Elizabeth Perkins doesn’t so much enter Minx’s second season as she detonates into it—arriving in a sprawling Los Angeles villa, flanked by naked boy toys, Afghan hounds, and the kind of money that makes other people instantly nervous. It’s a hell of an entrance, but Perkins knew exactly what she was diving into. “I saw season one and I just fell in love with it,” she tells me. “I said, ‘Oh, 70s pornographer feminist? This is interesting.’ I’d never seen anything like it.”
If you’ve been around long enough to remember the San Fernando Valley’s real 70s reputation, the show feels like a wild-but-familiar collage of ambition, exploitation, idealism, and hustling. If you haven’t, Minx gives you the Cliff’s Notes—with Jake Johnson’s Doug and Ophelia Lovibond’s Joyce steering a feminist magazine straight into the belly of a men’s porno empire. Perkins arrives as Constance, the wealthy, possibly unhinged patron who might save the whole operation… or send it spinning into a canyon.
“Money is power, and she knows that,” Perkins says. “She’s not gonna show her hand right away. She’s going to let them stew.” You get the sense she relished every second of that tightrope walk. Constance is one of those characters who smiles like she’s helping you while deciding which pocket to pick. And Perkins plays her with a looseness that makes her both magnetic and vaguely dangerous.
Part of the joy for her was stepping back into the era she actually lived through. “I was born in 1960,” she says. “The 70s were my entire middle school and high school life. To see Laurel Canyon, the Strip, Venice Beach—seeing LA recreated like that—was overwhelming. It really nailed the environment.” It didn’t hurt that this summer also gave her a real-life trip back in time: the Joni Mitchell/Brandi Carlile Gorge weekend, the kind of cultural convergence that makes people drop everything and book a flight.
Perkins can barely get through talking about it without her voice breaking. “There were 30,000 people there. She hasn’t played live in 20 years. People flew from Japan, Australia… When she sang ‘Both Sides Now’ a cappella, you could’ve heard a pin drop.” She pauses. “It was overwhelming for everyone. For a child of the 70s, it was beautiful in a way that was hard to describe.”
If Constance has a soundtrack, though, it’s not Joni, T. Rex, or the show’s endless rotation of glam-rock needle drops. “Constance is still drinking to Frank Sinatra and Perry Como,” Perkins laughs. “Maybe some Peggy Lee on a sad night. She hasn’t evolved into the 70s yet.”
Still, Minx itself plays in the more chaotic corners of the decade—sexual revolution, feminist movement, porn industry boom, pop culture melting down and reforming itself. Perkins thinks the show nails that ecosystem without flattening it into joke decor. “The backdrop feels very real,” she says. “Yes, it’s a unique story—the intersection of a young feminist writer and a porn publisher—but the environment, what was happening in LA, the rights issues, the culture shifts—that all tracks.”
What most people outside the production didn’t see was the jolt mid-season when HBO Max canceled the already-shot episodes, leaving everyone in limbo until Starz and Lionsgate swooped in. Perkins stayed optimistic. “There are still great studios who go, ‘This show is fantastic, the writing is great, the cast is great.’ And I’m grateful they picked it up. It’s a worthy show.” The relief is visible. You can feel actors loosen up when they’re genuinely proud of something.
Perkins has been on a career bender lately—Minx, The Afterparty, voice work in the Spider-Verse films, a steady run of roles across film and TV since Big, About Last Night, Weeds, and Miracle on 34th Street. Ask her about the chaos of juggling so many projects and she just shrugs with the kind of seasoned ease people try to fake. “Why not?” she laughs. “Why not be everywhere?”
What makes her irresistible in Minx is the exact thing that made her irresistible in half of her previous roles: the ability to shift from warmth to mischief to menace in a single beat, never fully letting you know where she’s steering the scene. Constance feels like one of those 70s characters who could only emerge from that very specific stew of feminism, horniness, ambition, and California eccentricity.
And Perkins gets it. She’s been swimming in the decade all summer—on set, in conversation, and at a Gorge amphitheater listening to Joni Mitchell sing a song that predates almost everyone in the audience but still manages to floor them. There’s something appropriately Minx about that: looking back at an era that was complicated, messy, sometimes regressive, often revolutionary, and realizing it still has something worth digging into.
As Perkins says it, “This show has something to say.” And she delivers her part of the message with a wink, a threat, and a martini—because Constance wouldn’t have it any other way.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
