It’s surprising to hear a foul-mouthed bisexual comedian casually invoke God. But considering how quickly her star has risen, maybe divine intervention isn’t such a stretch.
Stalter, 33, was in New York doing press for her new film “Cora Bora,” which premiered at last year’s South by Southwest film festival and has a limited opening Friday, with a wider release (including at a theater in Alexandria, Va.) June 21. The Saturday before, when this interview took place, she had booked a last-minute late-night live show at the Brooklyn venue Littlefield. She called it “The Wild Wet Freak Nasty X Rated Late Show with Meg Stalter.” It sold out quickly.
“It’s gonna be wild and loose,” she said ahead of the show. “I haven’t performed live in four months, but that’s just what the doctor ordered.”
Stalter’s career is at an inflection point. She’s stealing scenes as Kayla on Max’s Emmy-winning comedy “Hacks,” but she’s far from top-billing. She’s co-starring with “White Lotus” actor Will Sharpe in Lena Dunham’s new romantic comedy series “Too Much,” but that won’t hit Netflix for many months. Her first lead role in a feature movie is out now, but she’s not a household name.
That’s fine with her. “I’m really grounded in reality and God and my family and friends, so I don’t want to be famous,” Stalter says.
You might not get that impression from the tattoo on her right thigh that reads “Baby I’m a ⭐.” It was inked collaboratively by her dad and brother, who both work at Cleveland’s Voodoo Monkey tattoo parlor, owned by Stalter’s father. She says the tattoo is not a reference to the Prince song but a testament to her lifelong love of performing.
“I didn’t grow up with money, so I understand that getting paid to do something that you love is such a privilege that most people don’t have,” she says. “That is never lost on me.”
She has lots to be grateful for. Stalter has had the kind of early career that sets unrealistic expectations for other Hollywood aspirants.
In her early 20s, she moved from Ohio to Chicago, where she took improv classes at Second City, Improv Olympic and the Annoyance Theatre. She moved to New York, where she wrote for the National Lampoon Radio Hour podcast and immersed herself in the alternative-comedy scene.
During covid lockdowns, she moved back to Ohio to be with her family. With no job and no outlet for live performance, she leaned into self-taped comedy videos that she uploaded to social media. She specialized in characters with big confidence and little eloquence.
When playing a bullying real estate agent or a hot “real” scientist or a clichéd female movie character, she peppered her performances with malapropisms, awkward pauses and swallowed words, all delivered with unearned swagger. Her video of a Pride Month promotion for a fictional butter company helped her land real-life paid partnerships for real-life money and made “Hi, gay!” a niche catchphrase.
She quickly became a comedy darling.
“She literally had 20 followers or something, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, she’s a genius,’” said the actor Kathy Najimy, who has become a friend and collaborator. “Other people do characters or commentary, but she developed a whole other category that I just find enchanting.”
“When I saw her performing I was like, ‘Oh, that’s my daughter,’” said the comedian Margaret Cho, who appears with Stalter in “Cora Bora.” As Cho sees it, she and Stalter both embody “the hag” (a term that is sometimes paired with a rhyming gay slur).
“It’s the baby sister that just comes along that it is the third wheel times a million,” Cho says of the hag archetype. “It’s a part of gay culture that we don’t get to see as celebrated as often. She’s really brought that to the forefront.”
In 2021, Stalter landed her first — yes, her first — paid acting job on “Hacks.” The show’s co-creator and co-showrunner, Paul W. Downs, based Kayla on a real person (he flatly refused to say who) but wrote the part with Stalter in mind.
“Meg has this really funny thing, especially in her early character work, where she is both incredibly bold and self-assured but also very much second-guessing and stuttering,” says Downs, who also plays Jimmy on the show.
In 2022, Stalter booked the titular lead in “Cora Bora.” She was the crew’s first choice, but casting her was a risk. The role required serious range. Cora sings, cries and appears in multiple sex scenes. The character is supposed to be simultaneously unlikable, sympathetic and hilarious.
The director, Hannah Pearl Utt, says that Stalter rose to the occasion. “For me, she’s like a Goldie Hawn-level talent,” Utt says.
Dunham also had glowing things to say about Stalter’s acting chops. “The chance to watch Meg step into the depth of her emotional capacity onscreen has been one of the greatest gifts of my career,” Dunham wrote via email. “I love her like a sister and worship her like a historical figure.”
The “Cora Bora” crew had only 18 days to shoot, a rushed timeline for even a low-budget indie. Stalter was in nearly every scene. Some days she was so tired, she slept in a van between takes.
“It was the best time of my entire life,” she says. That’s not a joke.
According to Utt, the hardest part of working with Stalter was getting her to realistically smoke on camera. “She looked like somebody who had never smoked a joint before,” Utt says. That wasn’t far from the truth. Apart from the fake cigarettes in “Cora Bora,” Stalter says she had only “a puff of things before.”
“Sometimes I’ll have, like, a sip of Champagne, and it’ll give me a headache,” she adds.
