Zosia Mamet burst onto the scene in 2012 as the fast-talking, hyper-earnest Shoshanna in HBO’s Girls. After some initial raised eyebrows at the famous last name she shares with her father, David Mamet, her performance as the most naive of “the ladies” at the show’s core won over audiences. In her 2025 essay collection, Does This Make Me Funny?, Mamet lamented the all-too-common situation “when girls come up to me expecting to meet Shosh and instead they get Zosia.”
“I am the foul-mouthed, tattoo-covered, teenage-skater-boy, spicy-margarita counterpart to her pink-velour-wearing, champagne-with-strawberries, bubbly sorority girl-ness,” Mamet wrote. “We could not be more different if we tried.”
Respectfully, after chatting with Mamet and listening to several preview episodes of OMG Obsessed, her Lemonada Media podcast that premieres September 16 with new episodes weekly on Wednesdays, there seems to be more than a little bit of shared spiritual DNA there.
For example, when Mamet logs on to our Zoom, after we make our introductions, she launches into a monologue about her journey to podcast hosting, telling Vanity Fair, “I love to talk to people. I think I’m one of those humans. I’ll be waiting in line to buy a coffee, and all of a sudden, two and a half minutes in, the person in front of me has told me about their divorce. I don’t know what is happening on my face that makes people want to tell me stuff, but I just find it fascinating to talk to humans and to hear their stories. I’ve always been a curious individual, so the idea of a podcast always kind of piqued my interest, but I feel like I missed the first wave of everybody just starting a podcast to just sort of, as my Irish friend would say, have a chin-wag. I was like, Okay, well, if I’m gonna do a podcast, what is it going to be? And I am admittedly obsessed with horses and have been my whole life. I pitched that to some companies, and they were all like, ‘This is far too niche for everybody who is not obsessed with horses.’ So I kind of gave up the idea.”
She takes a breath.
Enter Lemonada, asking if she wanted to do a podcast.
“And I was like, ‘I would love to, but again, horses are too niche, and everybody else has a podcast where they just talk to people, so I don’t really know what mine would be,’” she remembers.
Then, as it so often does, inspiration came in the form of conversation with a friend, in this case, Cat Cohen, the comedian and actor who cohosts a podcast of her own. Mamet and Cohen were yapping on the set of a movie they were both working on, and that would-be podcast came up again. Cohen suggested that, since equine deep-dives were out of the question, Mamet invite guests to share their own extremely specific obsessions.