“I love that she’s a control freak,” Suzy Nakamura says in her exclusive interview with Gold Derby (watch the video above) about playing Iris Kimura, “the CEO or a top executive” aboard the eponymous space cruise in “Avenue 5.” The actress continues, “There’s so much that she doesn’t have control over and it makes me laugh to watch someone unravel; there’s a comedy in her helplessness.”
HBO has renewed the comedy after premiering it earlier this year. Iris ends the first season separated from the rest of the main cast, having accidentally boarded an earthbound rescue shuttle. Nakamura teases, “I’m really looking forward to season two because if I’m heading toward earth, I don’t know what my world is going to be like.” The second season has not shot yet, but it has been “mapped out” and Nakamura reveals that what she knows about it “is scrumptious in a way.”
Nakamura was seen more recently reprising her recurring role on “Dead to Me” for its second season. Her character was expanded this year with the introduction of her husband played by the “hilarious” Marc Evan Jackson, but Nakamura was “disappointed” that she curiously never shared the screen with him or even appeared in the same episode. “It kills me because I love Marc Evan Jackson! We’re from the same theater,” she says.
Next on the horizon for Nakamura is “a sports movie” that she likens to “The Karate Kid,” as well as “Napoleon Dynamite.” “It’s about a sumo wrestler (me) and they don’t allow females to compete, at least professionally, in Japan, so she’s in Torrance, California and she works at a high school and she teaches this young kid about sumo wrestling,” she explains. “Sumo” will mark her third collaboration with “Avenue 5” and “Veep” mastermind Armando Iannucci.
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