Sara Rue
Sara Rue is an actor, born 1979.
Rue was on screen as a child, and by the end of the 1990s she had the part that made her: Carmen Ferrara on Popular, the outsider in a high-school series explicitly about caste. Less than Perfect followed, with Rue as Claude Casey, and between them they fixed her public image as the funny, decent one who is not in the popular clique.
The trouble with being cast as decent is that it is hard to escape and easy to underuse. Rue is a genuinely fast comic actor, better at underplaying than sitcom performers are usually allowed to be, and her best moments tend to be the ones where the writing hands her something slightly sour. Brenda on Rules of Engagement, the softball teammate and friend of Jeff Bingham, works precisely because she never plays the friendship as sweet.
Her film work is small and sharp rather than large: the babysitter in The Ring (2002), Martha in Pearl Harbor (2001), the Earth Girl in Can't Hardly Wait (1998), the Attorney General in Idiocracy. Television has kept her busy throughout, with Bones, Eastwick, Mom, Impastor, American Housewife, a regular role as Kim on the short-lived Malibu Country, and Olivia Caliban in the second season of A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is the closest thing to a showcase she has had in years. She also hosted the reality series Shedding for the Wedding in 2011, which tells you something about how television has used her: constantly, and rarely at full stretch.
Movies (10)
TV (19)
- Bones (2005)
- Mom (2013)
- The Division (2001)
- American Housewife (2016)
- Rules of Engagement (2007)
- A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017)
- America's Funniest Home Videos (1989)
- Less than Perfect (2002)
- Popular (1999)
- Ned & Stacey (1995)
- Celebrity Name Game (2014)
- Eastwick (2009)
- B Positive (2020)
- Impastor (2015)
- Grand (1990)
- Pearl (1996)
- Phenom (1993)
- Minor Adjustments (1995)
- Malibu Country (2012)
Where to start with Sara Rue
Watch Popular first, and watch several episodes rather than one: the show is wildly uneven and Rue is the steadiest thing in it. If you want the version where she leads, Less than Perfect built a workplace sitcom around her, and it is the fairest test of whether her rhythm works for you.
The recurring roles are where she is at her best. Rules of Engagement has her playing a friendship with an edge on it, A Series of Unfortunate Events gives her more texture than anything else recent, and Mom and American Housewife show how easily she slots into an ensemble without stealing from it. The Ring is barely a scene, but it is a good one.
The sitcom runs
Less than Perfect gave her four seasons as the lead, which is more than most working comic actresses of her generation got. The rest is a long list of shows that lasted one or two seasons and deserved better than they got.
The films
The film work is scattered and mostly small. The Ring and Pearl Harbor are the ones people have seen, Can't Hardly Wait is the teen classic, and Gypsy 83 is the tiny independent road film that is genuinely worth finding.
The recent television
Olivia Caliban in A Series of Unfortunate Events is the best recent part, and the guest and recurring work across Mom, Bones and American Housewife is the sort of career that keeps a working actor working for thirty years.