Megan Stalter is feeling wild. She isn’t acting like Kayla, her scene-stealing assistant-turned-talent-manager character on the HBO Max comedy Hacks and she isn’t wearing anything head-turning as she did last month to accept an award. Instead, she has made a game-time decision to—wait for it—add shrimp to her cucumber and avocado salad. “Shrimp during the day?” she marvels, litigating her protein decision out loud. “Feels like a dinner thing.”
It’s the type of observation that sounds as if it belongs in a classic stand-up set: seemingly mundane yet rooted in truth (shrimp is kind of fancy); the type of offbeat riffing that helped Stalter find her niche as a viral comedy star in the early days of the pandemic. But—aside from a quip here or there—I’m surprised by how little the animated 34-year-old seems to “perform” during our lunch at an outdoor cafe in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. She emits a remarkably low-key vibe as we swap stories about being stressed over choosing our outfits (she settled on a cream boho blouse, red bralette, and pleated khaki skirt) and having dogs with separation anxiety. You’d never know she’s about to star in one of the year’s most anticipated TV series, Too Much, which was created by actor and writer Lena Dunham.
In the series, streaming July 10 on Netflix, Stalter plays Jessica, a 30-something who moves to London fresh off a life-altering breakup when her longtime boyfriend, Zev (Michael Zegen), leaves her for an influencer (Emily Ratajkowski). She quickly meets and hits it off with aspiring musician Felix (Will Sharpe), and the two attempt to work out their capital-B baggage together.
Too Much is a departure for Stalter, who for years has played characters—including an amped-up version of herself—that are a little screwball and a lot overconfident. “I’m always playing someone who’s not talented but thinks she’s very talented,” she says. The gag is, of course, that it takes a lot of talent to look this talentless. And the right people swiftly noticed the depth and nuance in her work.
Take Stalter’s breakout role, the kooky talent assistant Kayla Schaefer on Hacks, the acclaimed series about an aging stand-up comedian played by Jean Smart. If it feels written for her, well, it sort of was. “The Kayla character was an amalgamation of assistants we’d encountered in the industry who could be wildly self-assured and also a little blundering at the same time,” showrunner (and Stalter’s frequent scene partner) Paul W. Downs tells Glamour. “Meg was doing characters online that had that exact quality, and she was so funny that, as we polished the pilot, we added ‘think Megan Stalter’ to the script.”
History repeated itself with Too Much. “I knew when I started writing that it was Meg and only Meg,” Dunham says over email. “I saw her face, heard her voice, and she formed Jessica.” And although the show is loosely based on Dunham’s own life, “Jessica isn’t me,” she says. “She’s the alchemy that happens when Meg and I connect.”
Stalter likens the tone of the new show to a “subverted rom-com”: Heartbreak, butterflies, flirting, a tiny canine sidekick—all the essentials are there. But so are the jagged edges that made Girls, Dunham’s beloved 2012 HBO series, so refreshing, which include crippling jealousy, female rage, and unbridled honesty about bodily functions. (In a moment that could be straight out of Hannah Horvath’s journal, Jessica laments, “I don’t know if I’m getting, like, 50 UTIs a year or it’s, like, one long UTI.”)
If Too Much has even an iota of the cultural impact Girls had, Stalter’s stock is about to skyrocket even more. And this lunch—celebratory shrimp and all—is the calm before the storm.
***
If their work is any indication, many comedians aren’t exactly known for having uneventful childhoods. Stalter’s, by contrast, sounds almost too normal. She was born in Cleveland, which, she tells me, is “more fun” than Dayton, Ohio, where she grew up. Her parents divorced, and she’s the oldest of four kids, though she says her “eldest daughter” tendencies begin and end within the household. “When I’m with them, I’m definitely, like, bossy mother,” she says. “But I don’t think I’m bossy or controlling in my regular life.”
Her love for performing started early. In fact, she doesn’t remember a time she didn’t want to perform. “I always was desperate to be on the stage,” she says. “We had these poetry contests where you would pick a poem and perform it, and it would be the highlight of my year.”
In high school, Stalter says she had a difficult time making friends—that is, until she found her place in the drama club. “When I was there, I wasn’t the nerdy, shy person. I was the funny, wild person,” she says. She didn’t get the lead roles, but it didn’t really matter: “I still was the queen of drama club.”
