Britney Spears once sang, “There’s only two types of people in the world / The ones that entertain and the ones that observe.” Megan Stalter always knew she was the former; it was just a matter of when she’d get the spotlight and a willing audience. At 34 years old, the actress is finally taking center stage in Too Much, a semi-autobiographical romantic-comedy series from Girls creator Lena Dunham, starring Will Sharpe, Emily Ratajkowski, Naomi Watts, and Andrew Rannells.
Stardom wasn’t something nicely wrapped and handed to Stalter. She may have been born with a gift and a dream, but she had to go get it herself. Born in Cleveland, Stalter spent her childhood moving through different parts of Ohio, from Dayton to Huber Heights to Centerville. Wherever she lived, Stalter’s home served as a writers’ room of sorts, a place in which she was free to test material with her “very funny family.”
Outside of the house, however, she felt invisible. Her middle school in Dayton didn’t offer drama club or any theater programs, leaving her without a proper outlet for her passions. “I don’t ever remember not wanting to perform as a child,” she tells me. “Middle school is also the worst time of anyone’s life. I think people don’t talk about it enough.”
When she got to Wayne High School, in Huber Heights, she joined the drama club, but while she always auditioned for the lead roles in school plays and musicals, she “didn’t really get any of the good parts.” That turned out fine in the end, she says, because “I was being so funny with my gay boyfriend backstage, and we were pissing off the drama teacher because we couldn’t stop laughing.... And that’s when I realized I was funny.”
After graduating, in 2008, Stalter didn’t have enough money to move to Los Angeles to pursue acting, so she signed up for a local improv class instead. “It kind of found me,” she says. She spent the next few years bouncing between different majors at community college in Ohio—even trying nursing—before moving to Chicago in 2014 to focus on comedy. There, she worked as a nanny while taking improv classes at Second City and the Annoyance Theatre.
Stalter began developing an online presence, posting videos on Twitter, Instagram, and, most importantly, YouTube. In March 2019, she released the first episode of The Megan Stalter Show, an ironic take on the talk-show format where she’d found her voice. After nearly seven years in Chicago, she moved to New York in 2019 and started doing stand-up while continuing her YouTube show. A year later, when she was 29, The New York Times declared Stalter “sketch comedy’s newest star.”
Her ticket to Hollywood came in the form of a small role she made big on Max’s Hacks, the Jean Smart–led sitcom about a has-been comedienne. Stalter plays Kayla, the spunky, chaotic, overly confident, and surprisingly competent assistant to a talent manager in the series, which premiered in 2021 and was just renewed for a fourth season.
Fans of Hacks will recognize shades of Kayla in Jessica, Stalter’s character in Too Much, premiering on July 10, especially in how both women are unafraid to express emotions openly in a way that might seem chaotic or, like the new show’s title, too much.
“There’s something about those characters and myself. We’re [all] comfortable being strange,” she says. “You’re taught growing up that girls aren’t supposed to be weird. We’re not supposed to be crazy. I don’t think of myself as chaotic, but guess what? I think of myself as extremely dramatic, extremely sensitive, and getting way too loud.”
Dunham’s new show, produced by the team behind Love Actually and Notting Hill, is equal parts coming-of-age tale and romance. Showing the good, the bad, and the ugly of love, Dunham writes a relationship between Jessica and Felix—a grungy yet handsome womanizer with a secret heart of gold, played by Sharpe—that’s as beautifully dysfunctional as Hannah Horvath and Adam Sackler’s in Girls.
As for playing the steadfast object of desire to Felix, Stalter seems thrilled but not exactly surprised to be stepping into the role of a rom-com leading lady. “When I was little, I always thought that would happen, because I was a little bit delusional. I think that being a little delusional helps you in this business.”
Too Much premieres on Netflix on July 10
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at Air Mail
