What Mark Duplass Watches (and Plays) With His Daughters

When Mark Duplass first had his kids, he looked forward to the day when he could start to show them his favorite movies. 

“My vision was that we were going to do this thing on Sunday nights where everybody gets to pick a movie and we’d all sit down and watch,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to keep this sacred and it’s going to be like our church. I can make them watch Tarkovsky,’ but that definitely didn’t happen. You come to realize as a parent that you’re just scrambling, trying to get by. My kids are going to watch whatever the hell they want to watch.” 

Duplass’s realization is a common one amongst optimistic culture-hound parents hell-bent on — as The Onion once wrote — raising their kids “on media that will put them entirely out of touch with their generation.” You can lead your kids to water, as they say, but you can’t make them drink.

Fortunately, Duplass’s kids still turned out pretty darn cool. His eldest daughter, Ora, graduated from high school after her sophomore year and is now a working actor, living in her parents’ guest house and starring in shows like Coven Academy on Disney+. Younger daughter Molly just started high school and is, Duplass says, “the main grown-up in the house.”

“She’s one of the few people in my life that gives me beautiful but hard, constructive criticism,” he says. “She’s my moral center, giving me notes.” 

Duplass credits his kids’ level-headedness more to nature than he does to any nurturing done by either himself or wife Katie Aselton, but says he’s absolutely confident they’ve done at least one thing right in that sense. 

“We always said that when we screwed up, whenever we overreacted, we’d apologize to our kids and it’s so funny how that has been reflected back to us because both of our kids, whenever any of that teenage energy creeps in and there’s a desire to huff out of the room, ten seconds later they’ll come right back down, like, ‘I’m sorry, I went a little too far with that,’” Duplass says. 

. 
Alone

There’s this kind of low budget reality show called Alone that’s almost like a Canadian version of Survivor. We all love that show and who knew that was going to be the thing that that brought us together during the pandemic?

Actually, right before the pandemic I ran into Kathryn Hahn and her husband, Ethan Sandler, who are friends of ours and they were marveling at the fact that their kids, who are a little bit older than our kids, happened to like Alone. I was like, “there’s no way my kids are going to watch that.” But then the pandemic hit and we were running out of fun ‘80s movies to rewatch so I thought, ‘let’s try this out.”

There’s something about the fun survival nature of Alone. That’s what you come for, but then you stick around for the existential ennui of what it means to be alone. That’s what my girls got really into. Like Molly, who was at the time I think eight years old, would be like, “Dad, I don’t know if Chris is gonna make it because he’s got unresolved issues with his mom, and it’s really weighing him down.”

. 
Vidiots

L.A. theater and video rental store Vidiots is one of our favorite places to go, so that’s become a fun destination for us because there’s usually a dinner before or a dinner after and there’s good snacks. The vibes in there are always so good that a lot of the time we can drag them out by saying, “Let’s go see Young Frankenstein. You’ve never seen it,” or “Let’s go see Tootsie.” “Come see Raising Arizona,” so we do a lot of that.

. 
The Weepies, Lizzie McAlpine, and Fleetwood Mac

There’s a band called The Weepies that my wife and I started listening to years ago and it accidentally became the soundtrack of our lives. You start to have a record around when your kids are young and then all of a sudden you get nostalgic for it, and so here we are. 

Musically, I tend to be in control of the music in the house. They kind of just let me do my thing. When we’re in the car, though, the kids go into full-on DJ mode. They say “I call aux,” which means auxiliary, and then they just grab their phones and start scrolling. 

But there’s a lot of good overlap in what we like, I think. We tend to find the zone that’s like Lizzie McAlpine and Olivia Rodrigo. We can all get into that. 

Fleetwood Mac is a huge unifier too. This generation loves that band and it’s led to other music, too. Like, you put on Fleetwood Mac Radio and you get to hear other bands that can work for everyone. 

We also have three rescue dogs and Murphy, our middle dog, is very anxious. He’s a little pitty-staffy mix and he really, really loves Dave Brubeck. It’s late ‘50s west coast jazz or nothing for him, so we always put on that or Vince Guaraldi and do a little dancing in the kitchen with him, which he seems to enjoy.

. 
Daniel Seavey

My girls are also really savvy with picking up music on TikTok. There’s this artist named Daniel Seavey who’s great and he does like a lot of looping on pop songs, kind of the way that Andrew Bird used to do that kind of thing. One of the girls was like, “Dad, check this out,” and I listened to a couple of songs and thought it was great and then I looked and he was playing at the Blue Note the following week. It was sold out and I never do this, but I was like, “I’m gonna go on Instagram and just message him, like, ‘we want to come to the show,’ and he got right back to me. He was like, “dude, come out!” So we went to see him play and we had dinner together, and that was fun.
Klara And The Sun by Kazuo IshiguroBooks have been a thing with the family since Ora was in middle school. I started reading and rereading the books that they would read because a friend of a friend of mine gave me that idea years ago, before I even had kids. He said, “Reread the books that your kids are reading in school because it’s a great talking point and it puts light pressure on them to actually read the books.” So that led to me re-reading stuff like Klara And The Sun. Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite all-time writers and then my daughter got to read it too and so that was a nice thing that happened.

All the books they read in school are very different from what we used to read. Some are books I’ve read, but not at school. The only overlap there’s really been so far is Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Odyssey. That’s really it.

. 
Codenames and Hues And Clues

We play a lot of games in this house. A lot of card games and a lot of board games. It’s a great unifier for not only the four of us, but also my daughter’s boyfriend or my younger daughter’s friends. Our friends will come over, my parents will come over, and we’ll all play cards together. 

The family Zankou Chicken meal is the greatest deal on the planet, too, so there’s a lot of ordering Zankou Chicken and playing games. Codenames is a big one. When we have enough people, that’s the group game.

Do you know Hues And Clues? You’ve got a big board that’s like a Pantone color palette and someone will say a word and you have to guess what hue it might be with your little piece. Whoever gets closest wins.

. 
Blackjack

They also love playing Blackjack. I’m the dealer, though, and whenever I beat them, they’ll just yell at me. “This dealer sucks.” It’s one of their favorite things to say. Poker’s making a comeback, too. We’ve been doing a little Texas Hold’em. 

I’m always looking for safe rebellion for my kids, like a sense that like they have tiptoed into danger but it’s actually not that dangerous. So playing Blackjack at home quells some of their desire to do something catastrophic.