Monica Padman’s Moment Is Now (2024)

When Monica Padman was a kid, she had a clear vision of what her future should look like. She wanted to grow up and have Friends—not a social circle, but the proper noun. The TV show. The phenomenon.

This was before she started doing theater in high school, before she moved to Los Angeles to be an actor herself, before she met Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, long before she and Shepard decided to start a podcast together, now known to their millions of listeners as Armchair Expert.

This was instead in the hallowed decade between 1994 and 2004 when NBC ruled weeknights and Friends was not just a sitcom, but a modus vivendi. Padman, 34, was—to use her own word—“obsessed.” She remembers watching the show’s characters with a kind of longing that bordered on fixation: “It was just like, ‘I want to be like that. I want that life and that world…. All I want to do is be a member of a thing like that.’” (Her podcast audience will know that she had a similar relationship to the film Good Will Hunting, which she has memorized.)

Later, she graduated from college and migrated out West, as aspiring actors are wont to do. She joined UCB. But she never dreamed of being the star. True to her roots, she craved the ensemble—the people who squished onto a single couch, the “ping-ponging” banter that she’d seen on television.

Who could have explained it to adolescent Padman—as a child of the generation raised on network TV, AOL Instant Messenger, and Blockbuster? That ineffable thing she was so desperate for, that zinging, singing back-and-forth? It’s called a podcast.

Armchair Expert premiered in 2018. It’s an interview show, in the vein of The Howard Stern Show and WTF With Marc Maron, remixed with a little of Fresh Air’s earnestness. Shepard knew he wasn’t reinventing the wheel when the two launched it. He was in fact so aware of his predecessors and contemporaries that he has said he was tempted to call it The Millionth Podcast. Staving off potential criticism with a self-deprecating joke? The precise, human impulse that Armchair Expert likes to examine.

At the time, Padman was something between a creative collaborator and a sort of household executive for Bell and Shepard, who married in 2013. She first started working with the couple as an occasional babysitter for their kids. Then she came on full-time, migrated into the role of assistant, and transitioned into familial sounding board, script doctor, and general consultant.

She was not—it should be said—in a great place when she started working for them. Los Angeles is a swarm of people in various stages of “making it.” It’s not the kind of town that gives its residents a break from the hamster wheel. Padman says she had been experiencing panic attacks, angst-ridden about where her career was headed. She’d booked commercials after arriving in L.A., but she hadn’t cracked the kind of parts she most wanted. Joining UCB had at least introduced her to people who understood her. The real revelation was meeting Bell and Shepard.

“I just felt at peace there,” she remembers. The panic attacks abated. Bell and Shepard’s girls loved her. The whole situation had a celestial aura about it, as if the universe were aligning. Padman says that improvement in her mental health might have also had something to do with the fact that she started therapy around the same time. “I was like, ‘I don’t even understand what’s going on. I want to be around them,’” she recalls. “I didn’t want to leave at 4 p.m.”

So, she didn’t leave. She hung out in the kitchen, arguing with Shepard about politics and culture and whether or not it was disrespectful when people referred to women as “10s.” (On the show, he later conceded it was.) The seed for Armchair Expert was planted in those debates. When it came time for the show to debut, Bell was roped in too as its first guest. Shepard is best known for his work on Parenthood, as well as—for a certain set of millennial listeners—his breakout on the MTV hidden-camera show, Punk’d. But between The Good Place and Frozen, Bell is most recently in the spotlight. The couple’s particular mix of bantering helped establish Armchair Expert’s voice—loving, passionate, good-humored, a little exhausted.

It ensured that from the start the show felt like it had stakes. It was real, not pretend—for Shepard, who’s been candid about his experiences of trauma and of getting sober, and for Padman, who talks about work and pleasure with increasing frankness. The podcast is raw and unpolished in the sense that The Office was raw and unpolished. It takes a lot of effort to make something seem slapdash. The effect is warm and borderline confessional. Shepard volunteers his own foibles with what has to be described as a kind of zeal, allowing guests—including Quentin Tarantino, Barack Obama, Chelsea Handler (twice), and experts like Esther Perel and Stanford ethicist Susan Liautaud—to share theirs.