As a high school student in Dayton, Ohio, when other teenagers were experimenting with sex and drugs, Stalter found community in drama club and church. She fondly remembers her time “rockin’ out on Wednesdays” with her nondenominational Christian church’s youth group.
“I think when people get to know me, they’re like, ‘That makes so much sense that you were a God girl.’” she says with a laugh. “Because I really love myself a lot, and if you really love God, then it’s easier to love yourself.”
You remember the fun-loving “God girls” from high school, right? They’re the ones who would be the first to dance at a cast party. The ones who would say, “No thanks, I’m crazy enough as it is,” if someone offered them a drink. Big smiles, inside jokes, loud laughs? Come to think of it, a lot of them were pretty funny.
So, Megan Stalter was a God girl.
“And I’m a God girl still,” she says, her fingers fidgeting with a bouquet of flowers she was bringing to her girlfriend. “I just don’t have a church. But I’d love to have a cool gay church to go to. Because God loves gay people.”
After high school, Stalter lived with her mom. She waited tables at Friendly’s with two of her siblings. “It was really fun, but I was a horrible waitress.” she says. “They loved my personality but hated my service.”
Stalter toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher or a nurse and took a few community college courses. “I wasn’t good in school,” she says. “I definitely have ADHD and don’t do anything about it.”
She knew she wanted to pursue acting but didn’t have enough money saved up to move to a bigger city. Instead, she went on mission trips. At age 20, she spent six months in South America with the Christian service organization Youth With a Mission.
Stalter is careful to say that she doesn’t condone all such trips. “Sometimes missions trips can be, of course, problematic,” she says. But for her, the experience was meaningful. She loved living communally, doing service projects, helping run church services and praying multiple times a day. A few years ago, Stalter posted a video from one of these trips, cracking up some fellow God girls with a goofy dance.
“It was cool because I was so young, and I felt so close to God and far from home, and my mind was opened to a different part of the world,” she says.
So what makes her feel close to God today? “I feel very close to God now because I really know who I am,” she says. “And I think when I realized I was into women and never felt any judgment from God, that made me feel really close.”
Stalter gets moon-eyed and gushy when she talks about her longtime girlfriend, but she prefers to keep details about their relationship out of the press. “I feel so protective over those types of things,” she says. “People like to ask about her, and I’m just so private.”
She was nervous about coming out, but telling her family she was bisexual was ultimately uneventful. “I told my mom in a text, and she was like, ‘I thought you liked only girls.’ Which I took as a big compliment,” Stalter says.
That evening, ahead of her show, Stalter is drinking a seltzer and holding hands with her girlfriend backstage at Littlefield. She chats with the comedians Drew Anderson and Tyler Snodgrass, whom she had recruited to play her ex-husbands onstage, and coos over Pinky, a 4-month-old puppy dozing off in the lap of her friend, the comedian Mary Beth Barone.
Stalter’s live performances have some preplanned bits but are largely improvised. A lot of what she does onstage is technically “crowd work,” but that doesn’t quite capture the disorienting passive aggression she doles out to her audience. Maybe call it “Method trolling?”
“Who here was born premature?” she shouts into the microphone toward the beginning of her set. Later, after she hears a cough in the crowd, she makes several audience members hack into her microphone to identify the culprit. She critiques the body language of people standing up to get drinks and asks that everyone either laugh hard or not at all.
It’s hard to explain why this is all extremely funny, but it is. The audience is with her for the duration of her set, which runs more than 90 minutes.
As you might imagine, her brand of live comedy doesn’t always go over so well. She recalled a night several years ago at the Laugh Factory in Chicago, where she opened her set by saying, “If my mouth starts bleeding, it’s because I’m nervous.” Fake blood began pouring out of her mouth.
The audience gasped. No one laughed. “I had to do the rest of the set like that, and nobody thought it was funny,” she says proudly.
She also attracts a decent amount of haters online. She mostly ignores negative comments, but sometimes will chime in and agree with people who insult her and her work. “Nothing really hurts my feelings,” she says. “And if it does, then I send it to my sister.”
During her set, as she told jokes about LGBT culture and unprintable sex acts, the phrase “God girl” kept floating up. What would it have been like to have known a God girl in high school who made dirty jokes, used swear words and didn’t feel the need to “forgive” or “accept” someone for being gay? It seems impossible.
But then, Stalter has already changed how some people think about comedy. Maybe she can change how we think about God.
Studio photos shot at Love Studios NYC. Styling by Kat Typaldos, assisted by Amber Rana and Laynie Rouche. Retouching by Jenny Podushko.
In the first look, Stalter wears a headband by Richard Quinn from Albright, dress by Rosette NYC, shoes by Nomia and skirt worn as veil by Urban Outfitters. In the second look, Stalter wears head scarf by SVNR Shop, sunglasses by Illesteva, shoes by Nomia and ankle bracelet by Collina Strada. She is also shown wearing dress and ribbons by Collina Strada.
