Post-Iron icDiablo Cody
The Oscar-winning screenwriter
of Juno has written an
Alanis Morissette musical.
And she’s put everything into it.
By Genevieve Smithjagged little pill is in previews
at Broadhurst Theatre.R
ead the press surrounding Dia-
blo Cody from 2008, the year she
won, at the age of 29, an Oscar for
her screenplay for Juno, and you
might imagine a hard-living, hard-
charging, rockabilly sexpot with a penchant for
wordplay. The wordplay part is true—though she
keeps it out of her scripts these days—but as for
the rest, Brook Maurio, the real person behind
the name, is not much like the persona she used
to storm the gates of Hollywood a decade ago.
“Anybody who has remained in my life has a rela-
tionship with Brook, not Diablo Cody,” says Mau-
rio over breakfast one recent autumn morning.
This split personality is both convenient and,
perhaps, necessary. In the years after Juno, as Dia-
blo Cody found herself routinely in the internet’s
crosshairs, Maurio got married and had three
boys, all the while continuing to write thoughtful,
complicated stories for thoughtful, complicated
women—the kinds of stories that attract actresses
like Charlize Theron (Young Adult, Tully) and
Meryl Streep (Ricki and the Flash) despite their
productions’ modest budgets. Most recently, she
wrote the libretto to an Alanis Morissette musical,
Jagged Little Pill, which started previews on
Broadway this month. “I now regret not having
been a theater kid my entire life,” she says.
Along the way, the internet seems to have
finally come around on Diablo Cody. Some of her
maligned previous work—including Young Adult
and the 2009 horror flick Jennifer’s Body—have
since achieved cult status, and the criticism she
endured post-Juno now seems to reflect more on
the ones who did the criticizing than anybody
else. “There’s a specific type of woman that trig-
gers people,” she says now. “I’ve been able to
watch from the other side a couple of other
women go through the same cycle, and I justnovember 11–24, 2019 | new york 103