Lauren Weedman

Watch for the face. In most of Lauren Weedman's parts she is not the person the scene is about; she is the person standing to one side of it, taking in what the lead has just done and reacting a beat too honestly and a notch too loud. The nurse, the chef, the mayor, the flatmate: she plays the professional who has stopped pretending the situation is normal. It is a habit she brought over from the stage, where she spent years performing solo autobiographical shows, and she has said of Doris in Looking, "Basically, I'm playing a version of myself." On screen it reads as someone who has not quite agreed to be fictional.

The route was the long one. A solo show, Homecoming (1997), went from Seattle to off-Broadway; sketch comedy on Seattle television and a spell as a correspondent on The Daily Show (2001–2002) got her onto national television; then a decade of guest spots on Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm and New Girl, and a supporting turn in Date Night (2010). The part that made people notice was Doris in Andrew Haigh's Looking (2014–2015), Dom's straight best friend and flatmate opposite Murray Bartlett; she began as a recurring player and was promoted to the regular cast. Since 2021 she has recurred on Hacks as Mayor Jo Pezzimenti, a part that grew in the later seasons and gave her more to do beside Jean Smart than the early episodes suggested.

The two titles we have reviewed show the shape of the career plainly. In Kevin Can FK Himself (2021) she is Lorraine, one of the supporting faces around the sitcom wife who steps out of the sitcom; in Sirens (2025) she is Patrice, in the supporting ranks around the three leads. Neither of our reviews mentions her, and we should be honest about why. We watched Sirens for Meghann Fahy, as the series intended, and only afterwards realised that Patrice had come and gone without our registering her, which annoyed us, because Weedman is exactly the sort of performer a black comedy about rich eccentrics ought to let off the leash.

What works is timing and nerve: she is funny fast, physically unembarrassed, and able to make an eccentric seem like someone you have met. What has not worked is other people's imagination. Nearly three decades in, the roles are still mostly guest and recurring parts, and the emotional weight she has shown on Hacks has seldom been asked for elsewhere. She has kept solo theatre and two books of essays going alongside, which suggests she stopped waiting for television to make the call. We would like a writer to give her a whole series to react to. Until then, she is a reason to keep looking at the edges of the frame.