Alex Karpovsky plays Ray on “Girls.”
Were you nervous about meeting people’s expectations for the second season?
It was something I was little bit curious about. I don’t know if curious is the right word. Fearful, a little bit, because, well, for the obvious reasons: You have these 23-, 24-year-old girls that are for the most part unknown and now they’re on billboards in Times Square, and you don’t know if they’re going to show up being the same person they were before that. Because what we had on Season 1 was such a, I thought, really special, lively, effervescent energy. It just made me feel really comfortable and safe and I didn’t want that to be changed or compromised in any way, and I didn’t know if the attention would change it. But I don’t think it did at all, and maybe that’s some small miracle.
We love the scene where you take care of Shoshanna the night she accidentally smokes crack.
I’m always surprised and reminded by how much a nice gesture is accented if it’s preceded by a little bit of meanness. If Charlie did that, who’s kind of a nice guy to begin with, no one would care. But [for] a lot of people, that specific action by Ray really seems to stand out. That and his deflowering [her] are, like, the things people seem to respond to.
Lena told us she thinks Jessa is the character who has herself together the most. Would you agree?
She’s definitely probably a candidate. I’m trying to kind of weave in her nervous breakdown wedding into that argument. … If she didn’t have a nervous breakdown wedding it’d be a slam-dunk, Jessa. There’s no answer at the end of this tunnel, but I think it’s a testament to the show and how authentic and complex the characters are that it’s hard for us — for me anyway — to find an answer to that question.