The Stalters were religious; she grew up Pentecostal and in high school became active in a nondenominational church, which she calls a “really intense spiritual experience.”
Stalter, who is bisexual, says she never felt any judgment from the community, although she wasn’t aware of other LGBTQ+ people in the church. “I didn’t know, at the time, that I was gay,” she says. “I thought I was straight—because I’m bi—and so I just didn’t even think about it.”
She later did a mission trip to Peru and still calls herself a “God girl,” which she acknowledges is an “interesting combo” given her sexuality. “I don’t ever feel judged by God,” she tells me.
After high school Stalter took a detour to community college, studying teaching and nursing. Her heart wasn’t in it, though, and she had trouble as a student. Performing was still in the back of her mind, and she started taking improv classes. “I wasn’t good at it,” she says. “I would be the one that would come out in the scene and kill everyone.”
She kept at it, and in her early 20s moved to Chicago to pursue comedy seriously, taking classes at improv institutions such as Second City and iO. She ended up living there for eight years, juggling nannying with her burgeoning career.
It was during that time that her sexuality came into even sharper focus. “When I started dating in a real way, I quickly realized, Okay, I’m into women,” she says. “It feels more like I can connect with them in a different way that’s more natural to me.” (In case you’re curious, yes, she has a girlfriend though chooses not to get into details about her. Still, she offers a glowing—if succinct—rave: “I always love to say that I love her and that she’s a perfect angel.”)
One of her most-watched TikTok and Instagram videos to date is the now iconic “Hi, Gay,” from 2021, in which she bumbles through a faux ad for a butter business posing as a corporate queer “ally.”
“We are sashaying away with deals,” Stalter deadpans in the video. “We have been making butter since 1945, and we have been accepting all people since…the last four months.”
The idea came to her when saw corporations doing, in her words, “gay stuff” for Pride Month. “It was just a quick video, literally just like, making fun of a business that would never be queer-friendly, that’s doing it just to make money,” she says. “It’s a person trying to be an ally that’s never said those words.” More than 2 million Instagram views later, it’s still one of her most successful bits. “People know me from Hacks or, ‘Hi, Gay,’” she says.
There’s no doubt that being able to share her work on social media changed the course of her career. Stalter joins the ranks of a very specific group of creators that thrived during this era. Among them: Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone (who both now star in Skinner’s Amazon Prime series Overcompensating), Ziwe Fumudoh (who had her own eponymous Showtime talk show), and Caleb Hearon (who recently inked a deal for an HBO special). “I will always be grateful for Instagram for that reason,” she says, adding that she’s “not a great auditioner.”
It was the work—both on and off social media—that landed her the supporting role of Kayla on Hacks in 2021, her first professional acting gig.
“Meg is liquid funny,” says Downs. “I loved all her videos, but it was after I was on a standup show with her, where I saw her live, that I knew she was something really special.”
The pair’s dynamic wound up being a special ingredient in the secret sauce of Hacks; what went from a show about the legendary fictional comedian Deborah Vance (Smart) and her head writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), with Kayla and Jimmy as supporting characters, shifted into a true ensemble comedy—and that’s largely thanks to their comedic chemistry. (See the Dance Mom boofing cocaine scene from season four, a true laugh-cry moment of the 2025 TV season).
If Hacks—which has been nominated for 48 Emmy awards since its premiere—was Stalter’s breakout moment, Too Much is her star turn.
As Jessica, she shows what it looks like to be completely cracked open and put back together in your 30s. “It’s about a person who was with someone that thought she was too much in a bad way, and then she finds someone that thinks she’s too much in a good way,” Stalter says. Above all, though, “She actually finds a lot of love for herself. I think it’s romantic in that way.”
Of course, there are sex scenes (a follow-up to Girls wouldn’t feel right without them), but Jessica has a penchant for full-coverage underwear, nightgowns, and at one point, a comically large bandage around her waist.
Stalter was fully in control of what she did or did not wear during the scenes. “I personally didn’t feel the need to go fully topless,” she says. “It all made sense to me without [nudity], and I never felt any pressure that it was needed.” She says she understands that some people feel it’s empowering to do nude scenes but insists that, for her, “I kind of feel like it’s empowering not to.”
