Benito Skinner never wanted to play football. “I hated everything about it,” says the 31-year-old comedian known as Benny Drama. He only signed up in the fourth grade after falling in love with his best friend, who played on the team at their Catholic elementary school in Boise, Idaho. The boy ended up moving away the following year—“I hope he’s well. I hope he’s gay!”—but Benito kept playing through high school, ultimately becoming the star wide receiver. “It gave me this shield, and it felt almost comfortable to me to have that—it was like a true costume in every way.”
Today, Skinner has 1.3 million followers on Instagram under the username @bennydrama7. He rose to fame for posting impressions of stars during the coronavirus pandemic, when Vogue called him “the only funny thing to happen to 2020.” Now he’s putting the costume of the closeted jock back on in Overcompensating, an eight-part comedy that he wrote, is the executive producer of, and stars in. The TV show, which premiered this week, features Connie Britton and Kyle MacLachlan, with cameos by Bowen Yang, Kaia Gerber, Megan Fox, and Charli XCX.
Skinner plays the lead role, drawing from his own experiences at Georgetown University, where he graduated from in 2016. His character, Benny, a former football player, goes to great lengths to fit into his college’s fratty scene—drinking from red Solo cups filled with live fish, taking classes in the business school, and hooking up with girls (or at least attempting to).
The show’s first episode begins with a young Benny watching clips of a shirtless Brendan Fraser in the 1997 film George of the Jungle and Britney Spears dancing in the “Lucky” music video. “She was my shield,” Skinner says of Spears. “I was obsessed with her.”
As a child, Skinner, the youngest of four siblings, would often perform Spears’s song “Oops!… I Did It Again” for his family. He also saw Fox, who plays Benny’s guardian angel in Overcompensating, as another “female protector.” But no one could top his favorite actor, Robin Williams, especially in his 1993 role in Mrs. Doubtfire, where he dresses in drag to pose as his children’s nanny.
It’s a brand of comedy not dissimilar to Skinner’s own—he became known on social media for his impressions of stars like Kourtney Kardashian and Shawn Mendes. Skinner attributes his ability to transform into different personae to “so many years in the closet just studying people, and just feeling like I wanted to do everything once I was out and performing. I wanted to play every character.”
Posting skits on Instagram began as a hobby for Skinner. After graduating from Georgetown, he worked as a video editor in New York for two years, writing and filming sketches in his spare time. But in 2018, having amassed a social-media following, Skinner turned his side job into a full-time role, pivoting from online audiences to live ones. That November, he sold out his first live comedy show, a rough early version of the TV production also titled Overcompensating, at the New York Comedy Festival.
He began developing a pilot in 2019, writing about his experience coming out as gay during his senior year of college. The story also follows the formative female relationships he made during that time.
One female friend who has been especially impactful in Skinner’s life is Mary Beth Barone, a fellow comedian with whom he’s co-hosted the podcast Ride since 2023. Each episode consists of Skinner and Barone picking something to “ride” for, or believe in, like spray tans, the benefit of the doubt, and The Fellowship of the Ring.
When it came time to assemble the cast of Overcompensating, which began development in partnership with Amazon, A24, and Jonah Hill’s Strong Baby Productions in 2022, Skinner didn’t hesitate to include Barone, who plays Benny’s sister. “She’s such a muse for me,” he says. “I grew up watching comedians be in movies with their best friends, and to get to do that—I’m so happy and grateful.”
Barone stars alongside actors Wally Baram, Owen Thiele, and Adam DiMarco. In addition to her cameo, Charli XCX is the show’s executive music producer, a role she took on after being introduced to Skinner by his boyfriend of nine years, the photographer Terrence O’Connor, who had worked closely with the artist on her Brat album. Britton and MacLachlan play Benny’s parents. “They are the most brilliant, kind, unbelievable talents ever,” gushes Skinner. “It just felt surreal.”
While the show centers around Benny’s coming-out arc, it’s also about how the college-aged characters around him struggle with their own secrets and insecurities. “Queer people get this thing put on them that they have a secret. I think everyone has that to a degree—where they feel something is wrong with them,” he says.
The show’s message feels more relevant than ever. Skinner admits that when he first conceived of it, six years ago, he never imagined it would be released at a time when L.G.B.T.Q. rights are increasingly under threat. He hopes watching the show will give people “a break from all of this, from the clown parade.”
Filming it certainly did so. “[It] felt so queer and beautiful and shared. We were laughing and we were sobbing, and I hope that’s how people feel watching it.” And, he adds mischievously, “maybe you’ll get a little horny. It’s college! Why not?”
Overcompensating is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Paulina Prosnitz is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
