In ELLE.com's Thirst Trap series, we quench our thirst with the thirsted-after.
It's not very cool of me, but I'm shrieking. I've been keeping it together, and then, for one second, Peter Hermann turns his full electric-blue gaze on me and my brain is on the fritz. The Younger star's face is like a Roman statue come to life, which is as completely attention-rending as you'd expect. Sutton Foster deserves an award for playing opposite him on the TV Land comedy, now back for its sixth season, and every night I keep Hermann's IRL wife Mariska Hargitay in my prayers.
Hermann and I are at The Crown at Hotel 50 Bowery, with two of the rooftop bar's signature cocktails in hand (booze-free Royally Crushed for him—the Younger premiere party is still to come that evening—and the Resting Peach Face for me). I'm lobbing question after question at Hermann, but that Charles cool doesn't waver. Can he defend Team Josh? "Oh, that's so easy," he pshaws. "There is a purity of soul in him. There is a purity of motive in him that is deeply winning, deeply compelling." What's marriage like? "There's a poet, my favorite poet, Jack Gilbert, and he has a beautiful line: 'We can break through marriage into marriage.' If you think of it as a house, you can think you've visited every room and then you go, Oh, I didn't know this was here."
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Excuse me! Gentlemanly, learned, abundantly tall, and extremely good to look at: It seems like Peter Hermann really is all that.
Do you know what a thirst trap is?
I think I know. I have heard tell of being "too thirsty" on the internet and I think that's not necessarily a good thing, as far as I understand it. It's trolling—trolling on the internet is another thing—but it is trolling for likes, trolling for eyeballs. That is, being slightly or egregiously overeager on the internet.
That was such an elegant description of being thirsty on the internet. I don't think anyone has ever explained it that way.
However, I don't know what a thirst trap is.
Generally a thirst trap is you post a really great photo of yourself, say on your Instagram. It's engineered to earn positive attention. So the concept of a thirst trap is a photo...
That is so compelling to those looking at it that they are in a sense powerless not to look and like...
I forgot—you went to Yale.
...hence the trap. [Laughs]
So, speaking of which, in your first scene in Younger season 6, you're not wearing any clothes on top.
This is true.
How do you prepare for these scenes?
You read them. You panic. You go, Oh god.
You don't get a warning?
No. I think we've now become smart enough where we ask, "Is there anything coming up that I might want to get a heads up about in order to prepare ourselves for said scene?" But there was no "Hey..." I think those are the two steps: Panic, do your best and hope it goes well. Then, watch episode, and nitpick.
Alright, do you know what a thirst tweet is?
Yes.
Here's one for you.
Oh, good god.
"I doff my cap to you." Not that Mariska had anything to do with this!
The congratulations goes to my wife? I think that's so unfair! That's so deeply unfair! I'm sweating it out, and it's like, "Well done, Mariska!" That's just wrong.
Okay, here's another one.
Don't you love how it's even like a formal thank you note? That's like a person who learned how to write thank you notes. Dear Younger—it's probably on Crane & Co. Stationery—thank you so much for everything.
Now, we've talked about thirst traps and thirst tweets.
You've become very serious all of a sudden.
There's actually a genre of thirst tweets about both you and Mariska together. Look at your face in these.
[Takes phone] That's so nice. [Looks at photos intently and makes the same face he's making in the photos.]
Okay, one more.
Wait, how long is it—it'll be fifteen years this year. We've known each other for eighteen. We met in season 2 of her show. Can you believe it? They're about to start season twenty-one. It's crazy.
I read a story that Mariska has told about when the two of you met. She said she told you a joke and that you didn't think it was funny. Is that true?
She...let me put it this way: She came at me hard with her fantastic, incomparable humor and I didn't yet know it for the gift that it was.
She also spoke about a moment when she looked at you and thought, "That's my husband." Did you have a similar moment?
We actually talk about this. We complement each other really beautifully, because she is deeply intuitive. She is—and "impulsive" can have a negative connotation in the sense that it lacks care, and that's not it at all—she is a deeply intuitive, wonderfully impulsive person who leaps towards life. Mariska will say, and I will say, that I mull things, just by nature. I turn things over and over and look at all sides in my mind and Mariska will say, very generously, "You're very thoughtful."
He's not an unproblematic philosopher to quote, but Nietzsche said marriage is a conversation, and I knew right away that we had a lifetime of conversation in us. We've known each other for eighteen years, and we're still talking and still figuring out and still discovering and relearning what marriage is.
