Chad’s desire to stand out while still fitting in is endearingly desperate, and like most preteens, he’s teetering between “childhood and adolescence,” and can’t seem to get comfortable hanging in the balance. Pedrad can relate. “Ninth grade was horrifying," Pedrad recalls to Parade.com. “What’s so funny about high school, is that the kids are developing—whether it’s emotionally, mentally, sexually—all at different rates and speeds and everyone’s kind of on their own trajectory. And for me, I felt very caught, like Chad does, in between childhood and adolescence,” she says. “So in 9th grade, suddenly I was at a school with all these older looking people, and even the ones who were my age were lapping me when it came to a lot of things, and they were so much more advanced than me. I was still clinging onto my childhood.” She depicts this struggle in the pilot, in which everyone’s just come back to school and Chad thinks he’s ready for the big leagues…or simply thinks he needs to be to survive and thrive, as a teen. “He tells this lie that goes too well. People buy it and suddenly he realizes he can’t handle everything that comes with that.” Spoiler alert: it has to do with virginity. “So that was definitely something that I experienced in high school, like, ‘Oh my God, you guys are too fast for me.’” It was this understanding that led her to create Chad. Keep reading for more about why Pedrad wanted to take on the challenge of playing a teen boy and what she wishes she knew in high school.
This is a unique show in so many ways that must have made it a challenge for you. Why did you want to tell this story of a Persian teen boy?
I thought it would be a fun experiment to tell a coming-of-age story with an adult playing the teenager at the center of it. An adult who has some distance from that time and understands what’s so funny about being a teenager. And hopefully, I could bring some perspective, nuance and specificity to the performance and moments that are funny can be funnier because you’re not sitting there laughing at an actual child, you’re laughing at an adult.
Why not play a teen girl, something you obviously know more about?
I knew it would be an ambitious ask to get people on board for the buy-in that an adult is playing a teenager, so I really wanted to just be able to disappear into the role to feel as far away from myself as possible. And I felt like with the help of the wig, the eyebrows, the posture, the binder and his baggy clothes, everything that you can use as a device to help sell a teenage boy, I felt like I could just disappear into that better than if I were in pigtails playing a girl. So to me, it was really helpful to the performance. Also, I was a tomboy, and I was a late bloomer and didn’t come into my femininity until much later, I had all guy cousins. So a lot of even Chad’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, even though I wasn’t a little boy, are pulled from my actual adolescence.
Chad is definitely a kid that could use a little guidance. He’s basically begging for it. What advice would you give him that you wish you had gotten at his age?
That it’s OK to experience adversity at that age, in fact, I think it’s a really good thing. It helps you develop character, it helps you toughen up. I was certainly forced to hone in on qualities of my personality because I wasn’t necessarily conventionally cute, I didn’t have a cool house. I didn’t have these other markers that some of my classmates had that made them seem really cool in my eyes. Adolescence is difficult. So if you can survive it and get to the other side of it, hopefully, you can laugh at it someday. I would just tell chad to chill out, there’s a bright future ahead of you and to not try so hard.
Watch our full interview with Nasim Pedrad below to find out which high school experience she’d rather relive: Chad’s or her own!
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