Allow me to thank the algorithm. At some point during the depths of the pandemic, YouTube started hinting very strongly that I might want to check out the TikTok comedian Caitlin Reilly. It was right. After watching one of her front-facing comedy videos, I clicked on another. And another. Then I went back and binged all the ones I’d missed. Among her sharply observed characters were “Girl who is ‘not like other girls’ ”—a dude’s lady who insists, a bit too proudly, that she prefers “Star Wars” to rom coms. There was “Lounge singer in every hotel bar,” who masks her bitterness in schmaltz. There was a recurring character, the cheerily entitled, passive-aggressive “WASP mom,” elbowing her way through a Starbucks, an Olive Garden, and her son’s Zoom class. Once I caught up on Reilly’s œuvre, I waited for more, hungrily.
Reilly, who is thirty-three, has high cheekbones, a rictus grin, and curiously expressive nostrils. Like a young Christine Baranski, she excels at hauteur, but she can easily shape-shift into a Southern auntie on a cruise or an acquaintance pushing a pyramid scheme. Her funniest characters reveal their contradictions in under ninety seconds, including my personal favorite, “Woman who is ‘chill’ ”—a “spatial healer” who is convinced that she’s laid-back but warns, “Don’t fucking fuck with me.” A Los Angeles native, Reilly is hyper-attuned to the city’s calculated casualness, its particular species of phonies. Her videos are a taxonomy of L.A. types: actresses on Instagram, raspy talent agents, stressed-out publicists, dude bros, self-absorbed scenesters. Reflecting a town where everyone is at least industry-adjacent, her characters are often performing—at auditions, on Comic Con panels, on social media—while straining to hide some inner tension, which Reilly betrays with darting eyes or a quavering voice. On TikTok, she has 2.2 million followers.
When I met Reilly recently, at a trendy lunch spot in Larchmont, just south of Hollywood, she wore a loose-knit sweater and gold hoop earrings. “I got the probiotic smoothie—don’t judge me,” she said. The restaurant (Moroccan-ish earth tones, waiters dressed like house painters) had the studied cool of some of her characters, such as the wellness influencer dabbling in music. Reilly was brought up in the neighborhood, where her family owns a children’s-clothing store called Flicka. Working there gave Reilly early exposure to L.A.-mom culture. “A lot of celebrities would come in as moms,” she recalled, then imitated them calling out their kids’ ridiculous names: “Thicket! Jagger! Wicker! Echo!” Her father, John Reilly, was a soap-opera actor, best known for his eleven-year run on “General Hospital.” Reilly grew up watching her parents’ old Johnny Carson tapes and the Tracey Ullman sketch show “Tracey Takes On,” but her interest in comedy waned by the time she got to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I really wanted to be this serious musical-theatre ingénue who could do drama,” she said. “And, every single time I was given a role, it was comedic.” Finally, she went in tears to an acting teacher, who informed her that she had impeccable comic timing.
She spent the next ten years as “a poor, struggling actor that nobody cared about,” she said. She worked for a nanny agency that sent her on nannying auditions—meanwhile, she could barely get acting auditions—and kept her eyes open to the habits of the high-strung and privileged. One posh mother at a job interview shook her hand, noticed her acrylic nails, and asked, “Are you going to be able to work in those?” “Then her baby ran up to kiss her,” Reilly recalled. “She goes, ‘No, no, Mommy had a peel!’ I’m just standing there in the kitchen, like, What am I doing here?”
By the time the pandemic hit, Reilly was in a rut. “I actually had a moment where I was, like, I think I’m going to shelve acting for a while, because nothing was happening,” she said. “I had gotten this job to be a personal assistant to a real-estate agent, who absolutely did not need a personal assistant. Like, her dog went to acupuncture, and I got yelled at for getting the wrong turkey slices for the dog.” She had recently joined TikTok but “detested the Internet.” Early in lockdown, she was staying with her mother and started messing around making videos. In April, 2020, she got traction for her first Wasp-mom installment, “wasp white mom having a psychotic break during facetime” (“which I felt like I was having at the time”), borrowing the vocal inflections from her own mother, if not the day-drinking and desperation. The next week, she posted “The co-worker you hate during a zoom meeting,” a portrait of a corporate brownnoser, and it got a million views within a day.
To craft her characters, Reilly often drew from life. The woman who claims to be in a “really good place” (but obviously isn’t) was based on an older sister who was going through a breakup. A recurring character called “LA mom”—she tells an assistant to fetch her “grass-fed bananas”—was based on another sister. A tyrannical horse-camp instructor was a counsellor from tennis camp. And the various actresses posting ingratiating Instagram stories came from any number of celebrities attempting what Reilly called “the performance of relatability.” “There’s a beast on the Internet, and that beast is an actress with a blue check mark next to her name,” she told me. “I guess I technically am one as well, but it’s my favorite thing to observe in the wild. I feel like I’m watching a David Attenborough documentary.”
As Reilly’s online profile grew, she started hearing from managers and agents, though some wanted to put her on the influencer track of cookbooks and personal appearances. “I had meetings with people who were, like, ‘So, have you ever thought about acting?’ ” she said, with chagrin. But she landed an agent at W.M.E. and got a part on “Hacks,” as an entertainment executive who meets with Deborah Vance, the comedy veteran played by Jean Smart. Reilly modelled her characterization on the would-be managers who’d been wooing her. “So many meetings were, like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re obsessed with you! I’m dead,’ ” she recalled. “You’re, like, I’m never going to hear from you again, am I?” She also plays one of Maya Rudolph’s rich friends on “Loot” and an indie filmmaker in “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” and, coming up, a “shitty, bitchy fairy” on the new HBO series “Dead Boy Detectives.”
If this part of the story sounds familiar, that’s because Reilly is one of a batch of comedians who shot to notoriety by making short, low-tech character videos during the lockdown, among them Sarah Cooper, Vinny Thomas, and Megan Stalter, who was also cast on “Hacks.” “It just levelled the playing field,” Reilly said, of this emergent genre. “It was a sort of survival tactic for a lot of comedians, performers, actors. Not out of commercial need or financial need but emotional need. ‘There needs to be some sort of outlet or I’m going to stick my head in an oven!’ ”
But Reilly wasn’t always elated when her videos went viral. “You would think that would excite me, but it gave me a lot of anxiety,” she said. “It was, like, Oh, no! People are going to see it! Then I woke up one morning to be verified on Instagram, and I had a panic attack.” Complicating her overnight success even more, her father died, in early 2021, after a decade with Alzheimer’s. “I was having this crazy-exciting experience in my career while going through the worst thing I’ve ever gone through,” she recalled. “He just saw me struggling and unhappy, and he never saw this part.” She wiped something from her eye. “I’m not crying,” she told me, then looked at her finger. “Wow, that’s disgusting. Holy shit!” (Allergies.)
Reilly is still posting TikTok videos, though less frequently, and her headway in show business will surely give her more fodder. When I asked what new industry-speak she’s noticed out in the wild, she thought for a moment and answered, “What I’ve heard a lot lately is: ‘I’m not sure if the market’s looking for that right now.’ ” Hollywood, she assured me, is a weird place to grow up. “So many people come here to pursue their dreams, and they turn into monster versions of themselves—everyone just walking around, being a monster, trying to get the best smoothie.” More self-aware than her characters, she quickly added, “I’m guilty of a couple things myself. I’m drinking a probiotic smoothie, sitting here getting interviewed. It doesn’t get more L.A. than this, baby!” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