Something in me knew right away that this was a person I didn't want to let go of. We met on the show and at the end of the first episode, it's funny, I was so sad. I was sad because I felt like: "What is wrong with you? It's an episode of a TV show. What is wrong?" You don't know if you're going to be back on a show, and I didn't have my game together quite yet to [say], "Hey, want to see each other again?"
You didn't have game?
I did know enough to go by her trailer, just to talk. I just invented some reason to talk. And we kept talking. And walked, we walked all over New York together. I still have the piece of paper that, eighteen years ago, the PA wrote her phone number on for the first time.
Not everybody has a PA that you can ask! Most of us have to ask face to face.
That's when you're really happy about the film crew.
After almost fifteen years of being together, what's in your relationship toolbox?
One thing that is a fundamental tool is curiosity. In moments of disagreement, and moments where you're slogging through another hard day of marriage—even if you can stay curious about yourself, the best is to stay curious about the other person, but even if you can't manage that, if you can stay curious about why this particular thing makes you so mad, that creates a little bit of room. Some people have really fancy toolboxes. They have a super fancy and expensive level and plumb line, but I'm telling you, the hammer and nails and screwdriver are kindness and love and listening. If you have the basics in place, that goes a long way.
Is there anything silly that you disagree on?
This is such a simple one. We're wallpapering a bathroom and you go into it with the best of intentions. You go into it thinking, I'm going to be so open. That's the fantastic thing about relationships and how crazy we are as human beings: We can be so deeply, deeply connected, right? I can be swimming in the bliss of having somehow been guided to this person, out of all the people on the planet, I can somehow be married to this particular person, what a miracle that is...and five minutes later, I can be like, How can I be with a person who likes this wallpaper?
We actually joke about the other person. We pretend to take on the person's point of view as a peace offering, which is really fun and great. Then it's funny, because you realize it's so rarely about the thing that you were actually arguing about.
I think a very important tool is the desire to find your way back to each other, because I think that it's easy sometimes and tempting and human to build a case against the other person. Then you start piling on evidence and that stack gets higher: She did this and she said this. Then you say, Okay, that might be so, but leave that pile there. We're going to go talk to her now.
So in season 6, we finally really see Charles and Liza together. Charles stepped down and he's no longer working with Liza. Then he bought her a bed. What's going on in his head with all these big gestures?
He is a head-driven person. I think that he lives by his intellect. He is certainly out of his comfort zone in terms of letting his heart lead. There's that saying, and it's so overused that it becomes a cliché, that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. This season, we see him very much alive, and in a different way, so we see more aspects of him, which is hopefully fun to watch. Definitely fun to film.
It's funny because we look at things—say I get a script and I say, "That's out of character for Charles." I look back at my own life, and if somebody had handed me a script of the storyline for all the things that I would do in my life, [I might say] "I would never do that—that's so out of character for me." I think I have an overdeveloped sense of the consistency of character, and we do things on given days that are wonderfully out of character. To be impulsive, for him, is "out of character," but it's very much him, and an aspect of him that's really fun to play.
I want to talk a bit about Josh, now that he's going to be in Liza's life in a different way.
"I want to talk to you about Josh..." [In English accent] The name we shall not say.
Do you think Josh and Charles could be friends?
Yeah. They love the same woman, you know? That's a reason you could say, "My god, they could never be friends," but at the same time, they understand each other at the deepest level. I have to say there's a scene in the second episode...I wanted to run away with him. Could anybody look more charming than he did at that moment? No wonder [Liza] feels drawn to that, the life force that he is! That's also why the show is compelling, because it's not an obvious choice one way or another.
In the end, it's also that she's not going to live or die by her choice of man. That's not central to her being. She's her own person, because she is written that way but also how beautifully Sutton plays her.
What's Charles going to be grappling with this season?
Probably one of the biggest things is how much to open the door to this woman he loves, and how much to risk, and what to give up, and what to hold on to, and how honest to be. He also has two daughters—how to do right by them.
I also like that he's an ambitious man. That is not something that simply goes to sleep or goes dormant after he leaves his company. He still has ambition. He is a creative man. I think that is very active in his mind—what the outlets for that ambition and that creativity are.
Watch Younger on Wednesdays at 10 P.M. on TV Land.
Estelle Tang is the former senior editor of ELLE.com.
