| | Mae "Maeby" Fünke (Alia Shawkat)Alia Shawkat as Mae "Maeby" Fünke | Age: 20 years old (September 22, 1990) | | Gender: Female |
Mae "Maeby" Fünke (born September 22, 1990) is the teenage daughter of Lindsay and Tobias. Maeby's conception is an unanswered question and running joke throughout the series. It is frequently implied that she is a test-tube baby, although Tobias later confirms that she is not. Maeby attended a progressive school called "Openings" before her parents moved in with Michael. Once she enters the public school system, she is not able to compete. She loses interest in grades and starts creating new opportunities to get into trouble. Maeby receives charity money on false pretenses by pretending to be a wheelchair-bound girl named "Surely" (the opposite of maybe) who suffers from a rare, debilitating illness called "B.S." Maeby cons her way into being a movie executive and maintains the charade for many episodes. Eventually, her age is discovered when her cousin George Michael sends invitations to her 16th birthday party to all the other studio executives in her address book. It is shown throughout most of the second and third season that Maeby holds feelings for George Michael as well. She also dates Steve Holt, who is discovered near the end of season 2 to be the son of Gob, and thus Maeby's cousin. While increasingly desperate to end the relationship, she continues to date him, at one point slipping him one of Gob's "forget-me-nows" to avoid having sex with him and still make him think that he had. George Michael tells Maeby at the beginning of season 3 that Steve Holt is also her cousin (though it is revealed in the final episode of the season 3 that Maeby is not biologically related to either Steve Holt or George Michael because her mother, Lindsay, was adopted by the Bluths). She spends most of the rest of the series avoiding her cousin, George Michael, only to end up married to him after a "fake" wedding ceremony the two put on to entertain Alhzeimer's patients goes wrong. In the penultimate episode of the series, Maeby turns 16, although nobody except George Michael remembers. George Michael spends the entire episode trying to prepare a celebration for her, although nobody else turns up. Eventually, he mentions that Maeby may not be related to him at all. Maeby is touched by the kindness George Michael has shown her in the episode and because of this, as well as his revelation (and perhaps the fake wine they're drunk on), the two share passionate kiss. In the final episode, Development Arrested, the two are secretly in a relationship, although George Michael starts to feel uncomfortable after realising that, despite being informed that they may be related after all, she still intends to make out with him in the privacy of their room and eventually leaves with his father. In the end, she pitches her life story to her boss Ron Howard, who says that her story may be better as a movie. Creator Mitchell Hurwitz named the character after his daughters Maisy and Phoebe. Hurwitz acknowledged the peculiar result of this blending, saying "It just seemed like crazy extra fun to think of weird names. I don't want us to become too self-conscious about it but, yes, we do have some strange names." Maeby was initially imagined as a pseudo-conservative, to be a deliberate foil to her activist mother Lindsay, but eventually re-imagined to be a troublemaker in other ways. In making Maeby an opposite to George Michael (she is bolder and not at all reverent towards her father), Hurwitz thought this also contributed to the idea of George Michael and Maeby developing a romance. Maeby is portrayed by Alia Shawkat. Shawkat tried out for the part with Michael Cera, who plays George Michael, in Los Angeles, and the creators thought they both did well. The two were the first to join the cast. For her role as Maeby, Shawkat won a Young Artist Award in 2005 and was nominated for Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2005 and 2006. |
|
