She’s also a Queens girl, by the way. We have Angelica Ross from Pose, who is brilliant. She’s quarantining in the South. She recorded in her closet.

We have Jake Borelli. We had his recorded earlier this year. He’s one of the stars of Grey’s Anatomy. He has an awesome story. It’s about how he was asked by the showrunner if he would be cool with a storyline where his character, Levi Schmitt, would come out on the show. He would be the first ever doctor in a gay relationship in the history of Grey’s. He wasn’t publicly out at the time, and he wasn’t out to the show’s team. He helped shape the story of Levi Schmitt’s coming out. That inspired him to come out on Instagram in real life. He’s the loveliest. We also have Nicky Paris, who’s an awesome comic. He’s from Staten Island and he comes out after he gets caught smoking weed at the St. Patty’s Day parade. There are so many wonderful stories.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

PC: Guilty pleasure or movie?
Nikki: I’m watching The Politician right now, which I love. I don’t watch reality TV. I’m watching Shangela’s We’re Here, which is so good. It’s like when I need to cry, I watch that. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never watched Lost. I promised my best friend that I would watch that. You know what I watch on repeat? Kate McKinnon has a bit on SNL called “Whiskers R We.” It’s about how she’s this lesbian cat rescue store owner. She’s had people on like Tiffany Haddish and Kristen Wiig. She’s announcing all the cats that are available for adoption. Then while she’s hitting on whoever her cohost is, they’re touching each other’s boobs while they’re talking about the different cats available.

PC: Favorite book?
Nikki: I love self-help because I’m neurotic and Jewish. I’m constantly trying to better myself and fix all the errors of my ways. [laughs] I love Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. I just started Catch and Kill, which is Ronan Farrow’s book. I shared it on my Instagram stories. He reshared my stories. I can’t reshare the reshare because I don’t want to look uncool because now I’ve gained a little coolness. I’m one hundred percent going to screen-shot it and send it to my friends.

PC: Favorite play or musical?
Nikki: Avenue Q and Rent.

PC: A band or artist that fans would be surprised to learn is on your playlist?
Nikki: My favorite music in the world is country music. That’s weird because not a lot of New York Jews are country music fans. But when I proposed to my wife, Scarlett, it was in Washington Square Park during Pride. I did a parody of Sam Hunt’s “Body Like A Back Road.” I love generic pop too, but I love country!

PC: Who would play you in the story of your life?
Nikki: I’m in love with Debra Messing. Sexy Jewish women are my jam.

To keep up with Nikki, follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Listen to Coming Out Party: A Pride Celebration on Audible.

Photo Credit: Jon Premosch