Molly Gordon is a deft ensemble comedian, particularly good at letting a character remain vague or awkward without losing our interest. Theater Camp also reveals a limitation: her affection for the people she writes can make the jokes too gentle.
Fi1m perspective
In Theater Camp (2023), Molly Gordon plays Rebecca-Diane, a drama teacher whose floaty vagueness sits neatly beside Ben Platt's unembarrassed excess as Amos. She does not compete with him to be the most emphatic person in the rehearsal room. We laughed at the pairing: Gordon's dreamy manner makes Platt's certainty about himself look still more ridiculous. The performance works through the contrast between the two teachers, with Gordon leaving space for the other actor rather than insisting on every laugh.
Her supporting comedy work in Life of the Party (2018) and Booksmart (2019) established her usefulness in an ensemble before she began shaping one herself. As Maya in Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby (2021), she also had room for a more grounded sincerity. Her strength is that sincerity can survive the absurdity, so an awkward character remains someone worth spending time with. By Theater Camp, she was co-writing and co-directing as well as performing, with the opportunity to decide how far the joke should go.
She co-directed that film with Nick Lieberman and wrote it with Lieberman, Platt and Noah Galvin, and their familiarity with the children's drama-camp setting is evident. The teachers' habits feel observed, and the cast is good down to the smallest child. Yet the film likes these people too much to be consistently sharp about them, and its middle is thin even at 93 minutes. Ayo Edebiri gets the biggest laughs while doing almost nothing as stage-combat teacher Janet; Gordon and Lieberman could use more of that economy.
Her other ensemble work includes Claire Dunlap in The Bear (2023–2026) and Rebecca Hampstead in The Sheep Detectives (2026). We liked the latter's funny, unexpectedly moving farmyard mystery, though its human characters are less convincing than the flock; it is not the film to choose chiefly for its human cast. Theater Camp gives a clearer sense of Gordon's comic instincts and of where her generosity becomes a weakness. Start there, provided a thin middle is a price worth paying for the company.
Biography
Molly Gordon is an American actress, screenwriter and director. She began her career with child roles in the films I Am Sam (2001) and Bewitched (2005), and later appeared in series such as Animal Kingdom (2016–2018).
Gordon co-directed, co-wrote and starred as Rebecca-Diane in the musical comedy Theater Camp (2023). She has also featured in films including Booksmart (2019), Good Boys (2019) and Shiva Baby (2021), and plays Claire Dunlap in the series The Bear (2023–present). She is the daughter of director Bryan Gordon and writer-director Jessie Nelson.
