AYA CASH IS TV'S MOST COMPLEX COOL GIRL 

On the kind of sun-flooded California afternoon that makes a bad mood feel unbecoming, Aya Cash sits in the lobby of a Beverly Hills hotel reflecting on depression. “Being human is a mental illness,” she says, an acerbic yet honest observation that could be taken right out of a script for

, her bold, razor-sharp FX comedy, now in its fourth low-rated but critically acclaimed season. The show, and Cash’s performance specifically, offers the most honest portrayal of depression and mental illness on television and she’s spent a lot of time thinking about why that matters. “Even calling it an illness creates a stigma, which is disappointing, but we don’t have quite the right terminology for it in our culture. Mental illness is a spectrum, and we’re all on it.”

Cash is by now keenly attuned to the mercurial rhythms of her character Gretchen, who was introduced as a kind of variation on the now-archetypal Gillian Flynn ‘Cool Girl\': the chick who can match you drink for drink, is down for anything in the sack, and has zero interest in commitment. Season two pulled a ballsy bait-and-switch with the revelation that Gretchen also has clinical depression, a turn which elevated the show from an extremely funny, sharp-tongued black comedy into something extraordinary. Her central relationship with self-absorbed writer Jimmy (Chris Geere) started out as funny in large part because it seemed doomed to fail, these being such entertainingly toxic assholes. But when the going got tough, and Gretchen spent weeks near-mute on the couch, Jimmy did the most unexpected thing of all and stuck around. In a sitcom landscape full of supposedly great couples who actually seem terrible for each other (looking at you,

), Jimmy and Gretchen are a brutally honest and sneakily tender breath of fresh air, a couple who are freaked out by everything except dysfunction.

“You’re always waiting for the turn,” Cash says in regard to the show’s scant moments of real romance. “I just shot a scene where I’m supposed to be sweetly in reverie, staring off into space happily, and I was like, this feels weird! Ultimately I’m a more cynical person, so I’m more comfortable in that space.” Season three ended with a characteristic moment of emotional whiplash: Jimmy makes a heartfelt proposal of marriage to a tearful, overjoyed Gretchen, right before developing the world’s fastest case of cold feet and abandoning her on a Hollywood hilltop. The rare beat of raw, dizzying romance was immediately undercut by the gut-punch reminder of just how broken these people are.

Coming in the wake of that bombshell, season four picks up with Jimmy MIA and Gretchen in a full-blown, crack-fueled manic episode, giving Cash the opportunity to add a new dimension to one of the most fully realized on-screen depictions of mental illness. “The truth is, we have all of that in us, and it\'s just about tapping into your own experience of things,” she says. “That feeling of your mind going so much faster than your body can keep up with, and you’re trying to make yourself very clear, but everything’s moving way too fast. I get a little bit of social anxiety, and my anxiety comes out through over-talking and overdoing it, so I just tap into that feeling.”

Though she’s now settled and confident in the role of Gretchen, that wasn’t always the case; the network were not convinced by her initial chemistry read with Geere, and

creator Stephen Falk had to fight hard for her casting. “I’m not worried about getting fired any more, which I absolutely was through all of season one,” she admits; presumably the handful of nominations she picked up for season two, including the Television Critics Association and the Critics Choice Television Awards, helped with that. “Sometimes nerves in an audition can damp down that chemistry and that flow of communication, just like on a first date. It takes a second date for you to be like, \'Oh, this is good.’”

That chemistry proved crucial, since the pilot episode of

in which Jimmy and Gretchen meet at a wedding, bond over their hatred of the bride, then hook up—is about as sexually graphic as basic cable gets. “I thought the sex scenes were incredibly funny and incredibly real, in the heightened sense that

is real, and I appreciated that there was parity between the man and the woman. There’s no shame around Gretchen’s sexuality, there’s no embarrassment or judgment of her; she’s treated in the same way as we often treat males and their sexuality.”

