Megan Stalter Is Reinventing the Rom-Com Heroine

Time​ Magazine

6 days ago

Megan Stalter talks about the experience of starring in Too Much, a Netflix romantic comedy series from Lena Dunham, with the dreamy satisfaction of a person recounting how she found her soulmate. Like so many contemporary love stories, it began with a digital meet-cute, when the Girls creator—then a total stranger—slid into her DMs. 'She messaged me on Instagram and said, 'I have a project for you,'' Stalter recalls. 'I was like, 'What?!' And she said that she wrote it with me in mind, which is the craziest thing to hear from my No. 1. I'm a No. 1 fan of Lena.'
The fantasy continued in the UK, where she filmed her role as an operatically heartbroken New Yorker who crosses the Atlantic and meets a disarmingly gentle London boy (The White Lotus' Will Sharpe). Even after growing a cult following on social media with videos of unhinged characters, then breaking out on Max's Hacks, Stalter might have felt nervous about anchoring such a high-profile show. But her immediate rapport with Sharpe, who she was pleased to discover was "weird and funny like me," as well as Dunham and her husband and co-creator Luis Felber, set her at ease. There is a perfect awkward moment in the premiere when Stalter's character, Jessica, plants a hearty smooch on Sharpe's Felix, and he responds only with an embarrassed smirk. It was the first scene they shot together, and yet, she says, 'we had such an easy time improvising a lot of those lines.' A blissful working relationship, sealed with the worst kiss ever.
Maybe Stalter got lucky in finding such simpatico collaborators, but after our video chat in June, I suspect she could get along with almost anyone. 'We clicked,' she says four separate times about her first encounters with different collaborators. She brims with appreciation for the people in her life; family members get the same enthusiasm as idols turned friends like Dunham. Brilliant at embodying characters high on their own questionable supply, Stalter has no trouble speaking earnestly about herself or her work. What comes through when she does is buoyancy, warmth, and a form of gratitude free of self-doubt—all auspicious traits for a rom-com ingénue in the making.
For as long as she can remember, Stalter, 34, has been fascinated by beauty pageants and their pick-me-princess competitors. The title character of Little Miss Ohio, a compilation of cheerfully deranged monologues she released in the pandemic summer of 2020, is a faded beauty queen struggling to film a promo for this year's pageant. In June, she accepted an award at an LGBTQ-oriented Critics Choice Association event for her portrayal of Hacks' absurdly self-assured rookie talent manager Kayla wearing a tiara and sash with her sheer gown. (While Kayla is apparently straight, Stalter is in a long-term relationship with a woman, Maddie Allen, and describes herself as 'almost lesbian.') Playing to an audience that embraced her campy sensibility long before she was a TV star, Stalter proclaimed: 'I'm in shock that a country-bumpkin brunette made her way all the way to Hollywood and now I'm accepting the award for Best Gay Actor of All Time.'
In fact, it was her relatively humble Ohio upbringing that nurtured Stalter's love affair with brash female characters: 'To be like, I should win, I'm the best actor, I'm the best politician or the prettiest girl in the room, is so funny to me, because it's so overly confident, but also there's something really vulnerable about those kinds of characters.' A pageant girl's bravado is matched only by her need for external validation. Stalter experienced this dichotomy firsthand as a kid who practiced tirelessly with her mom for a local poetry-declamation contest. She loved to perform, making videos with siblings and cousins, and believed in her own abilities. But, she says, 'In high school, I never really got the part I wanted' despite her hard work.
That discouraging experience motivated her to create her own material. 'Part of why I love doing comedy and writing for myself and doing stand-up is that you get to make the rules," she says. 'No one's telling you you can't do it. I don't have to wait for someone to say yes.' Still, it would take a while—and a few attempts at training for a more practical career, like nursing or teaching—to make her way to the comedy hub of Chicago, where she studied improv and broke into the stand-up scene. She felt like a success almost immediately, just knowing she'd finally begun to do the work she was meant to do. 'It wasn't like, 'When is my dream gonna come true?'' she recalls. 'As soon as I was like, 'I'm gonna go for it,' it felt like my dream was coming true. Being in an improv class was so exciting to me, getting out on my first show, or even just doing open mics.'
In the summer of 2019, Stalter moved to New York. But it was during the pandemic, which she weathered in Ohio, that her star rose, as the housebound scrolled in search of a laugh—and found lo-fi videos in which she portrayed such characters as 'your boss when her tube top falls off on a Zoom meeting.' She was so convincing in variations on a woman whose cockiness is undermined by nervous stumbling or general strangeness that not everyone realized it was a bit. But being misunderstood has never fazed her. 'I don't mind making someone feel unsettled a little bit, or [pushing] them out of their comfort zone,' she says, citing Nathan Fielder as a comedian whose blurring of personality and persona she finds riveting. Besides, those bewildered reactions are fodder for the inside jokes she shares with fans who do get it.
Among the latter group were the creators of Hacks, Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky, who spotted her online and looked past a shoddy self-tape audition to cast her as Kayla. The pandemic was still raging when Stalter moved to L.A. to shoot the dramedy, which casts Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder as comedians of different generations jockeying for success in a sexist, ageist Hollywood. Introduced as a broad, nepo-baby foil to Downs' pushover-manager character, Jimmy, Kayla evolved from inept assistant to shrewd showbiz strategist. In Season 4, which aired this spring, she agonized over whether to sell out Jimmy and take a big job at her father's firm. She gives the show's writers credit for this transformation: 'They definitely let me improvise. But the storylines and the scripts are all them, so if they didn't want [Kayla] to be such an essential part, I wouldn't get to be.' That vote of confidence paid off, allowing Stalter to exhibit a versatility that no doubt helped her level up to multifaceted romantic lead.
