‘Too Much’ Led Emily Ratajkowski to Act Again—and Gave Her the Best Scene of Her Career

This article contains spoilers for the season one finale of Too Much.

Emily Ratajkowski was always open to acting again, but wasn’t sure if she’d have an opportunity to—until Lena Dunham came calling with Too Much. The Girls creator wrote a part in her new Netflix series, now streaming, with her longtime friend in mind. At that point, Ratajkowski had largely stepped away from onscreen work. Aside from a cameo appearance in the sketch series History of the World, Part II, she hadn’t acted on a film or TV set since 2017. In 2023, the Los Angeles Times said in a profile of Ratajkowski that “she’s basically quit acting.”

Despite an interest in the art that began in childhood, Ratajkowski came to acting professionally only after launching a massively successful modeling career. But by that point, she was already famous, pigeonholed into a “hot girl” box and not taken seriously as a performer. She fired her team and turned to working behind the scenes, including writing the New York Times bestseller My Body. “I had a pretty negative experience as far as Hollywood went,” Ratajkowski tells me.

All that helped her relate to the role she plays in Too Much. Ratajkowski is Wendy, a knitting influencer seemingly living her best life in New York. She’s got chic style, breezy charm, and a cute new boyfriend, Zev (Michael Zegen)—who used to date our heroine, Jessica (Megan Stalter). We get to know Wendy almost entirely through social media, as Jessica stalks her Instagram from across the Atlantic in London. While Jessica navigates a blossoming romance in her new city, she can’t seem to move on from her ugly breakup. Wendy’s cute, idyllic IG feed isn’t helping matters.

Then, in the finale, something flips. Wendy visits London after realizing Zev has lied to her about his past with Jessica. The two women meet in a café to hash things out. A few revelations emerge as Dunham ingeniously flips the “other woman” trope on its head, allowing Wendy to surface as a complex emotional figure in her own right. Ratajkowski’s performance is tender, smart, and knowing, bringing a surprising character arc home. Finally, she gets the chance to show us what she can do.

It took some time to get to this place. The character “was originally a lawyer, and I was picturing her in a Theory suit, and I just didn’t see it,” Ratajkowski says. “And Lena was like, ‘Okay, what are your thoughts?’” From there, a career-redefining role was born.

Courtesy of Netflix.

Vanity Fair: So what were your thoughts about Wendy? How did you shape her?

Emily Ratajkowski: I wanted her to be somebody that women would recognize as a modern trope of social media—easy to stalk and also hate because she’s cheesy, she’s posting a lot—and then find out that she’s actually somebody that our girl, and maybe the audience, would want to be friends with. I really liked the idea that she’s self-aware. She is doing her thing online and has her knitwear business, but she’s very like, “No, I’m just grinding.” She’s cool. It’s not, “She’s so smart and everyone just hates her because she’s beautiful and she’s so perfect,” but, “Oh, yeah, these are things that we hate about modern women, that might just be sexism or whatever else.”

There’s this interesting tethering that happens between women that stalk each other, or that share a close person from one’s history in another’s present day. I loved exploring that dynamic shamelessly, and having this incredible arc of them coming together at the end.

For the majority of the show, you’re essentially playing kind of a projection—what Jessica sees, what she’s afraid of, how she’s comparing herself. Then suddenly Wendy arrives as a real person in the finale.