Aya Cash
Aya Cash is an actor, born 1982.
Aya Cash was born in San Francisco in 1982 and spent the early 2010s in the useful margins: Sirens, Traffic Light, Shelly Wexler on The Newsroom, and small film parts in Sleepwalk with Me, The Oranges, Begin Again and The Wolf of Wall Street.
You're the Worst is the reason to know her. From 2014 to 2019 she played Gretchen Cutler in a comedy that decided partway through to be about clinical depression and then refused to soften either the illness or the character. Cash kept Gretchen funny, cruel and worth rooting for at the same time, which is a much narrower path than it looks. The performance drew a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination for best actress in a comedy series and a TCA Award nomination for individual achievement in comedy.
The Boys put the same skill to colder use. As Stormfront she is charming first and very specific about it, playing a character built to be agreed with, and she is returning to that world in the prequel Vought Rising.
Since then she has moved between registers without settling: Cheryl Peterson in Welcome to Flatch, a prosecutor in The Girl from Plainville, Joan Simon in Fosse/Verdon, Anita in the Hollywood satire The Franchise, and the two-hander horror comedy Scare Me. Kill Me and The Floaters are both listed for 2026.
Movies (12)
TV (12)
Where to start with Aya Cash
You're the Worst is not optional. Start at the beginning and let the first season fool you into thinking it is a sitcom about awful people; the show and Cash both get much better once Gretchen stops being able to keep up the act.
The Boys is the other essential and lands hardest if you know the first show, because you can watch her aim the same charm at the opposite target. The Girl from Plainville gives the straight dramatic version, all procedure and restraint.
After that: The Franchise is the funniest recent thing she has done, Scare Me is a small experiment worth an evening, and Begin Again and The Newsroom are where you can catch her doing very good work in parts written for someone less interesting.