Ari Graynor

OF ‘I’M DYING UP HERE’ ON SHOWTIME

Had you tried stand-up comedy prior to your role as Cassie on “I’m Dying Up Here”?

I did a bit. You know, I come from theater so I’ve done a lot of comedy on stage. Of course, that is a wildly different than standing nakedly on stage by yourself with a microphone sharing yourself. There is no character to hide behind. So that was a very different experience for me. I felt like I had some handle on how to sell a joke, but in terms of that really raw experience of just being yourself talking to an audience, that was not my comfort zone. I ended up doing a couple of open mikes just to know that I could do it, to give it a try to see how terrifying it was, and I’m really glad I did. And this whole process of being part of the show has given me such a different outlook on stand-up and such a deep respect for the work that people do up there that is so layered and so multifaceted.

Did you pick up things from the stand-ups on the show?

Yeah, absolutely. I think last season especially there was a lot of stuff together, there was a lot of stuff in the club, there was a lot of focus on the stand-up, on the stand-up we were doing, on where the stand-up was getting us, which rooms we were doing it in, and that was a really formative time and experience with all of those guys. You know, it was like osmosis and wanting to learn and play catch-up, and I think there’s this sort of interesting dynamic of primarily actors on one side and primarily comics on the other and this meeting point in the middle where the actors are becoming comics a little bit and comics are leaning into being actors. So I think we were all sort of learning from each other.