A Q&A With Paper Heart’s Charlyne Yi

I’ve had a girl crush on Charlyne Yi ever since her scene-stealing appearance in Knocked Up, in which her character asks a pregnant Katherine Heigl—with the kind of psychic insight only primo weed can unleash—“You must be angry at the baby whenever it steals your food, huh?” It’s the kind of off-kilter quip that Yi has perfected in her comedy routines: sweetly oblivious and a little bit unsettling.

Now the 23-year-old actor and comedian—who subscribes to the granny-cardigan school of fashion and recently told Conan O’Brien that she thinks she looks like E.T. (“I’m not being self-deprecating; I’m just being open and honest”)—is positioning herself as a romantic heroine for our awkward, Apatowian times. Recently she cha-cha’d with G.I. Joe’s Channing Tatum in an online tribute to Dirty Dancing. And now she is romancing Michael Cera in the film Paper Heart, which she co-wrote with director Nick Jasenovec.

Paper Heart is a documentary/rom-com mashup: Half of the movie is the fictionalized story of Cera and Yi’s courtship, in which the actors play characters named “Michael Cera” and “Charlyne Yi” (thereby furthering long-standing speculation about their real-life romantic status). The other half is made up of unscripted interviews on the topic of love, culled from 300 hours of footage that Yi and her crewmates collected while crisscrossing the United States in a 12-seat van. (“It stunk so badly,” Yi has said. “Like an aquarium.”) The result is a low-fi confection that manages to walk a fine line between being preciously clever and genuinely touching—the perfect refresher for the cynical dog days of summer.

Yi and her co-star Jake Johnson—who stands in for director Jasenovec on-screen—sat down recently with Double X to discuss puppets, Margaret Yang, and Yi’s hatred of period humor.

Charlyne, the movie begins with you saying, “I don’t believe in love.” How much of that was a pose for the sake of setting up the movie’s premise, and how much of that was real?

Charlyne Yi: I think it’s exaggerated for the film, but it was the inspiration for making the documentary. Originally it was going to be a straight documentary, because I was questioning love and doubting it for myself. Not other people’s love—I wasn’t, like, [pointing at invisible people in the room] “Bullshit; bullshit; not real.” I just wanted to make a documentary that would capture true love stories, to inspire people who were doubtful, like me.

What were you doubtful about?

Yi: I think I just had a weird panic attack, because I was hanging out with 40-year-old men and watching elimaDATE, which made me feel gross. It was more like, “What is love? Will I ever know? I don’t know how to date—how do you meet boys? How do you talk? I don’t hang out at bars—should I just go up to one of them and be like, ‘Hey, let’s go hang out’?”

The film is really romantic; it’s really hopeful about love. Did you know from the start that that was the kind of film you wanted to make?

Yi: It was always intended that we’d make something hopeful that would inspire people and make them happy. It was never meant to prove that love didn’t exist—it was never meant to make people feel shitty and alone.

Did you guys interview anyone who did have a particularly cynical or skeptical perspective?