Bittersweet Symphony: Inside the Sex and Drugs of ‘Mozart in the Jungle’

For the record, Lola Kirke wants you to know that the most nauseating way to play the oboe is with a hangover. “It’s suffocating,” the actress says with a laugh. “You basically use all the air in your body, and you feel like you want to vomit.”

Kirke knows this from experience. As she was preparing to play Hailey Rutledge, the oboe-tooting twentysomething lead role in the series Mozart in the Jungle, the first season of which premieres in full on Amazon Instant tomorrow, she learned the hard way how difficult it was to play after a night of drinking, something her character could relate to.

In the first episode alone, Rutledge  – an “offbeat ingénue,” to use Kirke’s words – participates in a spin-the-bottle–style drinking game, in which she gets trashed doing shots while playing her instrument in competition with a flautist, only to go on an impromptu audition for the fictional New York Symphony the next day. Things work out in her favor (sort of) and suddenly she’s entering the cutthroat cosmos of a professional orchestra — a world that, for all of its outward pomp, resembles something akin to the backstage of a Mötley Crüe concert, as explained by Tolstoy.

The series is loosely based on oboist Blair Tindall’s 2006 memoir, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music, and it delivers on its subtitle – which appears in the show on a fictitious Rolling Stone cover – with sequences about a drug-dealing timpanist and another in which a woman explains the correlation between a man’s instrument “and the way he fucks.” Violinists “tend to come quickly [due to] all those arpeggios,” Saffron Burrows’ cellist character Cynthia Taylor explains to Rutledge, while percussionists “pound you like you’re in a porno.”

Thanks to quirky scripts and a smart ensemble cast – which includes Gael García Bernal as the Symphony’s young-buck new conductor Rodrigo, Malcolm McDowell as its outgoing maestro Thomas Pembridge and Broadway legend Bernadette Peters as the Symphony’s manager, Gloria Windsor – it comes off whimsical without ringing off-pitch. “I liked that we were going to do the inside world of classical music and the fun aspect of it,” García Bernal says when asked why he took his role. “[Classical musicians] all breathe and eat and fart like normal people, but onstage they are quite serious.”

Part of the reason for the fun can be traced to the executive-producer pedigree behind the scenes. Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore) got the idea for the series after reading a review for Tindall’s book and brought in his cousin, filmmaker and frequent Wes Anderson collaborator Roman Coppola, and director Paul Weitz (About a Boy, American Pie) to develop it with him; Tony-nominated Alex Timbers (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Pee-Wee Herman Show) also came aboard as Mozart’s co-executive producer.

For Schwartzman – who, despite having drummed for indie rockers Phantom Planet, never sat in an orchestra pit before – Tindall’s book just seemed like an obvious television series right from the start. But by his estimation, it took years of lobbying his friends to get it made. “It’s about a subculture that’s huge and right in front of our eyes,” he explains. “It’s not like a secret subculture of mermaid goths that get together. I would talk to Roman about it forever and then only recently Roman was like, ‘We should try to do this.'” 

Kirke recalls hearing the names of the executive producers and, without hearing the plot, saying, “Whatever it is, let’s do it,” because, as she puts it, “those people are really, really, really fucking talented.” But then they explained its “sex, drugs and classical music” premise. “I was like, ‘What the fuck?'” she says with surprise. “Those are definitely things that I wouldn’t put in the same sentence.”

“There’s a lot of young people who are interested in classical music you don’t really think of,” Coppola says of the show’s potential audience. As a testament to this, the last couple of years have seen rock artists ranging from St. Vincent’s Annie Clark to the National’s Bryce Dessner composing orchestral music.

Prior to the show, Kirke’s experience with classical music was nonexistent. “I associate a lot of it with a drill giving me another fucking filling, because my dentist is a freak about classical music,” she says. Nevertheless, the actress, whose sister Jemima costars on Girls, identified with the role on a personal level. “What appeals to me about Hailey is she’s a young woman struggling to understand what it means to be somebody who has only ever committed to being an artist,” she says. “I identify with that.”