Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig

June 2, 2025·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Kate didn't recognize her own aunt, Blythe Danner, in a film shown during school.

"Stop," one of them says. This is not glossy nostalgia. It is the squirmy feeling of watching early awkwardness survive on television, like a yearbook that moves. Debbie begins with endurance, then follows the thread back to how a career gets started and how a person stays hopeful when the business keeps saying no. The theater apprenticeship gives the story some grit. It lets one of them see the hidden work: lighting, costumes, set design, the box office. Then the pace changes. A friend named Matt puts one of their names forward for Boys Don't Cry, and suddenly the door is open before she quite knows how to walk through it. She says she was naive. There was no grand process to lean on, so she said yes, showed up, and acted more ready than she was. Debbie keeps hearing the pattern in their book: success as a series of knocks, recoveries, and small acts of nerve. Hope is the tender part. The answer is practical, not pretty. Show business means learning how to carry rejection without letting it hollow you out. Their friendship helps. A recent lost role still has to be talked through with Kate, because some disappointments only make sense to someone who knows the room. The L Word sits close by, too: visibility, history, and work they can barely watch without wincing at their younger selves. By the end, Debbie points listeners to their podcast and new book, but the warmer story is the friendship that keeps holding.

As heard by us

A conversation about friendship, rejection, and staying in the mix after early success.

Design Matters settles into a conversation with Catherine Minnick and Leisha Haley of The L Word, and its appeal lies less in nostalgia than in the endurance of a long friendship inside a difficult industry.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a friendship that can survive the casting room without flinching.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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