This article contains spoilers for the finale of FX’s “Dying for Sex.”

Jenny Slate hasn’t quite figured out how to respond when people tell her they found themselves sobbing at the end of “Dying for Sex,” the new FX show she stars in alongside Michelle Williams.

It’s an understandable reaction. The limited series, which began streaming on Hulu on Friday, follows Molly (Williams) as she upends her life when she gets a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Rather than stay in a sexless marriage with her husband, Steve (Jay Duplass), Molly decides to dive into a thrilling erotic journey, with the support of her best friend Nikki (Slate), who becomes her caregiver during the last months of her life.

A mess of an actor who adores Molly, Nikki becomes her best friend’s anchor, the grounding force she needs as Molly explores her kinks, her desires and her insatiable need to be wanted and obeyed in bed. Their friendship and mutual caregiving is at the center of “Dying for Sex.” It’s why creators Elizabeth Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, who adapted the series from the Wondery podcast of the same name, knew it was a tall order to find someone who not only would need to go toe-to-toe with Williams but would need to serve as the heart of the show.

“We needed someone who could be really funny and also just break your heart and almost kind of in the same moment,” Meriwether said.

But that was only part of the equation. “You have to believe that Nikki is a person you would want to die with, that would be the most enjoyable, pleasurable person to spend the rest of your time with,” Rosenstock added.

The two said that led to some rather strange casting conversations: “Would we want to die with this person?” they’d ask themselves. And when it came to Slate, the answer was simple: yes.

“I think she portrayed all the messiness of caretaking in such a beautiful way,” Rosenstock said. And that required a nimble comedic performer who could just as easily showcase Nikki’s curdling anger against her boyfriend after he mutes her phone from Molly’s urgent messages as she can dazzle a bedridden Molly with Shakespearean soliloquies and a full-blown one-woman “Clueless” show.

Slate, whose recent work has included roles in “It Ends With Us” and “The Electric State” as well as a Prime Video stand-up special and a book of essays titled “Lifeform,” spoke to The Times about her character, navigating the tonal shifts in the series and what Nikki’s bag represents.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

We need to talk about that “Clueless” scene at the hospital where, to cheer up Molly, Nikki begins a mishmash of performances. Not just “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” but a whole throng of moments from that classic Amy Heckerling 1995 flick. Was that written into the script or do you just have “Clueless” in the back of your pocket?

I think a lot of us have “Clueless” in our back pocket. But that was written into the show, and I was delighted by it. Because I completely get it. I mean, I don’t know a lot of millennials who don’t know, “Oh, my God, I love Josh!” I knew a lot of those lines, but I did have to memorize Amber’s. I knew there are a lot of people that would be upset if I messed them up.

Less so with Shakespeare.

Oh yeah, he’s very good. I mean, he’s no Amy Heckerling, but he’s very good!

The scene captures so much of what I found thrilling about the show, especially the way it shuttles between humor and sadness. There’s so much crying through laughs and so much laughter through tears. How did you come to navigate that tonal shift throughout?

For me, one of the signature characteristics of the show is that you don’t get the laughter without the sorrow. As Michelle puts it, Molly’s cancer diagnosis acts as a portal for her to explore the truth of who she is and how she’s operated in the world via her erotic journey. It’s this idea that you don’t have to separate things out. That you don’t have to compartmentalize parts of yourself because they upset you. This show really tries to be as inclusive, emotionally speaking and experientially, as possible. I think that allows for really interesting performances, for unexpected moments in the narrative. But it also allows one to feel very close to the story, because much like life itself, it is going to unfold on its own.

“For me, one of the signature characteristics of the show is that you don’t get the laughter without the sorrow,” Jenny Slate says.

(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)

As much as the show is about Molly’s journey, this is also a story about caregiving — about the perils and the sorrows of it but also the kind of joy that can come from wanting to care for someone else, almost in spite of your own well–being. What did you learn about caregiving while playing Nikki?

