The 10th-grade student has just resumed online classes at her school in Las Vegas, where most recently she’s been studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. She’s appeared onscreen a few times now, but PEN15 is her biggest and most complex role to date. Grubbs, 15, said she’s been acting in plays since she was around 6 or 7, having developed a taste for drama when her babysitter got her a nonspeaking role in a local high school production of Into the Woods. “For this to bring back memories for people just let me know I did it right,” she told BuzzFeed News in her first-ever interview. “Every beat and note of her character felt true - and terrifying.”Īll the attention is delighting actor Ashlee Grubbs. “But there’s girls like Maura who are manipulative, who make you care about them, and make you think they care about you, who are then in a perfect position to be able to absolutely ruin you emotionally. “I think it’s because we most often get depictions of bullies at school being the hot popular girls who are just straight-up mean, so it’s very black and white,” Shaw said. She told BuzzFeed News that PEN15 perfectly captures the nuances of how a bully can operate within a friend group.
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Rebecca Shaw, a comedian in Australia, tweeted with a hint of lived experience that Maura was one of the top five villains in TV history. “You guys are my number ones,” she insists. Once she’s infiltrated the pair’s friendship, dazzling them with angora Kangol bucket hats and a fridge stocked with Powerade, she begins slowly pulling them apart, quietly hanging out more with Anna as she insults Maya’s clothes and mother, but always with the smile of someone who insists she loves you.
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Armed with a kitchen cupboard full of forbidden junk food, she hands out endless Ring Pop lollipops to kids in a sickly sweet attempt at bribing them to vote in their class superlatives contest for her, Anna, and Maya as “Best Best Friends.” A compulsive liar, she insists they’ve been best friends since they were 2 when really she’s known them for just two days. Maura appeared in a two-episode arc in the middle of the season in which she slowly weasels her way into the friendship of Maya and Anna (creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle) by using her family’s wealth and her finely tuned gaslighting skills.
“A hill I am willing to die on: you either had a Maura or were a Maura,” one viewer tweeted.Īs the second season of PEN15 debuted on Hulu earlier this month, the new character of Maura (Ashlee Grubbs) has stirred a bunch of online chatter - and repressed memories - for many reflecting on their middle school experience. The show’s music and costumes - from puka shell necklaces to prized Tommy Hilfiger shirts - transport viewers of a certain age back to an era when crushes were gossiped about on AIM instead of iPhones.īut while the cultural and technological references may only make sense to some, other elements of the middle school experience PEN15 explores are universal: the consuming emotion of first crushes, the awkward shame of puberty, and - most prominently this season - the existence of seemingly sweet but secretly scheming interlopers who look to insert themselves into friendships like parasites and bring them down from the inside. For aging millennials, PEN15 can feel like a time capsule for both early 2000s culture and middle school trauma.
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