Netflix star Kate Berlant: ‘Thank God I didn’t get work as a child actor. I’d probably be dead – or even more insufferable’

According to Bo Burnham – the cult actor, Emmy-winning stand-up and all-round Netflix darling – Kate Berlant is “the most influential/imitated comedian of a generation... a millennial Lenny Bruce”. His opinion is catching on. Not only did she steal scenes in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Don’t Worry Darling, but she won diehard stans thanks to her absurdist performances in acclaimed comedy series such as HBO’s The Other Two and Search Party. Now, she has scored a transatlantic hit with her one-woman show. Berlant may insist she’s “niche for life”, but the secret’s out: she’s a bona fide mainstream star.

KATE, her first scripted show, directed by Burnham, has transferred to London after its sellout run in New York attracted white-hot reviews of the “this show will change your life” variety. Between this and those aforementioned screen appearances, not to mention several stand-up sets on late-night talk shows, chances are you’ve seen the 35-year-old somewhere. Or maybe, as she jokes in her show, you’ve just confused her for the more famously famous Kathryn Hahn.

Like Hahn, Berlant has a super-elastic grin and ample curls. When we speak, the city is halfway through a 48-hour heatwave and those curls are piled high on her head in a bun. In conversation, Berlant tends to answer with her face first: verbal responses delayed seconds behind her physical ones. The human face has 40 muscles, and Berlant exercises masterly control over each one, tugging at them like the puppet strings on a marionette doll. She puts those skills to use in KATE, which takes the one-woman show trope and twists it like taffy, stretching the confessional self-indulgence to hilarious extremes.

The Kate of KATE and the Kate of my laptop screen are related. Berlant, too, is still searching for her big breakout role – only she is less openly obnoxious in the way she goes about it than her onstage counterpart, who preens for the camera as she unspools her “tragic” origin story. It’s my shadow self, says Berlant of her persona. “It shines a light on the need to be adored, the need to be successful, the need to be cast, trying to show one’s likeability or castability or marketability.”

If you’re at all familiar with Berlant’s work, you’ll recognise these fixations. Performance, artifice, ego, authenticity – you’ll find these themes and more in her 2022 Hulu special Cinnamon in the Wind; in Poog, the comedy podcast about wellness she co-hosts with fellow funnywoman Jacqueline Novak; and, of course, in any of the sketch shows she has filmed with her dear friend and collaborator of 10 years, John Early. It’s even there in her portrayal of a neurotic slugger in A League of Their Own. “I do think people should be way more humiliated to want to be a performer, an actor or a comedian,” she says matter-of-factly.

The way Berlant sees it, the last 10 or 15 years have seen a surge in the belief that “people should perform or tell their story or reveal themselves for an audience”. The obvious example being social media. “It’s definitely not producing good art or better art,” she scoffs. “And I think that it has really deplorable consequences for civilisation and the individual. Yeah, I think people should feel more embarrassed by their need to be seen. I know I feel it.”

Amid the peal of trumpets and shower of superlatives, there is one talking point about her show that Berlant is surprised to find missing from the discussion: the sexual bits. “It has felt like people really didn’t want to talk about what I looked like,” she says. “I sensed a real nervousness around discussing the literal elements of the show. But what is the materiality of the show? There’s a woman on stage; she’s writhing, or gyrating, or doing these things to appear sexual, or coy, or seductive – that was almost completely excluded, so that was interesting to me.”

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A main joke in the show, she continues, is that this person is trying to be perceived as hot – as we all are. “That’s an everyday performance we’re all aware of on a certain level, but there’s a double performance of trying to appear like you aren’t performing that,” she says. There’s something funny to me about someone trying to hide that.” She points to the female actor as an example. “The idea of an actress as someone who is ostensibly channelling an emotion and telling a story – while still needing to be perceived as hot? That’s endlessly interesting to me.” By the way, Berlant says out of the corner of her mouth, “I’m not trying to be like, ‘Why is no one calling me hot?’” She contorts her mouth into a clownish frown. Well, she is hot, I tell her. “Thank you!”