Padman’s role has expanded over time. In that initial episode with Bell, she pops up toward the end in the “fact-check.” The segment follows each interview and was meant to allow Padman to correct misstatements. It’s now a more freewheeling exercise. A recent fact-check found Padman launching into an elaborate recounting of her attempt to purchase and eat her favorite cake while at home in Duluth, Georgia. It went on for about 20 minutes. I listened to all of it, relieved that the tres leches cake that was offered to her when her preferred slice was unavailable turned out to be a thrilling substitute.

“I think Monica started out very much as the voice of the audience—and even before that, the ear of the audience,” says Adam Grant, an author and organizational psychologist who’s appeared on the show twice.

He could see how Padman worked in two registers, “guiding Dax toward what the listener would be curious about” and “encouraging the guest to weigh in on things that the listener would find relatable.”

When he returned for another interview, Grant could tell she’d embraced “the cohost role.” She pursued her own interests and curiosities. He had particular admiration for how nimble she could be compared to Shepard. “Dax will be the first to tell you on his own, he has an argument he wants to make and he’s going to grind that ax for the next three and a half hours,” Grant says, laughing.

Rob Holysz—Armchair Expert’s producer and another beloved character in the podcast’s universe—watches how Padman gauges where and when to break into the conversation in real time. “Her presence alone impacts the conversation so much,” he explains via email. When she’s quiet, that’s tactical. When she voices her opinion, she knows how to challenge Shepard without being unkind.

Count on a producer to deliver the highest compliment in audio: “I think there’s a lot of mastery to her restraint,” Holysz says.

Whatever she and Shepard are doing, it seems to be working. In 2021, the duo signed a licensing deal with Spotify. Under its terms, Armchair Expert will be exclusive to the platform until at least 2024. The financial details of the agreement weren’t disclosed, but Forbes suggested the value of the contract could “easily be in the $50 million range.”

That’s not sidekick cash. That’s Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green cash. Shepard remains the face of the podcast—his literal face is on the thumbnail. But Padman is something closer to its soul. It’s a serious transition for a woman who was not so long ago working at a spin studio.

In media coverage of the podcast, the focus tends to be on Shepard, who is the louder of the two and sometimes a flagrant interrupter. But Padman has, to some extent, had the wilder ride. For at least a decade, she was determined to be an actor. She booked spots—an episode on Drop Dead Diva, another as an assistant on House of Lies. She had no plans to host a podcast, let alone to run the midsize media empire that she and Shepard are creating with their Armchair Expert umbrella network. The show was an experiment, but then it worked. We live in an era of Instagram side-hustles; a time of sales execs building TikTok empires and social strategists becoming DTC cofounders. Padman didn’t mean to become a “content creator.” She set out with one dream, then a different one came true.

The shift has taken some getting used to. Thanks in part to the deal, she paid for a house in Bell and Shepard’s neighborhood. (“Did you hear we got rich?” Shepard asked The Good Place creator Michael Schur when he returned for his second appearance on the show. You can hear Padman laughing in the background. “Congratulations on your richness,” Schur replied.) She wasn’t sure she’d ever be a homeowner in Los Angeles. She still goes on auditions. She showed up on Curb Your Enthusiasm this season. She filmed an episode of Rutherford Falls on Peaco*ck. “I still get such a creative burst from acting,” she says. But Armchair Expert takes precedence, as it does for Shepard. It has required her above all to reconsider her view of herself. “When I worked really closely with Kristen as her assistant, I would get a lot of like, ‘That’s so good,’” says Padman. “Validation, verbal affirmation—I really thrived on that…. I was like, ‘I’m a hard worker, and people are telling me so, so I know it’s true.’” And now, as she and Shepard are business partners, the two of them decide together whether their work is moving closer or farther from their targets. She doesn’t read lines or stand in the background of a scene. She doesn’t write up other people’s notes.

Padman’s work ethic and instincts inspire her former boss to quote Shakespeare: “Though she be but little, she is fierce,” Bell writes in an email.

I get a taste of that when I ask her about the commentators who criticize her increased presence on the show. She swears she reads less of the feedback than she used to, but she has words for her detractors: “If you like this show, you do like me. You just don’t know it. I’m editing so, hello.”

