
Family and friends share the bard’s words amid a mountain of pillows.
Actress-comedian Eliza Coupe plays a visitor from the year 2162 in the hyper-modern, sci-fi world of Hulu’s “Future Man.” In the comfort of her Brentwood living room, however, she travels back 500 years to unearth an Old World acting tradition.
On a cushy couch laden with pillows and surrounded by an ornate, Baroque-inspired mural on the wall, Coupe hosts Shakespearean play readings with fellow thespians, including her “Future Man” co-star Derek Wilson, a Macbeth veteran who “knows his way around an iambic pentameter.”
“It’s dorky-dork Elizabethan fest meets weird Renaissance Faire,” said Coupe, 37. “We have the fire going and vegan cheese, grapes and kombucha, ’cause that’s the type of people we are.”
Her parents joined the reading of Macbeth during their recent visit, with Coupe channeling the ruthless and fiery Lady Macbeth, “which came very natural, by the way.”
She credits her affinity for “old English kind of things” to her upbringing in New Hampshire, and “a very New England mother having everything old and antique-y.”
Coupe’s 1,650-square-foot Spanish-style home serves as the perfect stage for such gatherings, the stucco walls and high, arched ceilings reminiscent of a medieval cathedral.
As for the purpose of these cozy readings?

“We’re not doing it for
anyone, we’re doing it for us. It’s nice to not have a camera and get
back to the real stuff. This is where it all came from,” Coupe said.
Why is this room so special to you?
Being
from New England, we did not have houses like this. The whole Spanish,
stucco style. We had colonial boxes, that’s what I grew up with, so I’m
very drawn to this.
What about this pond hockey book?
Igrew
up playing ice hockey and my younger brother Tom got me this book
because we wrote a movie based around pond hockey. We played when I just
went back. Growing up, my dad would flood the side lawn and make a rink
every winter. He’d have us doing drills at 5 a.m. in 2-degree weather.
This is such a cozy fireplace.
The
thing about a fireplace is you stand in front of it to get warm, and
then you walk away and you’re colder because you don’t have the
fireplace anymore. So I walk around with heating pads on my body. It’s a
cute look.
Favorite memory in here?
My
family likes to sing and play guitar. When they were in town for
Thanksgiving, we had a really fun sing-along here. Derek was over; he
plays the guitar quite well. I do areally weird Bob Dylan impression
that I don’t think I had ever done for anybody, so I just started doing
it and it became a whole thing. They said it was as if Bob Dylan was 125
years old, and the face that goes with it is not an attractive look at
all, akin to the heating pads.
You seem to have an affinity for pillows.
Ilike
to feel like I’m in a blanket all the time, hence the millions of
pillows. I was obsessed with “I Dream of Jeannie,” and the inside of her
genie bottle is everything I ever wanted, but a shabby chic, New
England kind of bottle with a Spanish flair and some hockey thrown in.
And a little Macbeth.