GIRLS' GUY
For the multitasking Alex Karpovsky, spring means the return of his hit HBO show, the release of two directorial projects, and a role in the Coen brothers’ new film. How will summer ever compare?
The lunch crowd at Frankie’s 457 in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn doesn’t seem to notice that right next to the window sits one of People’s newly anointed “Sexiest Men Alive.” “I went to that shoot holding hands with the other guys from Girls,” says Alex Karpovsky, 32, over a farro-and-roasted-vegetable salad. “But it felt good—silly, but fun, if nothing else.”
The actor is best known to the masses as Ray, the advice-dispensing, world-weary baristo he plays on Girls, but Karpovsky is also a veteran independent filmmaker. In fact, he first crossed paths with Girls’ creator Lena Dunham at the SXSW festival in 2008. “We shared a three-minute car ride from a mutual friend, and I was going on about a girl I had a crush on,” he recalls. “I immediately liked Lena—she was so funny and smart and self-deprecating and young and driven.” The two exchanged emails, and soon after, Dunham wrote him a role in 2010’s Tiny Furniture, her first feature film.
Leading up to that fateful meeting, Karpovsky’s career trajectory was not exactly linear. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, where his father was a computer science professor, and he spent his early twenties studying visual ethnography at Oxford University in the U.K. “I was existentially adrift, trying out many different social and creative hats, and trying to figure things out in a way that’s very sloppy and familiar,” he recalls. And then a classmate turned him on to Andy Kaufman. “He was doing something so weird and daring,” he says. “Starring in Taxi while doing professional wrestling while developing his own short films while working as a busboy…I fell in love with him.” Accordingly, Karpovsky dropped out of graduate school and devoted the next few years of his life to experimenting with stand-up comedy and performance art.
To pay the bills, Karpovsky took a job editing corporate and karaoke videos at a small production company in Boston. Using borrowed equipment, and only a bit of financial support, he made his first two shorts, “The Kokomo Hum” and “Tears of a Seagull.” In the latter, he cast himself in the lead role. “You could probably teach anyone to be an actor, if they have the ability to turn off their self-consciousness,” he shrugs. “If they have a little bit of charm, wit, and intellect on top of that, the chances increase.”
But don’t expect Karpovsky to prioritize one talent over another. “If I only directed, then the narcissist in me would feel like I wasn’t getting enough attention,” he deadpans. “And if I only acted, I wouldn’t have enough creative expression!” The full scope of his talents will be on display this spring, when Tribeca Films distributes two of his recent features. The bittersweet comedy Red Flag, shot with a handheld camera and featuring improvised dialogue, follows a newly dumped filmmaker named Alex Karpovsky (played by the man in question) as he screens his film in art house theaters across the South accompanied by a bumbling friend and a starry-eyed groupie. “I didn’t know any of the actors or crew beforehand—everyone worked for free—and I threw them in this crazy road trip, driving in a car all day,” he recalls. “I thought it would fall apart sooner or later, and I’d have to scale down, but we got along really well, and we still hang out.”
Rubberneck, a psychosexual thriller set in his native Boston, is much darker. Karpovsky collaborated with Boston filmmaker Garth Donovan, and the script took them a year, off and on, to complete. It’s the story of Paul Harris (Karpovsky), a scientist at a research center who falls for a colleague, Danielle (Jaime Ray Newman). After a one-night stand, she loses interest, and when she becomes infatuated with someone else, Paul’s failure to move on precipitates a garish revenge plot. Coolly filmed at locations all around Boston, Rubberneck is Karpovsky’s most polished directorial project, revealing his auteur sensibility as well as his able handling of an ambitious full-length feature.
In addition to a few new films in development—along with Girls—Karpovsky will appear in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, out this spring. “I’ve never been directed by two directors before, and they both do everything,” he says. “Because they’re so close, they verbalize a lot of the internal process, and if you’re close enough physically to eavesdrop [laughs], it’s almost like stepping into the mind of one brain, which is really illuminating. I hope I didn’t seem creepy.”
These days, Karpovsky has cultivated his own circle of not-so-secret admirers, especially since his Brooklyn neighborhood, Williamsburg, serves as the epicenter of Girls superfandom. “When I step through the subway door, there’s a part of my brain that makes me feel less anonymous than before, and most of the time it’s nice, quite frankly.” But not much else has changed. “I’m still the same asshole,” he concedes. “With the same insecurities, problems, and ambitions.”