The making of a sitcom star
Lauren Ash has gone from Second City to TV comedy
Lauren Ash was always destined for a career in comedy.
After six seasons of playing the no-nonsense assistant manager Dina Fox on the NBC workplace comedy “Superstore,” Ash has stepped into the role of a new kind of bad boss on the ABC newsroom sitcom “Not Dead Yet,” which recently returned for its sophomore season and airs on CTV in Canada.
Adapted from Alexandra Potter’s novel “Confessions of a FortySomething F**k Up” by “This Is Us” co-executive producers Casey Johnson and David Windsor, “Not Dead Yet” follows Nell Serrano (Gina Rodriguez), a once-promising journalist who moves back to Southern California after a bad breakup and returns to her old newspaper job. Tasked with writing obituaries, Nell soon discovers that she can see her subjects, who don’t hesitate to give her advice from the afterlife.
Ash plays Lexi Rhodes, Nell’s hilariously out-of-touch (and uberrich) boss, who still longs for the affection and approval of her domineering father, Duncan (new cast member Brad Garrett), the owner of the paper.
It’s a particularly meaty role for the Canadian actor, who said she wanted Lexi to feel like a real person and not like a caricature of wealth and privilege. “Lexi is not a sociopath; she’s not a bad person in my opinion,” Ash, 41, said in a recent video interview from her home in Los Angeles.
Lexi likely grew up in a world where her wealth and status gave her everything she wanted, including other people’s love and respect, but she finds it difficult to form a genuine connection with those who don’t take her at face value. “She’s someone who is the product of her environment and her upbringing and, unfortunately, she’s learning at an advanced age that that’s actually not what you need to do to make real connections in the world and in life,” Ash added.
“Not Dead Yet” arrived at a serendipitous time in Ash’s own life. A few years ago, she lost a close friend to breast cancer and began experiencing an acute kind of grief. Given that grief is still considered a taboo subject in Western culture, Ash said working on this show and speaking with her cast mates has been a way to unpack her own feelings surrounding the loss of a loved one whom she considered a kindred spirit and reflection of herself.
“I talk about my dead friend a lot, and I talk about what that felt like and what does that mean for me? What it means for me is that I have to live as hard and as big as I possibly can in this time because aging is a privilege that is not afforded to all,” Ash said.
“The kind of concepts, especially in Hollywood, about not aging and staying young are so sad to me now through this lens. We, as a society, don’t celebrate people who are aging and wise, and all of the beautiful things that come along with that. It’s a competition to see how young we can all look and feel.
“Grief takes on many different shapes and sizes in life that I think we just don’t typically talk about, which I love about this show,” Ash added.
In Lexi’s case, she is grieving the end of her marriage and the years she wasted yearning for her father’s acceptance. “I think it’s having the audience think about (grief) in a thoughtful way and think about what that means to them in terms of people they’ve lost and their own mortality.”
Ash has long believed that comedy is a great vehicle to discuss heavy existential questions. Born and raised in Belleville, Ont., Ash was selected to join the Second City comedy troupe’s touring company when she was 18, making her the youngest woman ever hired.
She toured for three years and spent another two years on the Second City Toronto mainstage, but she quickly set her sights on the Chicago mainstage, wanting to follow in the footsteps of comics who went on to work on “Saturday Night Live.” She became one of only four Canadians — along with Mike Myers, John Candy and Lisa Brooke — chosen to perform on the Chicago stage. But the rest of her plan didn’t quite pan out.
“Lorne Michaels came to one of my shows, and he flew out the other women in the show and not me, and I didn’t get an audition,” Ash said. “It was this moment of, ‘Wow, I’ve worked at this point for many years and this was my only goal.’ It made me have to reflect and go, ‘Well, what else is there?’ ”
Ash then spent a few years living between Toronto and Los Angeles, depending on what kind of work she was able to find. Over the years, she became a fixture of Canadian television (“The Dating Guy,” “The Ron James Show”) and eventually broke into American sitcoms (“Super Fun Night,” “Another Period”), but she acknowledged there is a fundamental difference between both markets.
“There was one night where I was scrolling through the channels and I was like, ‘I’m on five shows at the same time in Canada and no one knows who I am,’” Ash recalled with a laugh. “It was such an interesting moment on that journey where I was going, ‘Wow, if I was in America and I was a lead on three shows and guest-starring on two shows on the same night on American television, I would be the biggest star in the world.’ But it doesn’t work that way back home.”
Despite being a modest hit during its network run in the U.S., “Superstore” found a second life on Netflix during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ash, who noticed a significant shift overnight in her social-media following, joked that it took her 25 years to become an “overnight sensation”: she landed her first commercial agent at 13, but didn’t experience the kind of mainstream success that most actors dream of until she was 38.
“When you get a lot of opportunity and a lot of success and fame at a young age, that is a tough, often difficult journey in this industry,” she said. “So for me, it was really beautiful and wonderful to have it be a very slow burn, and require a lot of time and work to get to where I was when that show kind of blew up.”
Ash chose not to come home during the pandemic, instead hunkering down in Los Angeles for a few years. When she did return to Toronto last summer to visit some family and friends, Ash could tell she had reached a new level of visibility. “I look quite different than I did on ‘Superstore,’ so I thought maybe I would get recognized a little bit, but it got wacky,” she said.
“I really didn’t anticipate not being able to go to the Eaton Centre without having some kind of situation happening. I didn’t anticipate sitting on a Fox & Fiddle patio and having to leave eventually because the stream of people coming for photos was just non-stop. Again, it’s in no way a complaint. I want to make that clear. It’s more just that I didn’t know that that was who I was,” Ash said with a laugh. “I was operating as I always had in my life in Toronto, but it’s a different world there for me now.”