Interview: Miriam Silverman on Netflix’s Vladimir and Her Busy Life After Her Tony Win

Nearly three years since her Tony win for The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Miriam Silverman has entered what can be described as the whirlwind chapter of her career.

In the span of just a few months, she bounced between Toronto, Texas, and New York, co-starring in Netflix’s provocative new series Vladimir, popping up in a fan-favorite turn on Landman, and recurring on Apple TV+’s Your Friends and Neighbors, all while raising two young children at home in Brooklyn with her husband.

Vladimir, premiering March 5, is a darkly comic drama by her longtime friend and fellow Brooklyn mom, Julia May Jonas. The series stars Rachel Weisz as a female professor whose life begins to unravel when she becomes obsessed with her younger colleague (Leo Woodall). Silverman plays Flo, a fellow professor caught within Rachel’s orbit and shifting moral ground. She helps anchor a story that blurs the line between lust and self-deception.

We recently spoke with Silverman about collaborating with a close friend, the logistical nightmare of filming three series at once, and how winning a Tony has changed the way she looks at roles.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You and Julia Jonas, who created Vladimir, go back a while.
Julia Jonas is one of my dearest friends, and our daughters have the same birthday. We became mom friends in the neighborhood, and our daughters became close, and we clicked because of our shared interest in art and theater. But we hadn’t worked together.

When did you first read her novel version of Vladimir?
When the pandemic hit, she wrote this novel, and I read an advanced copy of it, and I loved it. Not just because she’s my friend. The book was so up my alley. The book is very funny, but it’s dark and raw and sexy and sort of naughty. I was surprised and delighted when I was reading the scripts at how it’s still very naughty and still dark, but frothy and effervescent.

There’s a moral gray area to it.
That’s intentional. At first you might think it’s like Fleabag, and then you realize that Rachel’s character is not actually being honest all the time. She’s playing the audience a bit. One of the things I love about Julia’s writing is that she’s interested in exploring the moral ambiguity of situations and not making a clear villain or a clear hero.

Did she write this role with you in mind?
She definitely told me that she had my voice in her head for it, which was such a compliment. I’m sure it was not enough for the writer of the novel, who is also show-running, to say, “I wrote this for her.” I still had to pass through all the approvals from Netflix and 20th Century and all the many producers involved. I think a big part of it was whether everybody was going to work it out, because Your Friends and Neighbors was also a factor. I had my deal for season two, and they were in first position on my schedule.

It was an amazing period of time. I spent six months, from May through October, doing three shows.

What was the third one?
I did two episodes of Landman. Even that was up in the air. They kept trying to bring me back to Texas, and I was working in Toronto on Vladimir and Friends and Neighbors in New York. It was this wild period of spending a lot of time in Toronto, flying home, and having a few days off and being with my kids.

How did that sit with you?
The craziness of that schedule and flying everywhere and being in all these different cities was great. In the downtime, I would have nothing to do except be a mom and a spouse and be with them. It’s funny to now come off a run of a play and be reminded of how different that schedule is. I’m here all the time with them, but I’m gone every night and I’m gone on the weekends. I feel like I’m seeing them less in a way.

Parenthood and theater don’t mix in a way that I didn’t realize until I had a kid.
I don’t know if you experienced this, but I felt like the first two years were easy, especially when it was just my daughter. I remember doing a play when she was a year old at the Rattlestick, and I would put her to bed and go to the theater. I could nurse her, put her to bed, get on the subway, and make it to my curtain, and it was amazing. She didn’t even know that Mommy was not home.

I’ve done three plays since Sidney Brustein. One was a very short run at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks, in the middle of doing season one of Friends and Neighbors. And then I did Deep Blue Sound, which I asked to be in because I love that play so much. And Sidney was the best experience ever, but between BAM and Broadway, it was almost seven months. It was so much time on that crazy schedule to be away from my kids. So now it’s been like, what can I do that’s going to be artistically fulfilling [that will allow me to see my family]?

Did winning the Tony make things easier for you as a working actor in that regard?
Yes, totally. And so many people—other Tony winners who are my friends—said to me in the months after winning, “Everybody says it’s going to change everything, and it doesn’t.” I realized at a certain point that a lot of the people who said that already had very visible careers. They maybe won the Tony on their third nomination, or they were already sort of a Broadway star. But it did for me.

How?
It opened access. In a lot of ways, I think my existing collaborators and friends have been able to put me forward for work, knowing that the first thing somebody sees when they Google me is that I have this award. It has really made an impact with TV and film. I did a film last fall that Will Arbery co-wrote [Sacrifice]. We shot it in Greece. It’s going to come out sometime in the next year, and it’s full of movie stars and me.

My role is small, and they were seeing all these actresses in England, and the director couldn’t find anyone. He didn’t say this to me, but I’m sure that Will felt like the award made it easier to be like, “Yeah, her.” I’m sure Julia felt more confident, too, with Vladimir, knowing that it’s the first thing people see.

In the theater world, I get straight offers for plays a lot now. It also feels like I turn down a lot of theater now; like, a lot. If there was a role for me this past fall in New York theater, I probably had it come across my desk. Nobody’s offering me the starring role in a Broadway play, but just like Carrie Coon said in that great interview that went viral, the economics of being a lead on Broadway still feels like you have to be on two hit series’ and become quite famous.

But I have felt that it has unlocked a lot of doors for me in a really nice way.