Alia Shawkat
- Born:
- April 18, 1989, Riverside, California, U.S.
Alia Shawkat (born April 18, 1989, Riverside, California, U.S.) is an American actress best known for portraying Maeby Fünke on the cult-classic television sitcom Arrested Development (2003–06, 2013, and 2018–19) and Dory Sief on the dark comedy series Search Party (2016–22).
Early life
Shawkat is the second child of Dina Burke, who works as a film producer, and Tony Shawkat, who is a club owner and actor. Her father was born in Iraq and owns the ShowGirls Gentlemen’s Club in Cathedral City, California. Her maternal grandfather was actor Paul Burke, who was known for his roles in the films Valley of the Dolls (1967) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, she recalled her hometown, Palm Springs, California, as “a slow, suburban kind of town…a very chill place to grow up. By the time we were in high school, we would drive around in cars and park them…look at the mountains and be like, ‘One day we’re going to get out of here.’ ”
Career
Shawkat began modeling when she was six years old and by age nine had appeared in a Calvin Klein apparel catalog. She landed her first movie role alongside her father and actor George Clooney in the war film Three Kings (1999). From 2001 to 2002, she starred in the comedy-drama series State of Grace as Hannah Rayburn, a young Jewish American girl who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and who struggles to adapt as a new student at an all-girls Roman Catholic school.
Shawkat’s big break came when was landed the role of the rebellious, wise-beyond-her-years teenager Maeby Fünke on the critically acclaimed sitcom Arrested Development, which initially ran from 2003 to 2006 on the Fox network. One of the show’s storylines was the forbidden, and awkward, quasi-romantic relationship between Maeby and her on-screen cousin, George Michael Bluth, played by actor Michael Cera. In a 2022 interview with The New Yorker magazine, Shawkat recalled that she only understood the humor of the show “to a degree. When we’d do the table read, sometimes me and Michael [Cera] would get laughs, and we didn’t necessarily know why. The incest jokes, we understood, but sometimes certain sexual innuendos went over my head.” After Fox canceled Arrested Development in 2006, Shawkat moved on with roles in the television movie Not Like Everyone Else (2006), the independent film Amreeka (2009), the Roller Derby film Whip It (2009), the rock band biopic The Runaways (2010), and the romantic comedy-drama Ruby Sparks (2012).
In 2013 she reprised her role as Maeby Fünke when Netflix revived Arrested Development for a fourth season. Starting in 2016, Shawkat starred as Dory Sief in the dark comedy series Search Party, which follows the adventures of four friends searching for a former college classmate who has gone missing. In Time magazine’s review of the fifth season of Search Party, critic Judy Berman wrote that Shawkat’s portrayal of Sief “embodied the aimlessness of grads who’d entered the job market amid the Great Recession, trodding career paths that led only to dead ends.” In 2018 Shawkat cowrote and starred in the independent film Duck Butter, which focuses on two newly acquainted women who make a romantic pact to spend 24 uninterrupted, sleepless hours together.
The fifth season of Arrested Development aired from 2018 to 2019. However, in 2017 actor Jeffrey Tambor (who played George Bluth, Sr., on the show) was accused of sexually harassing two trans women while working on the television series Transparent. Tambor denied the allegations but, oddly, admitted to having verbally berated his costar Jessica Walter (who played Lucille Bluth, the wife of George, Sr.) while working on Arrested Development. In a 2018 interview with The New York Times involving Shawkat and most of the main cast members, actors Jason Bateman, Tony Hale, and David Cross initially attempted to defend Tabor’s behavior toward Walter. In a 2018 interview with VICE magazine, Shawkat criticized her male costars’ efforts to downplay Tambor’s behavior and faulted them for talking over Walter during The New York Times interview. She went on to say, “Afterwards I was scared that I didn’t say enough and was kind of upset with myself that I wasn’t able to stand my ground more.” Bateman, Hale, and Cross later apologized to Walter for their comments.
In 2021 Shawkat portrayed television writer Madelyn Pugh, one of the principal writers for the classic TV sitcom I Love Lucy, in the biographical film Being the Ricardos. In 2022 she told The New Yorker that she was developing a TV show based on her father’s life as an Iraqi immigrant in the United States who runs a strip club.
Personal life
In 2020 rumors that Shawkat and actor Brad Pitt were in a relationship began circulating after tabloids published photos of them spending time together. Both actors denied that they were dating. In 2022 Shawkat showcased her artwork, primarily ink drawings and paintings, in a solo exhibit curated by the SPRING/BREAK Art Show. She also owns a private art studio in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.