On June 10, Molly Bernard will say goodbye to Lauren Heller. “I aged with her for all of my 20s,” Bernard, now 33, tells me over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. If you’ve never seen Younger, the TV Land hit whose seventh and final season ends this month, you might think Bernard was describing a friend from college—someone she grew into adulthood with. This is how Bernard speaks of the character throughout our entire conversation.
In reality, though, Lauren Heller, played by Bernard, is Younger’s resident ambitious publicist, source of the show’s most outlandish humor, and a horny pansexual. “She will sleep with anything that moves,” Lauren’s mother (played by Kathy Najimy) says affectionately in a season one episode.
Bernard landed the role as her first gig after graduating from the Yale School of Drama. In the pilot, she had a guest-star credit and a mere six lines, albeit ones that made her character quite memorable. The first was, “Hey, I’m so sorry, I think I accidentally punched you in the tit,” and another: “Oh, my God. That bush.” Darren Star—the creator behind Younger as well as Sex and the City—took a liking to Bernard, she tells me, and decided to write Lauren Heller permanently into the show.
Like Lauren, Bernard identifies as queer—some of the time, at least. “Sometimes I identify as queer, sometimes I identify as bisexual,” she says. “First of all, it’s no one’s business.” (I use the term queer throughout this piece to reflect the verbiage Bernard used to describe herself and various aspects of her life, including her relationship, in our interview.) Yet prior to meeting her partner over three years ago, Bernard had never been in a relationship with a woman. In part, Bernard thanks her seven-year tenure as Lauren Heller for her love story: “I came into my queerness through playing her,” she says. Would her life look the same today—engaged to and in love with a woman—had she never played Lauren? “I have fully no idea. I hope that I would have met Hannah, my partner,” Bernard says. “And I hope that I would have still had as easy of a time coming out.”
Though it was her first queer relationship, when Bernard knew, she knew. “I did not bat an eye,” she tells me of falling for Hannah. “I just fell in love.” Bernard met her partner at a wine-and-cheese book club. They were reading Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. “I recognized that she had really small feet like me,” Bernard recalls. “I was like, ‘What are those? A six?’” Her unorthodox pickup line worked well enough that the two exchanged numbers. As they say, the rest was history, which Bernard enthusiastically details: “We went on this amazing first date, and it was the best date of my life. And the second date was the best second date of my entire life. And now we live together, and it’s the best live-together day of my life, every day.”
It seems that at various points, Bernard has soaked up a special kind of comfort with her sexual identity from Lauren, describing some of her self-discovery in tandem with the way her character moves through the world. “Lauren, I think, was infused with that effervescence that she has, and that confidence,” Bernard says. In that way, Lauren taught Bernard it’s okay to just be.
But Bernard’s experience figuring out her sexuality hasn’t been all rainbows and butterflies. “It did start to catch up with me,” Bernard says of the hard-and-fast way she fell in love. “Even though I came out and I had such a happy coming-out story and happy falling-in-love story, I wasn’t off the hook. I still had to—and continue to—put work in to explore what it is to be queer.” For Bernard, this has included difficult conversations with herself and with her therapist about sexual identity.
“It’s hard to even process in your own body,” she continues. “Thank goodness for mental health professionals and for great friends. There were times where I was like, ‘Oh, I wish I had a Lauren.’ She would just be like, ‘Be easier on yourself.’ Because I’m so hard on myself.”
While Bernard is grateful for what she’s learned from the zany Jewish girl she played for so long on television, she’s also ready to let Lauren go. “I will miss the size and the scope that I got to inhabit. But, to be totally honest with you, I hope that I don’t do that [again] for a while because she’s so specific,” Bernard says. In fact, she says she’s already turned down parts she finds too similar to Lauren. “To be queer in Hollywood, period, is a tall order,” Bernard says. “It’s uncomfortable. I am probably about to get typecast for the rest of my life as a quirky girl.”
So she is being choosy when it comes to her roles. Her latest project is the indie film Milkwater, which came out on May 21. In the film, which also marks her debut as an executive producer, Bernard plays complicated and aimless Milo, a character who’s vastly different from the one she played on Younger. Milkwater unfolds when Milo, a young woman, impulsively offers to be a surrogate carrier for a gay, child-free, middle-aged man.
Stories like these that revolve around (or at least heavily feature) LGBTQ+ characters are becoming more commonplace but can still be disappointing. Bernard says Younger handled its plotlines with grace and extends that accomplishment to Milkwater and Transparent—where she had a recurring role—as well. But she says many other contemporary movies and television shows continue to prey on the notion that being queer is more akin to a sentencing. “Fucking Happiest Season killed me,” she says. “Like, that was a traumatizing outing story. They need a do-over. We need a do-over.”
In a now classic episode of Younger, Lauren plans her own “hot mitzvah,” a celebration of spirituality and sexuality, on her 26th birthday. I think of this as Bernard mentions that her grandfather, actor Joseph Bernard, was born Joseph Fieldman and changed his last name to better assimilate as an actor. Like her characters in Transparent and Younger, Bernard is Jewish. Curious, I ask her why she thinks the two identities—Jewish and queer—seem to be meeting more and more in mainstream film and TV shows. “The celebration of rituals and of freedom is the pillar of Judaism,” she says. “It is freedom—and I think that»s the intersection.”
For now, Bernard would like to focus on just that: being free. “Lauren is like a bright, glimmering light, and I want her to be her own Molly Bernard standalone entity that I played,” she says. “I really want to explore other people. But I will really miss our chemistry.”