Sunday Conversation: Noël Wells isn’t afraid of emotions

Noël Wells is a multi-hyphenate who seems to keep adding new hyphens. Her first movie as a writer-director, in which she also stars, is “Mr. Roosevelt.” It’s premiering as part of this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

Originally from San Antonio, Wells, 30, attended the University of Texas at Austin before moving to Los Angeles. After a series of online comedy videos racked up millions of views, she appeared on “Saturday Night Live” for the 2013-14 season, gaining attention for her spot-on impressions of young celebrities such as Zooey Deschanel, Lena Dunham and Emma Stone.

After leaving “SNL,” Wells appeared as the female lead/romantic interest on the first season of Aziz Ansari’s acclaimed series “Master of None”; costarred with Jessica Williams in the movie “The Incredible Jessica James,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival; and she just finished shooting the movie “Happy Anniversary,” co-starring Ben Schwartz. Wells also has an upcoming series at Comedy Central that she co-wrote, co-created and stars in.

In “Mr. Roosevelt,” Wells plays Emily, a young woman struggling to make it in Los Angeles who is suddenly called back to Austin after the death of a loved one. There she confronts all the ways in which she continually gets in the way of her own success.

Working with cinematographer Dagmar Weaver-Madsen, Wells shot “Mr. Roosevelt” on Super 16 and is very excited that a 35 mm print will screen at the SXSW festival. “I think it’s going to feel like I made a movie,” she said with clear delight.

Your movie includes what is bound to be the contentious claim that tacos in Austin are superior to tacos in Los Angeles. Please explain.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the hot sauce. Mexican food in Texas, which is Tex-Mex, it just has a very distinct flavor, and it’s very rich, and the experimentation of tacos in Austin just takes it to another level. And when I moved to California, I thought it was going to be so amazing here, but everything here is just burritos and everything tastes like plain rice. The hot sauce is mild. There are taco trucks that are OK, but it just doesn’t have that kick. I think people from Texas will definitely know what I’m talking about.

You went back to Austin to make your movie. Why?

For me, it always felt like my first movie would be there. So much of my formative years were there, and I’m still kind of unpacking that. It’s a town filled with all these incredible, supportive people, and I really wanted to celebrate it. Also, it’s just such a great setting and filled with all these characters and I wanted to collaborate with my friends and people that I’ve known who are still there. And me being like, “OK, now, I’ve got the capability to make a movie, can we do something?”

In the film, you deliver a monologue in which you decry being labeled a quirky girl as a way to diminish a woman’s intellect and power. Is that how you feel in real life?

It happens all the time. Emily the character, she gets upset about it and so she goes on her soapbox tirade. Where I’ve gotten to the point where it’s fun to be underestimated by people. People are constantly talking down to me. When I was on “SNL,” they were like, “Don’t worry, you’re a cute girl and Lorne Michaels likes cute girls.” And it blew my mind that people didn’t see me for how I felt about myself. And you just learn that people aren’t in your brain and they’re not in your body and they don’t know the richness of what’s happening in your mind and they don’t know your anxiety. They just don’t know it.

So they see you and just think, “Oh, cute girl,” and they don’t see all the work that I did before. They don’t know how I got here. Even when I was making my movie, people would say, “How did you get a movie made?” And it was like, “If a guy wrote his own movie, would you ask why he was directing it?” Of course, he’s doing it. So when people ask me how I did it, it’s because I wrote a … movie and I was going to make it no matter what. And that kind of stuff I’m learning to not let it bother me as much.

Your roles on “Master of None” and “Mr. Roosevelt” show you have a real knack as a performer to shift from a manic comic energy to something much more emotionally real. Where does that come from?

Maybe this will inform the quirky girl thing. My comedy, what’s driving me, is a very dark, sad thing. I have a dark sense of humor, and I find the world incredibly bleak. Everybody is a cartoon to me, even myself. It’s just a part of me. And the trick that I have in my back pocket is that I am very OK with becoming very vulnerable really fast and just being incredibly honest. I don’t like pretending I’m something that I’m not. It’s real and it’s there and it’s in everybody. And people hide those things, but it’s the most interesting part of people, and the most interesting things about characters is when you get to see them flip.

There was an interview with you last year that featured an astonishing parenthetical.

I know! It was so crazy. I was like, “Lady, come on.”

Were you surprised to see “starts to cry” in brackets in the middle of one of your answers?

I cried. And I cry all the time. I’m an emotional human being and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I will continue to cry. I might cry in this interview; it’ll be fine. I don’t mind crying. I did another interview with somebody where I opened up and he was like, “I can’t believe how vulnerable you’re getting.” And I was like, “Why are we all pretending all the time? I’m crying, deal with it. If you can’t handle it, maybe it’s on you.”

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Mark.Olsen@latimes.com

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