Lauren Weedman
Lauren Weedman is an actor, born 1969.
Lauren Weedman made her name in theatre she wrote herself. Solo shows including Homecoming, BUST and The People's Republic of Portland came before screen work, which is a different discipline entirely from waiting on a casting call, and it left her with a performer's habit of building a whole person out of very little stage time. A stint as a Daily Show correspondent from 2001 to 2002 followed.
Doris on Looking is the role that finally used her properly. Across the HBO series and its closing television film, she is the friend outside the central romantic churn, the one who says the blunt thing everybody else is carefully avoiding, and Weedman gives her a full interior life underneath the timing. The show is quiet and observational, and she functions in it as a sudden draught of cold air.
Everything else here is a small part played very hard: a banker, a chef, a cat lady, a mayor, a pastor. Her film appearances in Date Night, The Five-Year Engagement, The Little Hours and Horse Girl each amount to a scene or two, and she has an unusually high hit rate for making one scene stick in the memory. Born in Seattle in 1969, she remains best known on television for Looking and in theatre for material nobody else could have written for her.
Movies (13)
TV (14)
Where to start with Lauren Weedman
Watch Looking for Doris. It is the only screen work here that gives Weedman room to be funny and sad in the same breath, and the character quietly becomes the show's conscience without ever being written as one. Looking: The Movie closes it out and is worth staying for.
The rest is a highlight reel of small parts, which is fine if you go in knowing that. The Little Hours gives her the most screen time in a feature and the most licence to be strange. Horse Girl uses her as an anchor of ordinariness in a film steadily losing its footing. Date Night is the widest-seen, Hacks and Abbott Elementary are single-serving comic guest spots done cleanly, and Kevin Can F**K Himself is the most interesting of the recent television because the show's whole premise is about what sitcom women are allowed to be. Her solo theatre work is not on this page, and it is the best of her.