For a Girls girl and rom-com devotee already pinching herself to be sure the last few years weren't all a dream, landing Too Much felt like divine intervention. 'That is straight from the stars. That's from God,' says Stalter, who has always been a big believer.
In a story that echoes Dunham's romance with Felber, a British musician, Stalter's Jessica has been spiraling since her ex, Zev (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel alum Michael Zegen), dumped her for an Instagram-perfect knitwear influencer, Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski). After a humiliating breakdown, Jess seizes the chance to work abroad in London. That means leaving her claustrophobic clan of single women in Great Neck; Rhea Perlman, Rita Wilson, and Dunham play her grandma, mom, and sister. (This female-dominated family reminded Stalter of her own: 'I was raised by women that all have big, strong personalities.') She arrives to find that her council-estate sublet is nothing like the verdant country estate she pictured. Her dry British boss (Richard E. Grant) resists her messy American charms. And she remains so obsessed with her ex and his now-fiancée that she accidentally lights her nightgown on fire while making a bitter video addressed to Wendy.
Felix, an indie rocker styled like a young Robert Smith, offers a calming contrast to Jess' too-muchness. But this reformed party boy has baggage too. In episodes that flash back to the couple's previous partners and explore their families' internal dynamics, Too Much illustrates how who we are in each romance is the culmination of every other serious relationship, sexual or otherwise, we've had. 'Anytime you're dating, you're bringing everything that's ever happened to you,' Stalter notes. 'If you actually are falling in love, you are showing really bad sides of yourself.'
This honest approach to romance, which affectionately comments on the idealized rom-coms parodied in each episode title ('Enough, Actually'), resonated with Stalter. Raised on the escapist pleasures of Bridget Jones and the Julia Roberts canon, she describes Dunham's surprisingly humane spin on the genre as 'subverted and unexpected and so my sense of humor,' but also grounded in 'beautiful, real, dramatic moments.' Some are love scenes every bit as frank as the ones Dunham famously made for Girls, though this time around the sex is often good.
If Stalter had any lingering nerves about these intimate moments, they didn't make it to the screen. Her vulnerable performance evokes Bridget's dizziness and intelligence, and the commingling of naivety and jadedness that made Pretty Woman's Vivian appealing. You can see flickers of Legally Blonde's Elle Woods and Clueless' Cher Horowitz—who could be icons to Jess—in a wardrobe of candy colors, skirt suits, and whimsy. What these women share isn't a hair color, a shape, or a profession; it's their effervescence, a spirited lightness that has defined screwball It Girls for a century and practically fizzes out of Stalter's pores.
Even in recent decades, as LGBTQ voices have moved into the mainstream, it's been rare to see queer actors leading straight romances. So it feels notable that Stalter, who has been openly bisexual for longer than she's been famous and says that 'right now, I actually couldn't imagine being with a man,' slides so comfortably into hetero roles. She does have years of experience with men to draw on. But immersing herself in queer community, especially via camp-soaked niches of social media, where her aggressively femme characters often play off unseen husbands, has also made her a keen observer of straightness. 'Queer people sometimes are curious about straight culture, as straight people are curious about queer cultures,' she notes.
At the same time, she has cherished the opportunity to play women navigating relationships with women, as she did in the title role of the 2023 indie film Cora Bora, which follows an unmoored musician straining to hold on to a long-distance girlfriend. 'It's really emotional and meaningful for me to play queer characters because of what it means for representation,' she says. To that end, she has spent the past few years developing a comedy series called Church Girls with A24 and Max. Inspired by her experiences, it casts Stalter as a young, Christian woman in Ohio coming to terms with the realization that she is a lesbian.
Especially in a polarized society where loving God and 'love is love' can seem incompatible, Stalter feels compelled to demonstrate otherwise. 'I've never understood why you wouldn't be able to be gay and be a God girl,' she says, pointing out that the Bible has about as little to say against homosexuality as it does against, say, eating shrimp. 'It hurts me to think, if somebody wanted to connect in a spiritual way, that they would feel like they wouldn't be allowed to because of their sexuality.'
Church Girls is Stalter's dream project, the one she makes time for even as she juggles TV roles, live comedy tours, and a devotion to posting weird videos on the internet that didn't end when she booked Hacks. ('Laughing with strangers online is just important to me.') Which is not to say she's torched her personal life: 'You always make time for things that are important to you.' For her, that means friends, family, plus her dog and two cats—'literally God's little angels sent down to help us.' On screen and off, in work as at home, Stalter seems to seek out soul-deep connections. It's the kind of romantic quest that, like a wounded American girl giving love a second shot in the land of Wuthering Heights and Notting Hill, you can't help but root for.