Part of Famous After 40 featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Christoph Waltz, Bryan Cranston, Ke Huy Quan, and Alan Rickman.
Rise to Fame
Nine years of stand-up and bit parts in New York wasn't the fast track to Hollywood. The Gilmore Girls gig as Sookie St. James arrived when the original casting fell through, and she spent seven seasons being the best part of a show everyone liked but nobody called career-defining. Bridesmaids (2011) changed that. Cast as the loose cannon bridesmaid, she improvised much of her material, and the film grossed $306 million worldwide on a $32.5 million budget. Her performance earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, a rare thing for broad comedy.
In the Spotlight
The Falcone-directed comedies (Thunder Force, Superintelligence) got critical write-offs, and now she's repositioning. She's playing Patsy Ramsey in a Paramount+ limited series about the JonBenet Ramsey murder, opposite Clive Owen, and doubling up as both Miss Nelson and villain Miss Viola Swamp in a Netflix adaptation. The dramatic pivot is deliberate. The 2026 Golden Globes appearance generated more coverage about her transformation than her upcoming work, which is either a burden or a calculated reset, and possibly both.
Side Notes
On a family corn and soybean farm in Plainfield, Illinois, nobody was lining up casting directors. She moved to New York at 20, got her first TV gig from her cousin Jenny McCarthy, and ended up at The Groundlings in L.A., where she met Ben Falcone in a writing class. After publicly describing a hostile set that made her 'physically ill,' they co-founded On the Day Productions in 2013 with an explicit policy against 'screamers or crazy egos.' That's not an artist statement. That's scar tissue.