Aidy Bryant
Aidy Bryant is an actor, born 1987.
Ten seasons is a long tenure at Saturday Night Live, and Bryant did exactly that, joining for the show's 38th season in 2012 and leaving at the end of its 47th in 2022. Three Primetime Emmy nominations came out of it, two of them for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. What she was on that show was a specialist in characters whose confidence is not up for debate; she very rarely played the person losing the argument.
Shrill, which ran from 2019 to 2021, made the fullest case for her. She starred, wrote and executive produced, and the show handed her a character allowed to be ambitious and unpleasant and wrong, which given her casting history is rarer than it should be. It brought a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
The film roles have been sharp cameos rather than leads: Mary, one of the stand-ups in The Big Sick (2017), Vivian in I Feel Pretty (2018), a costumed Statue of Liberty in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). Voice work has become a steady second line, through Human Resources, Danger & Eggs and Teenage Euthanasia, and the recent live-action work is supporting: Carrie in Platonic, Alice in Horace and Pete, Anne Severino in Documentary Now!. The thread running through all of it is a refusal to play apology, which turns out to be far more useful in comedy than warmth.
Movies (5)
TV (11)
Where to start with Aidy Bryant
Everything worth saying about her is in Shrill, and it is a short show, so there is no excuse. Start there: the first episode sets up a woman who wants a bigger life and is bad at asking for it, and the series stays honest about how irritating that can be.
Saturday Night Live is the obvious follow-up, though it is better sampled than binged; look for the sketches where she plays authority rather than eagerness. Then The Big Sick and I Feel Pretty for the film cameos, Platonic for recent ensemble work, and Documentary Now! for the most technically demanding thing she has done, since parody at that level only works if you play it completely straight. Human Resources is the voice performance worth hearing.
Shrill and the SNL decade
Ten years of sketch and then three seasons of Shrill, which she co-created from Lindy West's memoir and which is angrier than the marketing suggested. Documentary Now! is where the sketch training pays off best outside Studio 8H.
Films and voice work
The film credits are supporting parts in other people's comedies, which is the standard SNL export deal. The Big Sick is the best of them. The animation is more interesting, and Teenage Euthanasia is genuinely strange late-night work.