Ayden Mayeri on Summer Comedies ‘Mr Throwback’ and ‘Jackpot’

Last weekend, Steph Curry helped the U.S. men’s basketball team take home a gold medal. Back home, his other teammates — technically, castmates — were cheering him on during an Olympics watch party hosted by his production company, Unanimous Media. The watch event doubled as a celebration for the release of the Peacock miniseries “Mr. Throwback,” a mockumentary in which Curry stars as himself.  

“This sounds naive, but I didn’t know this many people were going to watch it,” says actress and costar Ayden Mayeri. The series wrapped filming at the end of June and was quickly edited to be released in tandem with Curry’s Olympics run. “It felt so intimate making it; it felt like we were just making this little indie.”

Mayeri — who grew up in the Bay Area, home of the Warriors — stars in the series as the ex-wife of a memorabilia shop owner, portrayed by Adam Pally, whose financial desperation leads him to reconnect with Curry, his childhood best friend.

“Honestly, I have never read a funnier pilot script. I was laughing out loud reading it,” Mayeri says.

The series is structured as a mockumentary — a fictional documentary; the only factual element is that Curry is indeed an NBA star — told through a mix of interview and verite footage. There are celebrity cameos; there is footage of Curry on the court mid-game with the Golden State Warriors.

“I was like, either this is gonna be a big swing that really works or really doesn’t,” Mayeri adds of the premise. “But I think it really does.”

A week after the release of “Mr. Throwback,” the 33-year-old actress has another release to discuss: the Paul Feig-directed comedy “Jackpot!” starring Awkwafina and John Cena. The film is set in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles where the entire city participates in an annual high-stakes lottery draw. “Jackpot!” caps off a breakout summer for Mayeri: she also stars in the indie rom-com “Cora Bora,” which premiered at SXSW last year and was released in June. 

“It’s really nice that they’re all coming out at once, because it makes it look like I’m so busy,” Mayeri says from her home the morning after the “Jackpot!” premiere, which was held at the iconic TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. She wore an orange Marchesa minidress for the occasion.

“But also because they’re so different,” she continues. “‘Cora Bora’ is such a sweet, grounded indie, and then in ‘Jackpot!’ I’m completely unhinged and insane. And then ‘Mr. Throwback’ is somewhere in between, where it’s funny and it’s natural, but it’s also kind of wild,” she adds. “It feels good to be able to show that all at once.”

While Mayeri has built her career around comedy, she’s moving beyond the genre with her directorial debut, a documentary with a premise that sounds like it too could be a mockumentary, only it’s real. In 2000, when she was a kid, Mayeri and her friends recorded a homemade album with hopes of becoming the next Spice Girls. A German family friend contributed the instrumental tracks. “And it’s so haunted and dissonant and strange. At the time we were like — it’s the year 2000. This is not pop. This is really weird. It’s embarrassing. I don’t want anyone to ever hear this,” Mayeri says.

Fast forward to 2020, and those tracks ended up online; the songs got a “weird little following” and a niche record label reached out to sign the group, X-Cetera, and release the project on vinyl. “And so we have an album coming out in January, and I’ve just been documenting everything,” she says. She’s currently finishing up edits on the documentary and plans to submit the film to festivals.

“We got the band back together, we wrote a new song — I filmed all this — we went home to Santa Rosa and spent a week together. We made a music video, choreographed dances. We even invited former skater boys over that we used to date when we were 12 — who are adult men now,” she adds. “And we all talked about how we felt about each other at that time.” 

Similar to “Mr. Throwback,” it’s partially about reconnecting with your childhood self. 

“When I was a kid, I was like, ‘I’m going to be an actress. I’m going to make movies.’ And then I got really insecure,” says Mayeri, who grew up making films with a ’90s-era Sony Handycam. She briefly pursued political science in college and thought she might go to law school. “In my 20s is when I came back and was like, what do I want to do? Who do I really want to be?” she says. “And I changed paths and went to theater school.”