Before the pandemic, Megan Stalter was an unknown comedian performing wherever she could, trying to break into acting and posting occasional videos on Twitter and TikTok. When the pandemic hit, those videos became her only outlet. Stalter began producing them at a rapid clip, as very short character sketches. With everybody at home and on the Internet, she started to find a big audience, racking up millions of views. On social media, she became known as the queen of quarantine.
Stalter shot on her phone, and the props and costumes were whatever she could find around the house. Her characters embody the full spectrum of the socially awkward and clueless. Then, suddenly, Stalter jumped from the Internet to television, playing the worst assistant in the world on the hit HBO show “Hacks.” She recently spoke with The New Yorker Radio Hour about her early online successes, including her viral “Hi, gay” video; landing her “Hacks” role; and playing Helen Keller’s mother in “The Miracle Worker.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Am I getting it right that “Hacks” is your first professional acting job proper?
Yes.
Yes, you just went from nothing to HBO Max’s huge comedy hit?
I couldn’t be more lucky. I can’t believe it. That’s my first time on set. That’s the first time I ever had a professional acting job. I haven’t even done a commercial.
“Hacks” centers on this old-school Vegas headliner comedian named Deborah Vance, played by the truly amazing Jean Smart, who hires a twentysomething comedian named Ava, played by Hannah Einbinder, to punch up her act and be her assistant. You play Kayla, who is an essential part of the show. Can you describe who Kayla is?
Ava has this manager, and Kayla is the manager’s assistant, and she’s a bad assistant. She’s kind of a party fashionista slash silly rich girl whose dad owns the company, so she has this privilege and power. She sees [the manager] Jimmy as—they’re like equals, even though Jimmy is her boss. I think she sees them as co-workers, and she lives in her own world and doesn’t even realize how privileged she is.
She’s what the Internet would now call a “nepo baby.”
Yes, absolutely.
“Hacks” is very much about this generational divide in comedy, with Deborah Vance representing the old-school, punchline-heavy Joan Rivers school of comedy, and then Ava is the less crowd-pleasing, more jagged millennial slash Gen Z kind of comedy. I’m curious if you see your own work in those terms—if you feel like you’re on one side or the other of that divide.
My hope is always that my stuff can be understood by people of all ages. I feel like I draw a lot from older comedians, anyway. A sort of one-woman show in the eighties, like an older woman doing a Vegas-style one-woman show, is kind of my inspiration. I like to hope that people of all ages can be on the inside of the joke. I love “Hacks” because I feel like there’s something for everyone in the show. Paul [W. Downs, a co-creator of “Hacks,” who also plays Kayla’s boss] was saying that a lot of times people tell him, like, “Oh, this is the show I can watch with my mom, and she loves it, too.” Comedy is so subjective, but any sort of art that’s not including, or alienating a huge group of people—I just would rather not. I would rather not alienate any age group or type of person. “Hacks” is something that people of all ages and genders would be into because there’s something for everyone in it.
How did you start performing? Was there a spark where you felt, “Oh, I have to be on that stage”?
I really never remember not wanting to perform. I can’t ever remember a time I wasn’t making videos. When I was little, we always liked making videos, me and my siblings and my cousins. Anytime there was a talent show or a Christmas pageant, I’d be desperate to be in it. I remember my choir teacher gave me a solo for the Christmas pageant, and I just practiced the song over and over and over again. It was just probably two lines of the solo, but I was so, like, “Oh, my God.” I just really needed to be onstage. I do think that I’ve always been sort of weird, freaky, silly. I definitely didn’t fit in in high school, besides drama club. And I auditioned for everything, and I would research the role and I would prepare a lot. I never got the parts that I wanted probably ever, but I did play Helen Keller’s mom in “The Miracle Worker.” I didn’t even get that part. I was an understudy, and then they let me have it because the lead dropped out or something.
Really?
Yes, but that was probably my shining role. She had lines, at least. After high school, I didn’t have any money saved to move to L.A. or New York, and we don’t come from money. I just went to different community-college programs, and all I really wanted to do was perform, but I just couldn’t even see a way. But then, finally, after trying a bunch of different things—like teaching, nursing, missions slash church work—I did Bible school.