Like her character, Stalter admits to being homesick during the four and a half months she spent in London during filming. Having an “instant friend” in Dunham soothed her. “I felt so connected to her from the very first time I met her,” Stalter says. “It felt almost like we were making it just for us.”
The feeling is mutual for Dunham. “We really cackle together and love to extend one joke for weeks, months, or years,” she says. “We also both love to play with style, to have fun and push boundaries and be girlish and sweet, yet funny and tough.” She was drawn to Stalter’s spirituality too. “I love her connection to her God, and how attuned she is to that part of her life, which can be rare to find in his business.”
We can all thank Andrew Scott, a.k.a. Fleabag’s Hot Priest, for first introducing Dunham to Stalter’s videos while on the set of the 2022 comedy-adventure film Catherine Called Birdy. “He’s always ahead of the crowd, and he had fanned out and had a coffee with her,” Dunham says. “[He] basically said, ‘You two have to meet, you have something to make together.’ I trust him implicitly, and went home and watched everything she’d ever made—and of course Hacks, which is divine in its own right.”
Like millions of millennials—and, now, younger viewers discovering Girls for the first time—Stalter likely considers Dunham the voice of her generation (or at least a voice. Of a generation), so to be the lead in her return to TV was, in a word, surreal. “I was watching a show about my 20s when I was 20, and now I get to be in her show about being in your 30s as a 34-year-old,” she says. “It’s so special.”
Stalter says Dunham is “protective” of her, given the ups and downs Dunham experienced during the height of her Girls fame. (Dunham largely stepped away from the spotlight and now lives in London with husband Luis Felber.) But having forged a career on social media from day one, Stalter feels prepared. “I’ve already had such bad things said about me that I guess I didn’t have any questions about people’s opinions about me, or my body, or anything like that.”
Tuning out the haters is something she had to navigate this past March. While appearing on the podcast Who’s the Asshole With Katya, the host asked Stalter what she thought about some people who lie about using weight-loss drugs.
“Let’s just say the trips to the bathroom would say otherwise, okay? We know if you’re on it because you’re shitting your pants,” she replied. “How is that hotter than being fat? That is insane to me.” She added, “I would rather be 500 pounds than shitting all day.”
The take garnered some press attention, which Stalter says was somewhat misconstrued. “They were like, ‘Meg Stalter slams Ozempic,’” she says. “It’s like, no. I was saying that for people that don’t need it, there’s bad side effects. It’s life-changing if you need it.”
Stalter is refreshingly comfortable in her own skin—a rarity in Hollywood (and everywhere else, really). “It’s one thing [if someone uses Ozempic for] health, but there’s a lot of healthy people in bigger bodies,” she says. “I don’t get it. I guess I’m so lucky to love my fat ass.”
***
Over lunch, I ask Stalter if she’s ever felt like too much. “I’ve probably always felt that I was,” she says. But as she’s gotten older, she’s embraced that part of herself. “I love myself so much now.”
She relates the question back to her drama club days. “[I thought] if I can make myself really, really small and quiet, then maybe I’ll be hurt less by the students,” she says. “And then I found the drama club, and I was able to be too much.”
Between Too Much, Hacks (which was recently picked up for a fifth season), and working on new material, Stalter has a full dance card these days. In her rare free time, she likes to paint; she’s gotten really good at flowers. “The other day I said to my girlfriend, ‘What do you have to do to get one of these in a museum?’ I was serious,” she says.
Meg Stalter reiterates how lucky she feels—and has always felt—doing comedy. “When I was in Ohio doing an improv class, I was like, I can’t believe I get to do this,” she says. “Even when I didn’t have any money, and I was nannying all day, I still couldn’t believe I got to be on the show at night.”
Maybe it’s because, deep down, she believed she would get where she needed to go. “I kind of always knew it would happen some time; I don’t know why,” she says. “I think you have to be a little delusional to really believe that’s going to happen.”
Photographer: Luke GilfordStylist: Kat TypaldosHair: Clayton HawkinsMakeup: Alexandra FrenchManicure: Marisa CarmichaelSet Design: Bette AdamsProducer: Anthony Federici/Petty Cash Productions
The post Megan Stalter Is the Main Character appeared first on Glamour.