In the past Cash had turned down auditions for huge shows (she name-checks HBO’s prohibition drama

) because “almost every role came in as ‘nudity required,’ and unfortunately I just was not up for that. As a young girl, that’s what you get asked to do all the time, and it’s completely gratuitous. It feels like there’s just an expectation that if you decide to be an actress, your body is public domain.” The sex scenes in

aren’t technically nudity, she notes (“it’s incredibly graphic simulated nudity”), but “I still don’t enjoy doing them. I wish I was some cool girl who was like, ‘Yeah, it’s no big deal!’”

Cash is done with keeping silent about the treatment of women in her industry. Last November, she took to Instagram to share her experience of an audition that had left her feeling degraded. The post was a screenshot of an email she wrote to her agent afterwards: “I think I have to not go in for parts that are there so a man can want to fuck them with no actual story line or character,” she wrote, adding that she felt disappointed in herself for going for the role at all. “There were women crying in the waiting room afterwards,” Cash says. “It was a pretty offensive role, and to have it be the day after the election [of Donald Trump] was jarring, and made us all go, ‘What are we doing?’”

"There’s just an expectation that if you decide to be an actress, your body is public domain."

A friend of Cash’s, an actress she declines to name, went in for the same role and gave the producers an earful. “She improvised a monologue back to them about how they were speaking to her, saying, ‘How dare you attack me at work like this.\' I thought that was so badass. I’m not brave like that.” But Cash did make her own mark: The Instagram post received a flood of private responses from around thirty fellow actresses, all identifying the exact project, “saying ‘I went in for this too and I cried afterwards and I felt humiliated.\'”

It wasn’t the first time she’d had such an experience, but it will, she hopes, be the last. “When you get an offer to go in for a giant movie with amazing people, and it\'s a part that\'s denigrating to women, it\'s hard to say no because you think, ‘I should do this for my career.’ But I just don’t want to live my life that way anymore. The truth is, I don\'t tend to get those roles either because I can\'t find a way into them. There’s nothing for me to hold onto. I wish I could say that there are actresses who should play those roles, but some roles are just bad for women.”

Moving forward, Cash says, she’s determined not to say yes to auditions despite her better judgment. “I\'ll be less rich, and maybe less famous, and that trade-off is absolutely okay. I failed, in that moment, and I will probably fail again, but I really want to keep an eye on that. If I can\'t take a stand in this privileged position where I\'m making a good living and I\'m on a show that I love, then how hard is it gonna be for the people not in that position to make? I just have no excuse.”

For now, Cash is reveling in her position on a show that is beloved by critics and a small core fanbase; much though the show deserves to be a hit, she’ll take the creative freedom over huge ratings. “Ultimately, the people who find us seem to be happy to find us, and they\'re keeping us on the air so it sort of doesn\'t matter,” she says. “FX has allowed us to be the show we are, and doesn\'t try to make us something else.” Many a network would have been leery of the show’s no-holds-barred approach to dark material: With Gretchen finally taking medication for her depression, season three shifted its focus to the death of Jimmy’s father, as well as his veteran roommate Edgar’s (Desmin Borges) struggle with PTSD. (Yes, this show really is a comedy.) That willingness to show life\'s wear and tear extends to the surface level, too: Though season four has been filming for months, Cash tells me she’s only just gotten her nails done. “I was like, ‘She’s on crack, she’s not getting her nails done!’” Earlier in the season Cash was bitten by a dog, leaving a huge bruise on her thumb, “and we just left it in! It’s okay to not have everything be so perfect all the time.”

, Jimmy and Gretchen are almost a perfect match for each other. It’s hard to imagine that they won\'t end up together, despite how much seems stacked against them; even the show’s theme song plays like a warning, with its repeated refrain “I’m gonna leave you anyway.” Cash might call herself a cynic, but she’s cautiously optimistic on this front, at least: “I hope we see them end up together, but in a way that is not your typical ride off into the sunset. Maybe there’s a twist.”