You should really know Jillian Bell by now
LOS ANGELES – If the name Jillian Bell doesn’t ring a bell, well, you haven’t been paying attention.
She’s the secret weapon in a laundry list of huge comedies from the past decade, who delivers insanely outthere dialogue so dryly, you hear it and think “Wait, what?!”
Chances are, the line was something off the cuff about “Jurassic Park,” crystal meth or playing pinochle, and you may have heard it in “Workaholics,” “Eastbound & Down,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “22 Jump Street,” “Rough Night,” “Office Christmas Party,” “Goosebumps,” “Fist Fight” or “The Night Before.”
It’s no wonder the quips are so silly: Bell has been honing her comedy chops since her mom enrolled her in an improv class at age 8.
“I wasn’t doing well with other kid activities like ballet class, but I was like, ‘Give me a situation, give me a time of day!’ “Bell says. “I really liked making people laugh.”
At 35, that much hasn’t changed for the actress whose roles may seem dull on paper (eager office manager, conservative wife, possessive best friend), but she makes them memorable by imbuing them with such idiosyncrasies as short tempers, confusing feminist ideals and an affinity for onesies, so they become deliciously surprising and droll. In the last decade, she quietly has become the best supporting actor of every show and movie she’s been in – and more loudly starred in her Comedy Central series “Idiotsitter,” where she embodied the titular, well, erratic “idiot” who’s under house arrest.
But it’s time for her big-screen break, and it’s here. As the lead, Bell is in every scene of “Brittany Runs a Marathon” (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expanding to Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington and other cities) and also executive-produced the dramedy.
Bell is Brittany, a woman who uses running as a tool to help gain control of her unraveling world. Based on a true story, “Brittany Runs a Marathon” won an audience award at Sundance Film Festival this year by addressing weight and self-discovery in a way that feels fresh and also wrenches your guts.
She was tired of seeing the “transformation tale where someone loses weight and then their life’s immediately great and then it rolls the credits and you’re like, ‘Well, what did we learn from that?’ “Bell says. “For me, this was the movie I wanted to see when I was an 11-, 12-, 13-year-old girl.”
Here are five times the expert improviser got more laughs than the title
characters:
‘22 Jump Street’ (2014)
As villain Mercedes, Bell had plenty of memorable moments opposite Jonah Hill’s police officer Schmidt, many of which involved her making fun of how old he looks when he goes undercover as a college student.
“Jillian makes me want to quit show business and realize I am a complete fraud because she is the funniest person I have ever met in my life,” Hill once said in a roundtable interview for “22 Jump Street.”
‘Workaholics’ (2011 to 2017)
For six years, Bell played socially awkward office manager Jillian Belk in the fratty Comedy Central series co-created by Blake Anderson, Adam Devine and Anders Holm. Though she wasn’t part of the triumvirate central to the show, she became the most enjoyable and multidimensional character to watch, with her outbursts and outrageous attempts at forming friendships. “We always knew that she had to be in it,” Anderson told Vanity Fair about casting Bell. “We poached her” from another improv group.
‘Eastbound & Down’ (2013)
In the final season of Danny McBride’s HBO series, Bell plays Dixie.
It’s a character that could’ve been as memorable as wallpaper: a wife who doesn’t get jokes and carries on inane dinner conversation. But Bell makes the character comically vanilla, even turning a conversation about her sex life into something mind-numbingly boring.
‘Office Christmas Party’ (2016)
This cliched comedy is filled with such funny people as Jason Bateman, T.J. Miller and Rob Corddry, yet Bell plays the only indelible character: Trina, a pimp. She initially comes off like an overprotective mom to a young female escort, before taking out a gun and threatening to shoot everyone.
“This week has been a scheduling nightmare. My iCal crashed and now all my appointments are set in 2019,” she says in one scene, getting angry when her driver tries to shut a car door for her. “I can close it myself! I’m a woman in 2016. Jesus.”
‘Rough Night’ (2017)
As the former college roommate of bride-to-be Scarlett Johansson’s Jess, Bell’s Alice is a Type A bachelorette party organizer. Though Kate McKinnon’s Aussie character Pippa has the movie’s most over-the-top scenes, the subtler moments of Alice wanting to make sure that everyone has the greatest time ever really hit home. After she accidentally kills a man, Bell’s character says, “This can still be the best weekend of our (expletive) lives! Let’s just smile a little bit about it, right? Smile more.”
As McKinnon put it, Bell “may be the funniest woman alive.”