And a lot of people seem to like her. She has more than 400,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts both the occasional selfie and product photos like the self-cleaning litter box she recommends for cat lovers. The podcast has sold countless tickets to its live shows. Padman has hosted spin-off series with Bell and one of her friends, the comedian Jess Rowland.

At present, she commands her ideal level of fame. Enough to be visible, not so much that she can’t do what she did a scant 24 hours before our interview—wear pajamas to a wine bar. She doesn’t mind when people approach her in public, but she is sometimes thrown when she realizes that people know the things about her that she’s shared on the show.

In June, Padman and Shepard went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Kimmel, who’s been a guest on Armchair Expert, turned to Padman after an extended conversation with Shepard and prompted her: “You’ve not dated someone seriously ever, right?” he asked. It’s a split second, but Padman blanches. In the clip, she wheels around to look back at Shepard, both of them a little pink. “Oh, we’re going there,” she responds, grasping back at her composure. “You have a podcast about it,” Kimmel points out. It sounds ridiculous, but Padman says she felt real shock. The sudden realization. Right, I do. “I forget!”

The lines between what’s personal and what she discloses as part of her job blur all the time. Sometimes, she and Shepard will fight over something small. She’ll scream at him, “This isn’t professional!” And then she’ll hear herself. “It’s like, Yeah. That’s the nature of what this is,” she says. It isn’t professional, at least not all the time. She and Shepard are best friends, but also coworkers. Padman accepts that the job is not like a normal nine-to-five. How else to account for the fact that Padman posed for a photo with her idol Matt Damon in which he is kissing the top of her head? How else to explain the fact that when she last traveled to Paris, Bradley Cooper invited Padman and Shepard to stay in his apartment instead of a hotel?

One of the foundational rules of Armchair Expert is that guests are allowed to strike stories or disclosures from the record before an episode goes live, says Padman. That escape hatch is part of what gets people to feel so at ease opening up in the first place. Twice, Padman estimates, she’s been disappointed about what someone has chosen to cut. “I felt like, ‘Oh man, I don’t wanna take that part out.’ And not because it was so salacious, but because it led to something that I thought was really profound or relatable or good and then I have to take that out too.”

When she’s done attending to her interviewees’ requests, she does her own sweep. Padman has a particular distaste for sound-bite culture and insists that she and Shepard “do not want someone to sound bad.” Padman prefers fewer headlines, more nuance, she doesn’t want someone to “make a meal out of” a guest from their show. She sees the show as one of the few outlets that gives people permission to think out loud. She and Shepard do it all the time. If that disappoints people, so be it. Padman is focused on what the two do best: “We’ve got to keep doing what we do, staying authentic to us, and keep being honest.”

“With both Monica and Dax, there’s a mutual vulnerability going on,” says actor Tony Hale, who appeared on the show in 2019. “It’s not just the guest coming in who’s vulnerable.” That readiness to be present and exposed is one he associates with the foundations of good acting. “In every single acting class, the word that is emphasized the most is ‘listen,’” he says. “You have to listen. You can’t just spout your lines. You can’t just speak. You have to listen because that’s when you have honest and authentic reactions.”

You know the punch line, of course. Padman got her ensemble. Devoted podcast listeners (Grant among them) know the names of Shepard and Padman’s inner circle. Cue the laugh track. The show even has a theme song. But Grant cautions against the clichéd casting for Padman. “I think so often in these kinds of collaborations it’s too easy for the woman to get described as the warm, caring, communal, enthusiastic one,” says Grant, when in fact Padman is razor-sharp.

What a waste it would have been if she was still toiling at auditions. “Why should she be playing some other character?” he says. “She’s such a curious and interesting and insightful person. You want her to play herself. You don’t want her to play a role at all.”

At the end of our interview, Padman—an online-quiz enthusiast—submits with concentrated fervor to the Myers–Briggs personality test. I tell her it’ll take about 10 minutes for us to figure out what kind of person she is. In the end, it takes closer to 30. But she leans forward when the results populate—ENFJ. The letters stand for extraverted, intuitive, feeling, judging. ENFJs—rules the site—are teachers and organizers who are idealistic and driven to maximize the potential of those around them. Another site calls them the “protagonists.” Seems like a main character after all.

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