Mary Elizabeth Ellis
Mary Elizabeth Ellis is an actor, born 1979.
The role Mary Elizabeth Ellis has played longest does not have a name. She has been The Waitress on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia since 2005, the object of Charlie's decades-long and entirely unwelcome devotion, and what makes the part work is her refusal to play it as a joke at her own expense. Her Waitress gets angrier, drunker and more corroded by the years, and the show lets that be genuinely bleak rather than cute.
Sitcom television has repeatedly cast her as the reasonable woman about to snap. Caroline on New Girl is Nick's returning ex, a relationship the writers keep reopening because Ellis makes her plausible rather than merely inconvenient. Lisa Palmer on Santa Clarita Diet is the neighbour with a marriage coming apart next door to a much larger problem. Debbie Sanderson on The Grinder is the family straight woman surrounded by people performing at each other.
Her best film moment is a small one. In Licorice Pizza she plays Gary's mother, Anita, and gives a handful of scenes the weight of an entire household, an adult with her own life and her own temper, glimpsed at the edge of a teenager's story. It is the clearest evidence that the comic precision she gets hired for is technique rather than personality. Born in Laurel, Mississippi in 1979, she has also anchored shorter-lived sitcoms including Perfect Couples, which is not among the credits listed here.
Movies (6)
TV (12)
Where to start with Mary Elizabeth Ellis
Begin with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, though not for the reason most people assume. Watch The Waitress across the years rather than in any single episode: Ellis is playing a slow, unglamorous decline inside a comedy that gives her almost no dialogue to do it with, and it is the most sustained piece of character work on this page.
For an actual part with lines, New Girl is the most rewatchable, and Santa Clarita Diet is the best showcase, since Lisa Palmer needs to be both the comic neighbour and the person whose life is quietly collapsing. The Grinder is the underrated one, a short-lived sitcom with a much smarter premise than its ratings suggested. Licorice Pizza is the film to see her in, A Man on the Inside is the warmest recent thing, and Happy Endings is a good three-minute reminder of how quickly she can turn a guest slot into a person.