“I didn’t care what they wanted me to play. I was there”
Rabbi Jen!! Photo: Craig Blankenhorn/HBO If you think about it, Hari Nef actually has a lot in common with Carrie Bradshaw. Fashion icon? Check. Writer? Check. Bad at walking down a runway? Okay, not so much. Still, the model-actress-writer is a pretty spot-on update to the early-2000s party girl rubbing shoulders with New York’s glitterati and typing away about her romantic life.
Instead, she ended up playing Rabbi Jen, the trans rabbi Charlotte hunts down to officiate her nonbinary child Rock’s “they-mitzvah.
At first, she says, her character had only a few lines; the addition of her monologue is a testament to her talent. “I made choices with the way I delivered the text,” she says of her first reading. “I made the team laugh. When they sent the new script, my character had earned herself a little more time.”