Paula Pell
Paula Pell is an actor, born 1963.
Paula Pell is a writer first, which is the fact that explains everything else. She joined the writing staff of Saturday Night Live in 1995 and stayed for the better part of two decades, and for that work and her work on 30 Rock she has won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program and six Writers Guild Awards. In 2019 she was given the Herb Sargent Award for Comedy Excellence.
Her acting career is essentially a second act, and it consists mostly of small parts played with an amount of commitment that the material rarely warrants and always benefits from. Dana in Sisters is a supporting role performed as a woman who has decided to enjoy herself and cannot be talked out of it. Helen Henry Demarcus in A.P. Bio gave her the longest sustained run, a supporting character with a rich and slightly alarming inner life. She turns up in Documentary Now, Girls5eva, Wine Country, Other People, Big Mouth as Barbara Glouberman, and Dying for Sex.
Voice work has been unusually good to her. She plays Mom's Anger in Inside Out and Inside Out 2, a tiny part with a payoff far out of proportion to its screen time, and she extended the same world with Paula Persimmon in Dream Productions. She also created and starred in the mystery comedy Mapleworth Murders, which is the closest thing on her resume to a full showcase of her own writing voice on screen.
Movies (13)
TV (16)
- Late Night with Seth Meyers (2014)
- Big Mouth (2017)
- Monsters at Work (2021)
- Girls5eva (2021)
- A.P. Bio (2018)
- Made in Hollywood (2005)
- Documentary Now! (2015)
- Dying for Sex (2025)
- Die Hart (2020)
- No Activity (2017)
- SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night (2025)
- The 'Burbs (2026)
- Dream Productions (2024)
- Mapleworth Murders (2020)
- Mapleworth Murders (2020)
- The Awesomes (2013)
Where to start with Paula Pell
The honest answer is that her best work is writing, and this catalogue only reaches it sideways. So start with the performances that give her room.
Sisters is the most generous of them, and she uses every inch of it. A.P. Bio is the sustained one, a character who gets funnier the more you learn about her. Documentary Now! uses her deadpan most precisely, and Girls5eva is the sharpest of the guest turns.
For the voice work, Inside Out and Inside Out 2 hand her Mom's Anger, a tiny part with a payoff far out of proportion to its length, and Dream Productions carries the same world further. Wine Country is the loosest thing here, closer to watching a group of friends than a script.
The performing career
Pell spent twenty years writing for other people before this. Girls5eva is the best of it, playing the member of a nineties girl group who has entirely made peace with how it all went. The Mapleworth mysteries are the ones she created herself.
The films
Sisters is the film she wrote for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, drawing on her own teenage diaries, and she appears in it as well. Wine Country is the ensemble comedy with the same cohort, and Other People is the serious one.
The Pixar work
She voices one of the mothers' emotions in Inside Out and has stayed with the franchise across the sequel, the short and the recent spin-off series. Dream Productions is the strangest and most writerly of these.