Casey Wilson

Casey Wilson is an actor, born 1980.

Casey Wilson came up through the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York, which is the usual route to the job she got next: two seasons as a Saturday Night Live cast member, from 2008 to 2009. She was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1980, and she writes as well as performs.

What she does, better than most people currently doing it, is play enthusiasm as an act of aggression. Penny Hartz on Happy Endings is the definitive version, a woman whose optimism has the force of a weather system and whose friends are visibly bracing. Take the same instinct and remove the laughter and you get Noelle Hawthorne in Gone Girl, the neighbour who grieves loudly and on camera, a performance that is funny and repellent at once and does a lot of the film's work on how public sorrow gets performed.

The rest is a long list of comedy support done well: Bride Wars, Julie and Julia, The Guilt Trip, Why Him?, The Meddler, The Disaster Artist, Chloe in Always Be My Maybe. On television she has led Marry Me, played Tiff on Black Monday and Bonnie Herschkopf in The Shrink Next Door, and turned up in Mrs. Fletcher, Physical, Atypical and Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage. There is a steady voice career too, in American Dad!, Human Resources and Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, and she hosts The Great American Baking Show. The through-line is that she is almost always funnier than the material around her.

Where to start with Casey Wilson

Go to Happy Endings first. It is the show she is best in. It was cancelled young, it moves faster than any sitcom of its era, and Penny is the character the writers clearly enjoyed most. Watch two episodes before deciding.

Then Gone Girl, for the proof that the same technique works when nothing is meant to be charming. The Shrink Next Door is the most dramatic thing on her list and the best argument that she has been underused. After that it is a matter of taste: Black Monday for the loudest version, Always Be My Maybe and Why Him? for sharp comic support in other people's films, and The Meddler for the quietest and most human part she has had.

Happy Endings and the comedies

Happy Endings is the reason to know the name: a sitcom cancelled far too early with a joke rate nothing since has matched, and Penny is its most quotable character. Black Monday is the closest thing to a successor.

The dramatic work

The serious roles arrived later and are more interesting than the comedy career suggested they would be. Gone Girl gives her a neighbour with genuine menace under the friendliness, and The Shrink Next Door is the sustained dramatic turn.

The films

She co-wrote Bride Wars, which is a fact worth knowing before judging the film. The Meddler is the best of them and the least seen, a small Susan Sarandon picture that almost nobody found.

Genres Casey Wilson works in

More about Casey Wilson

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