Suzanne Cryer's speciality is the flat, exact line from someone who does not seem to know a joke has been made, and Silicon Valley gave her five years to do it. The rest is guest spots and supporting parts; blame the industry, not her.
Fi1m perspective
Laurie Bream, the venture capitalist who takes over Peter Gregory's firm in Silicon Valley, delivers ruinous news the way other people read out a postcode. Suzanne Cryer plays her from 2015 to 2019 without visible emphasis: the timing is exact, the words are few, and nothing in the face confirms that anything funny has happened. Our review called Welch's Gregory a billionaire who thinks in silences and Cryer's Laurie, if anything, odder, and we stand by it. We laughed at her every time she walked into a room, and it took a season to work out why: everyone else in the series is sweating to be liked, and she is not, so the deadpan makes the panic around her look worse.
She had been doing this for nearly twenty years before anyone gave her a long run at it. In 1997 she was Marcy in the Seinfeld episode 'The Yada Yada', the one that put the phrase into the language, and Amy Cain in Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog, a film we like for Dustin Hoffman and in which she is not the point. Two Guys and a Girl (1998–2001) made her a sitcom regular as Ashley Walker. Then came the long middle of an American character actor's life: guest parts on Dexter, Bones and Grey's Anatomy, work that is done well and forgotten by the following week.
What she does well is economy. She has said of Laurie that 'There's not a lot of roles, especially characters like this, for women over 40', and the discipline of someone who learned to land a part in two scenes, because two scenes was what there was, is all over the performance. The Yale drama training shows in the steadiness; she does not push a line, she waits for it. The criticism is the obvious one: a career mostly of supporting and guest roles, and a talent for making six lines count is not the same as being handed sixty. Mike Judge's series is the exception, and it is a good one.
Since then there has been a small film part in 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and guest and recurring work on Lucifer, All Rise, Lucky Hank, Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Ted Lasso. Start with Silicon Valley, and pay attention in the investors' office rather than the house. If you find yourself waiting for her next line, that is the job done.
Biography
Suzanne Cryer is an American actress. Born on 13 January 1967 in Rochester, New York, she studied English literature at Yale University and received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.
She is known for playing Ashley Walker on the ABC sitcom Two Guys and a Girl (1998–2001) and Laurie Bream on the HBO series Silicon Valley (2014–2019). Cryer appeared as Marcy in the Seinfeld episode "The Yada Yada" (1997) and as Amy Cain in the film Wag the Dog (1997). She has performed on Broadway and in regional theatre productions, including at Hartford Stage and the Mark Taper Forum.