So why the silence? “I think the culture is so sexless right now, and there’s this real terror surrounding the body and talking about the body,” she says. “Like it’s scary to acknowledge people’s physical form right now.” Later, Berlant adds, “I understand why people are scared of that, but then it leads to this situation where we can’t talk about what we’re seeing or experiencing, or that certain reactions seem base or beside the point. But no: performance is a physical act.”

Berlant grew up in sunny Santa Monica, the daughter of very supportive parents who loved her a lot. So blessed is Berlant in the genetics department that she made it onto New York magazine’s “nepo baby” list, which named and shamed famous people with a famous parent. I would argue, however, that Berlant’s dad’s career as a visual artist and the fact that her mother “made the Stonehenge for This Is Spinal Tap” is not quite the same as being able to call two Oscar nominees Mum and Dad. Regardless, she’ll take it. “I was thrilled by that list because it made me seem so much more famous than I am,” she cackles. “I was thrilled. So funny.”

As a young teen, Berlant and her friends were given a chance to audition for a walk-on role in Lizzie McGuire, starring opposite Hilary Duff. She nailed the line “Nice pants!” and nabbed herself a manager. “It was like, ‘Here I go: my life is going to change!’” recalls Berlant, who was dropped almost immediately after. The rejection didn’t sting as much as you’d think. “And ultimately, I mean, thank God!” she exclaims. “Thank God I didn’t get work as a child actor. I think I would probably be dead, or even more insufferable.”

Her background, then, isn’t exactly the sob story you might typically find at the crux of a one-woman show, which is perhaps the reason she so often lampoons it in her comedy. “I have my s*** the way anyone does, but I can’t point at myself or my life experience and say I’ve been through hell,” she says. “Those are the realities of my life, and I guess I’ve always felt a need to address that...” She stops short. “Or have I? I don’t actually know, but somehow, it’s gotten in my stand-up over the years. I understand it might seem a certain way now, as we’re interrogating (as we should) who is given platforms and who is allowed to talk, but I never saw it as an apology. I just use that bit as context for the show.” It’s also a very funny bit. “Well, hopefully.”

You get the sense that Berlant is not overly enthusiastic about being interviewed. But she thinks on the spot; her answers lead to interesting places rather than anecdotal verbatim. Often, they end up in queries of their own. “All of these questions are really fascinating to me, but they really are just questions,” she says. “I would never pretend that I know the answers.”

At school, Berlant was the jokester. “Even since I was a baby, I have for whatever reason always been a clown,” she says. Her conspicuous omission of the “class” prefix that typically accompanies “clown” calls back to a time when the word meant something slightly more tragic than a red-nosed prankster. Berlant got into stand-up at 17. “I pitched my high school that I do stand-up independent study instead of math,” she recalls. Berlant was so bad at the subject that the school said yes. “Everyone’s a comedian now, but back then, it was definitely a strange thing to go into.”

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Berlant never “related” to the brand of self-deprecating humour that she saw other female comedians performing at the time. “Instead, I had to adopt this persona of being really overconfident and entitled,” she says. “I mean, I am entitled, that is also part of me, but the joke of self-deprecation never really was my language, so I moved towards the joke of overconfidence, being the person who is most comfortable being watched.”

These days, Berlant says, she is more likely to be recognised for her TV and film work than she is for her stand-up. “I am an actress, but I feel like my identity more primarily is a comedian, which is helpful,” she says, “psychologically speaking.” How so? “I think there is more agency, potentially. And also, you know, an actress is either a character actress or she is someone who is primarily beautiful, but a comedian is not thought of as a beautiful person, and so I think it’s more of a capacious identity.”

There is a running bit in KATE that among the audience is a Disney bigwig named Steve, whom Berlant is trying desperately, pathetically to impress. She’s only half-joking. “This show is intensely gratifying for me creatively, and yet at the same time, of course, I would like a huge director to see it and be inspired and put me in his movie,” Berlant laughs. “It’s like, of course I want to work. I very much am trying to get work as an actress... like, Jesus Christ.”

For now, she is happy to continue performing live. “Theatre is dying. It’s a quaint form at this point. If people are seeking comedy, they go to TikTok, they’re certainly not going to the theatre,” she says. “There’s almost nowhere left in culture where people are actually all together, looking at something.” Increasingly, as new dates are added to the London run due to high demand, that something is Berlant herself.

‘Kate’ runs at Soho Theatre until 30 September