You did?
Yes, I was really involved in my church, and I was, like, “Well, if I can’t do what I really want to do, then maybe God wants me to choose something that’s helpful, but a job where I know I can make money after college.”
Pre-pandemic, what was your life like? Can you describe what you were doing, the state of your career, of your life, where you were living? What was going on?
I had just moved to New York six or seven months before the pandemic. I was having the time of my life on different shows every night, and I was, like, “Oh, this is the dream. This is the New York dream.” I think that’s when I first started getting any traction online. I do remember, right before the pandemic, my first couple of videos that had ever gone—not viral, but a lot of people were watching, more than normal for me. I think one video was—it was, like, the woman in the movie who almost hooks up with the lead before he goes off to find his real true love, or something like that.
I remember that one.
And I was, like, “Oh, my God, wow, I’m really doing it. I’m in New York and I’m doing these shows at night, and people are watching my stuff online.” Then I think the real attention came with the pandemic. It really changed everything, and [I] was not focussing on trying to get people to see it, to be honest. I just was doing these really crazy themed Instagram Lives overnight, because I was so alone, and I was, like, “This is a fun way to feel connected.” Or even posting stuff, I’m, like, “Oh, this is like a creative outlet, because we can’t perform live right now,” and it was really scary and sad for me. I was just trying to stay afloat. I was just trying to not lose my mind. It was so scary, but then things were happening for me, too, online.
It’s this weird combination of a horrible moment for the world slash good time for Meg’s career. I want to look at one of the videos that went really viral during the pandemic. “Hi, gay” was from June of 2021. It was a video for Pride Month.
That video, I literally was rushing out the door. It was Pride Month, and I’ve just seen so many ads from places that would never normally do a Pride thing. It just was, like, something clicked—where it was, like, “God, that would be so funny.”
It’s obviously a great satire of how companies co-opt the language of Pride to sell products during June. To me, what’s so funny about it is that it’s more than that. You see this character who is just so unused to being on camera just trying and failing to be presentable and pull this off.
The whole thing, I’m reading off the computer, so all of what I said was written. I normally like to improv with the videos, but that one, I was, like, “It’d be funny if it looks scripted and looks like I’m reading off a script.” I think what I’m drawn to, when people-watching or getting inspired to do a character, is people that are really fully themselves out loud. They’re different than everyone else, but they are so themselves that it doesn’t matter what other people think of them.
Well, there’s something about your characters that represent the breadth of American idiocy. There’s this one video I love where you play a woman in her car who has just been to Starbucks and is outraged.
Yeah.
Of course, we all have followed these people who get outraged about the “war on Christmas,” or whatever. In a way, online culture has made everyone a kind of on-camera performer. You do really capture the sense that so many people are performing for the camera nowadays who just aren’t up for it. You can see them trying and failing. It’s like we’re all performers now.
Everyone feels this pressure. Everybody wants to be famous or go viral. It’s fun to make fun of and to explore, like, “Why do people feel that way? Why do people feel the pressure to do that?” That’s what’s so funny about these front-facing video characters, because, like that video, a lot of people thought that was real. That’s what’s so funny.
Really?
Yes, I think my favorite characters to watch are people that feel real, even if they’re bonkers. They just feel, like, “Oh, well, I know that woman.” Like that church woman, even though she was saying crazy things about the Starbucks employee and celebrating Halloween, she’s so real.
What kind of things were people saying on Twitter who thought it was real?
People were upset with her, this character, and saying, “Wow, I don’t think a Christian should be yelling at a barista” or, like, “You’re not the real kind of Christian.” Or “I don’t think God would like that.” The other thing is I really liked the low quality of the videos because it almost feels like the person’s even more real—because it’s like they filmed it themselves. The fun thing is you can prank people if they don’t follow you. There’s so much of that content now online that you can put yours up and people think you’re serious, and that’s really a part of the joke for me.
