Chicago native, Lauren Lapkus, grew up watching Saturday Night Live. Impressed by comedians such as the late Chris Farley, she started auditioning for parts in school plays but luck wasn't on her side. Despite not getting roles right away, Lauren opted to follow her teacher's advice and took up Improv classes at the popular iO theater to improve her craft.
Lessons Learned
Now, the 34-year-old star of the recent Netflix comedy, The Wrong Missy, credits these lessons for jump-starting her Hollywood career. She says, "It ended up being so life-changing. I really didn't know how it would lead into a career. Especially in Chicago where its really all about the craft of it. That you are doing it for the sake of doing it and not really thinking about the bigger picture."
To further hone her acting, she left Chicago for New York and signed up for classes at Amy Poehler's Upright Citizen's Brigade — a bi-costal improvisational theater training school. Never one to stop learning, Lapkus was hungry for more opportunities. In 2010, after completing several classes, she embarked on a plan to break into the theater scene by heading for Los Angeles. Here she applied for the Upright Citizen's Brigade Harold Team. The bold move paid off for Lapkus. She admits, "It was so, so important for me. It helped me get representation, which led to getting commercials and TV shows."
All Thanks to Twitter
But aside from getting connections from the Upright Citizen's Bridage, Lapkus shares that she credits micro-blogging and social networking service, Twitter, for opening more doors for her. In an interview, the Orange is the New Black star confesses, "I have an interesting story for how I got my first commercial agent: I had no connections, really, in the business except for just other comedians that I knew, but usually it doesn't help you that much. But I followed a commercial agent on Twitter; he would give tips and advice for commercial auditions... At a certain point, he tweeted, 'It's my birthday. The first five people to say happy birthday to me will get a meeting. ' So I just wrote happy birthday, and then he's like, "you get a meeting" So then I went into his office, which was at Abrams (Artists) Agency, and ended up getting signed by him and got to do commercials through that when I was first starting."
Commercial Appeal
The Wrong Missy lead has starred in many commercials ever since. She has been in ads for Chevrolet, Jack in the Box and a note-worthy 2011 Snickers ad with Joe Pesci. The small TV and film roles kept coming and in 2012 she got cast as Dee Dee in the NBC show, Are You There, Chelsea? Lapkus looks back at her first few jobs before the bigger roles turned up. She says, " I got my SAG card from doing two commercials. I did a commercial for Bing.com, which, I don't know if its still a website anymore, but it was a Google wannabe website at the time, before I was in commercials, before I got any job ever, I didn't really understand how you got to be in a commercial. So that was a really cool moment for me because I was like, Wait, everyone in the country,like my whole family is seeing me in this commercial every once in a while, and that's legit. So that was the first step to feeling good about doing stuff."
Before playing the lead opposite David Spade in the Netflix film, The Wrong Missy, Lapkus has been providing comic relief in such notable shows like The Big Bang Theory, Jurassic World and Crashing. She shares that her experience in improvisational theater, has done wonders for her, "I think both (long and short-form improv) are applicable to film and TV, and both are really helpful because they help you think on your feet and you get comfortable being on stage and or in front of people, you get confident with your ideas, you get comfortable changing to the next thing if a director comes over and tells you that you need to do something completely different. But my experience is in long-form, and its been so helpful to me to have that experience, because I feel like I could rewrite the whole scene right now if you want me to and just talk and do whatever I need to make this go a different way."
Voicing it Out
Lapkus may also sound familiar. She lends her voice and quirky persona to projects like Bob's Burgers, Adventure Time, American Dad and Harvey Girls Forever. And if that's not enough, she is an active on the podcast circuit as well. She can be heard on Spontaneaton with Paul F Tompkins, Comedy! Bang! Bang! and WTF with Marc Maron. She even has her own show entitled, With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus, a role reversal show of some sort where her guests can determine the episode's theme and title.
Indeed, a single Tweet can go a long way. It certainly did for Lauren Lapkus.