Meredith Hagner plays fools as if they were simply being polite. Five seasons of Search Party proved she can hold a stupid character together long enough for us to like her; film has mostly given her smaller versions of the same job.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Portia Davenport agree with something. In Search Party (2016) Hagner does not play Portia's idiocy for the laugh; she plays it as good manners, nodding along because nodding along is what a nice person does. Portia is an actress on a television crime series, the friend who never quite hears the mystery being discussed in front of her, and Hagner keeps her sunny across five seasons of a comedy that is sharp and unkind about almost everyone else. It is the least showy of the four lead performances and, over that long a run, probably the hardest to sustain.
She came up through daytime television, as Liberty Ciccone on As the World Turns (2008–2010), then primetime parts in Lights Out (2011) and Men at Work (2012–2014). Search Party, created by Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, is the work that told people what she was for, and it ran until 2022. Around it she took supporting parts in Ingrid Goes West (2017), Set It Up (2018), Brightburn (2019) and Palm Springs (2020), mostly as the girlfriend or friend whose behaviour sets up the premise or comments on it. More recently there has been recurring work on Shrinking and a main role in Bad Monkey (2024).
What she does well is timing, and a knack for making exaggerated people behave in ways we recognise. In Search Party she sits next to John Early, whose Elliott lies for attention and is furious when it is not paid; Early is faster and louder, and Hagner is the one who makes the group feel like a real friendship rather than a sketch. We laughed at Portia for a season and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because Hagner had let us see that the vacancy was a kind of hope, and the hope was not going anywhere. She has said Portia is "a satirical parody of a narcissistic millennial—but she's still a real person to me", and that is the performance exactly.
Film has been less generous with her. Palm Springs is a good comedy and we liked it, and our review found no reason to mention her: Misty is there to do one thing for the plot and she does it. That is the nearest thing to a recurring complaint, that the film parts stay brief and functional inside larger ensembles, and it is a complaint about the parts rather than the actor. Bad Monkey suggests someone has noticed she can carry more. The test now is whether anyone writes her a part that is not the friend.
Biography
Meredith Hagner is an American actress. She began her career portraying Liberty Ciccone on the CBS soap opera As the World Turns (2008–2010), which earned her a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Younger Actress in a Drama Series in 2009. She subsequently appeared as a series regular on the FX drama Lights Out (2011) and the TBS sitcom Men at Work (2012–2014).
Hagner gained prominence for her role as Portia Davenport in the TBS and HBO Max dark comedy series Search Party (2016–2022). Other television credits include the series Strangers (2017–2018), Dummy (2020) and Bad Monkey (2024). Her film roles include Hits (2014), Brightburn (2019), Palm Springs (2020) and Vacation Friends (2021). She trained at the Boston Conservatory.
