A New Yorker interview with Meg Stalter, currently playing Mary Todd Lincoln in the Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” after breaking out as Kayla on “Hacks.” The conversation covers her real pop album “Crave,” her red-carpet bits with Paul W. Downs, and the Pentecostal Ohio childhood that fuels her star vehicle “Church Girls.”
- She was bullied daily in middle school, then found her people in drama club; improv in Chicago came after community college nursing classes
- The pandemic years: nightly Instagram Live and cheap custom Cameo videos “saved” her — she didn’t fall into “the deepest depression”
- On mission trips from her own near-miss in Peru: “to think you’re going to go and be a savior, that’s dangerous”
- On faith: raised Pentecostal, she “never felt at all judged by God about being a queer person, ever”
- “Crave” is not a joke, she insists — real pop songs written with Jesse Thomas, because “every comedian wants to be a musician”
The throughline is the blur between bit and reality, Kaufman-style: an art project where you never tell people exactly what’s fake. Everyone’s laughing either way.