Marc Bendavid – How to Buy a Baby

By: Jamie Steinberg

Q) What are some of the recent projects that you have coming up?

A) I have a very exciting unscripted project in development in Los Angeles but I’m not allowed to say very much about yet other than it takes place outdoors and things get very muddy.

Q) What can you tease is in store for Season 2 of “How to Buy a Baby?”

A)  Car crashes! Helicopter chases! Explosions! Awkward family dinners!

Q) How did you prepare for the role and how important was it for you to portray Charlie’s experience authentically?

A) I have a brother-in-law who, from the first time I read the script, reminded me enormously of Charlie— He had Charlie’s humor, his chilled-out nature, his reserved disposition. So, preparation for playing Charlie really came in the form of paying attention to my brother-in-law’s behavior, his intonation, the way he cracks jokes, that sort of stuff. I tried my best to sort of ingest his way of being in the world. The mind-blowing coincidence, which we only discovered after shooting began, was that when he was a teenager, he played hockey for several years with our creator Wendy’s husband, Steve. So, the man she based Charlie on and the man I based my Charlie on were actually longtime friends and weirdly quite similar guys.

Q) How is your character Charlie different from all the other characters you’ve had in the past? 

A) Charlie’s pretty unflappable. It’s hard to get a reaction out of him… until you do. And then, it’s fireworks. He shrieks, he yells, he makes a mess, but up until the storm hits you have no idea it’s coming.

Q) The show concentrates on IVF (Vitro fertilization). What did you know about IVF before taking on the role?

A) Well, not nothing. I’m at an age when a lot of my female friends are starting to explore options for conceiving that are less-conventional, so I’d heard first-hand about some of what IVF entails. What I didn’t realize was how widespread the struggles that lead to people seeking IVF were and how much grief and shame people— men as well as women— have about their inability to conceive.

Q) What do you love about working with your costar Meghan Heffern?

A) For me, Meghan is really the rare perfect costar. She’s generous, energized, relatable, smart and waaay more talented than I am. Seriously. I feel like if I’m having an off day or I’m particularly distracted (There are so many distractions on a TV set!) I can depend on her to bring me back to earth, to the truth that bubbles underneath any well-written scene.  She’s one of my all-time favorite acting partners: consistent in delivering strong choices, but more often than not those choices are totally unpredictable. You can see it on screen, in this and everything else she’s done.

Q) Do you think this type of comedy helps as a coping mechanism for people going through this situation?

A) I can only speak to the responses I’ve had from viewers and the answer is overwhelmingly “yes.” I believe Wendy [Litner] (the show’s writer and creator) created these scripts out of a desire to do exactly that for herself— to find a way to channel the overwhelmingly disempowering and fraught experience of failing to easily produce the children she yearned for her whole life. And people have picked up on that, by and large. Meghan and I both received lots of messages from people we know (and even more from people we didn’t) saying that it helped them to be able to laugh at the absurdity of their own experiences.

Q) What have been some of your favorite moments from working in “How to Buy a Baby?”

A) There were lots of hard shoot days, I’m not gonna lie. We had a very tight budget and a ton of outdoor locations, all shot in the dead of a particularly heinous winter. We were frozen to the bone a lot on this shoot and a lot of my best memories are of Meghan and I racing into the craft truck or a store lobby or some random cafe to warm ourselves up between takes. One of the only advantages of having such a small creative team is that a real intimacy develops inside that small creative core – the actors, the director, the writer – and with Adriana [Maggs], Wendy and Meghan that was a really rewarding place to be.

Q) You’re apart of social media. Do you enjoy seeing all the instant feedback from the episodes?

A) To be honest, I’m still pretty absentminded about it all, the online promotion and interaction. Sometimes I don’t post anything for weeks because I just…forget to. Premiere dates come and go without my noticing. But when I do suddenly see that something that meant a lot to me is landing with people, and that it means something to them too, it’s incredible. Actors have to do this really difficult thing once shooting is wrapped, namely to just let everything you’ve invested in a project the place it has taken up in your heart, suddenly go. It can be an abstract thing to go through because the second a shoot is over all signs of it are completely vanished. So, when months or years later you get this deluge of responses and acknowledgement…it can be very unexpected and very rewarding.