One thing I really loved about this character is that she sees caregiving as something that is really outside her own self definition. Not that she defines herself as selfish. But she doesn’t really look to herself to be the person in the room who’s going to know how to do your taxes. She’s just not the person that is responsible in a sort of pen-and-paper way. But the way that she is deeply dedicated and sure of her love allows her to participate in caregiving as a process that is definitely serious, and she has to learn to pick up the pace on that. But caregiving is also — even if it has an end point because someone has a terminal diagnosis — an open-ended, innovative process. That’s how I approached it. As an actor, I am going to keep myself open. I’m going to learn to innovate the more that I learn about Michelle as a performer and Molly as this character. And I worked with that openness. I allowed Nikki to stay in the moment. Nikki sees caring as an investigative process where you have to give someone room to grow. And so I gave myself room to grow while I was performing.

I think you see it in a prop. At the beginning, we see Nikki’s bag as an agent of chaos, and then it’s sort of this Mary Poppins-like bag, where anything that Molly would need, she’s gonna have it.

Yeah. She doesn’t end up with, like, a Clare V. clutch. Nikki is allowed to stay herself. The bag is still the bag. But the use is different. She doesn’t have to become someone else in order to be the best person she can be for herself and for Molly. But she does have to deal — to use the metaphor of the bag — with what is internal, and to understand that for Molly, a lot of stuff that she’s carrying is just not for right now and needs to go. And same for Nikki. They have different tasks as people, in terms of their growth. But by the end of it, Nikki’s bag has everything for Molly but so does Nikki’s brain. She knows exactly what type of vibrator Molly needs.

It’s what makes those scenes where they butt heads — like on New Year’s Eve, when Molly all but ignores Nikki’s plans (and their fab promlike dresses) to go hook up with a random stranger — all the harder to watch.

I think that’s a really important moment for Molly and Nikki, because even though they’re really bonded and they’re both committed to what they’re doing, they actually need to experience differentiation in order to experience success, whatever that means for both of them. One of the most beautiful things about this project is that there are so many inflection points. There are so many moments of necessary, and specific, and also pretty surprising, change. It’s not just one moment where everything comes to a head, falls apart and then comes back together. The characters are allowed the privilege of a complete ride. And as Molly says when she’s about to die, “It’s not that f— serious.”

“The characters are allowed the privilege of a complete ride,” Jenny Slate says. “And as Molly says when she’s about to die, ‘It’s not that f— serious.’”

And that comes from one of my favorite scenes in the final episode, which is when Amy (Paula Pell) explains dying in the most thoughtful, most hysterical way. That line of hers — “Your body knows how to die” — unlocked for me something quite profound about the show and its story.

Because of Paula and her incredible performance, and Liz and Kim’s brilliant writing, it’s like we’re very gently turned toward this thing that we see in life and we see in movies. It’s that people die. But Paula explains it from the inside out. I’ve heard parts of that when speaking to a hospice caregiver in my own life. But Paula’s nurse, Amy, at once makes dying natural and also extraordinary. In the same way that having an orgasm is natural and also extraordinary. It is physical, natural but also intensely personal. And that the body knows what to do and needs to do it. I, as a person, don’t think about dying a lot. But I found myself, while listening to Paula’s monologue, feeling soothed.

Soothing is the perfect word to describe that scene, yes. Especially because it tees up the ending not as depressing or dour but almost kind of uplifting, which is odd for a show concerned with death and dying. What are we to take from that final episode?

I think for Nikki, in the final episode, in that last scene, you see that she’s clearly been able to take a lot about what she learned about herself from being Molly’s caregiver but also just from her love with Molly, from the fact that she could love someone that much. She sees herself as someone with the capability for immense love and connection. And she knows it’s true. She has the proof. She’s proud of it. You see she’s utilized that knowledge in a lot of healthy, positive ways. She’s moving forward, there’s wind in her sails. She’s not in stasis. She’s not like a fossil because of Molly’s death. There are going to be times when she notices that kind of twang of a heartstring because of the experiences she will not be able to have with Molly. I like that the show is honest about that. She’s not better off at the end. She’s just different, and that’s OK.