Annie Murphy spent six years running from Alexis Rose, until a rom-com caught up

Annie Murphy

Photo: Canadian Film Centre, Sam Santos / George Pimentel / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 19, 1986 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, Fingernails, Picture This
Awards	Emmy · Critics' Choice · Gracie

There is a version of Annie Murphy that the internet settled on years ago: a voice pitched somewhere between a purr and a whine, a hand flapping loose at the wrist, the word “ew” stretched across three syllables. Alexis Rose, the stranded heiress of Schitt’s Creek, gave her an Emmy and a permanent place in reaction-GIF culture. Nearly everything Murphy has chosen since has been an argument with that girl. The surprise of her new film is that she seems to have stopped arguing.

Murphy grew up in Ottawa, the daughter of two teachers, and found acting through school productions at Elmwood School. She spent a year at Queen’s University before moving to Concordia University in Montreal, where she took a degree in theatre performance, and then trained at the Canadian Film Centre’s Actors’ Conservatory.

The early work was drama, which was a problem for someone who wanted to be funny. Her screen debut came in the television thriller Lethal Obsession in 2007, when she was 20, followed by small parts in films such as Story of Jen and guest spots on Rookie Blue. She has described herself in that period as a struggling actress who was “begging to go in for comedies” while her résumé told casting directors something else.

By 2013 she was close to quitting. Her house had burned down, she had, by her own account, three dollars in the bank and almost two years without work, and she had just blown her first screen test. She remembers crying in the Pacific Ocean and taking it as a sign to stop. Two days later came the audition for Schitt’s Creek.

Dan Levy and Eugene Levy’s sitcom about a bankrupt family exiled to a town the father once bought as a joke ran for six seasons, from January 2015 to April 2020. Murphy’s Alexis began as its most cartoonish figure, a socialite whose past was a blur of yachts and implausible escapes, and ended as its quietest success story, a woman who builds her own business and walks away from a relationship that would have kept her small. The audience grew slowly, then very fast once the series reached Netflix, and the final season swept the seven main comedy categories at the Emmys in September 2020. Murphy won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and added nominations at the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice Television Awards.

What came next looked like a plan. In Kevin Can F**k Himself, the AMC series that ran for two seasons from 2021, she played Allison McRoberts, a wife who lives in two formats: inside a bright, laugh-tracked sitcom as the punchline to her oafish husband, and outside it, in a grim single-camera drama, plotting to be rid of him. In 2022 she played the younger Ruth Brenner in the second season of Russian Doll. A year later she was the title character of Joan Is Awful, the Black Mirror episode in which an ordinary tech manager discovers that a streaming service has turned her life into a drama starring Salma Hayek, a role that won her a Critics’ Choice Super Award. She has been blunt about the motive. “After six years of Schitt’s Creek, I was like, ‘Is this all I can do?'” she told Bustle, adding that she had been trying to take roles “so far from Alexis.”

The plan only half worked. Kevin Can F**k Himself was a sharper concept than it was a show, and it ended after its second season. The Black Mirror episode was a satire that depended on her being recognisable, which is to say it ran on the very fame she was trying to step around. The voice work that followed, a scheming mermaid in DreamWorks’ Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken and the lead in Freeform’s short-lived animated series Praise Petey, kept her busy without answering the question. In the second season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers she was Imogen, a linguistics academic who drags her mother, played by Christine Baranski, to a retreat in the Austrian Alps. Six years of running from Alexis had produced a respectable résumé and no defining second role.

This year has moved faster. In January she lost Catherine O’Hara, her television mother, who died at 71; Murphy’s tribute remembered a laugh that worked like a permanent “yes, and” and passed on the lessons it taught her: “Giggles always. Jokes first.” In July she turned up as Tawny, a human newscaster, in Breaking Bear, Tubi’s adult animated crime parody about a family of drug-dealing bears voiced by Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Josh Gad. Between March and June she shot Poser, an eight-episode psychological thriller for Netflix from On My Block creator Lauren Iungerich, about two estranged best friends, with Daisy Jelley and Sadie Stanley.

Then came Toronto. All That She Wants, written and directed by Scarlett Bermingham and Andrew Rhymer, had its world premiere in the Toronto International Film Festival’s Special Presentations section on September 13. Murphy plays Emma, a woman in her mid-thirties who leaves a boyfriend who does not want children and, on a night out with her sister, played by Zosia Mamet, falls for Luke, a graduate student more than a decade younger, played by Cooper Raiff, who turns out to be the four-year-old she once babysat. The reviews were among the best of her career. IndieWire’s headline welcomed her to the “Rom-Com Queen Club”; Variety found her and Raiff well matched; The Playlist asked for “more of her. Much more.” It is a romantic comedy, the genre she spent her twenties begging to audition for, and it makes the case that her comic instinct was never the thing holding her back.

Away from the set, Murphy married the musician Menno Versteeg, frontman of Hollerado and Anyway Gang, in 2011; they were the couple who lost almost everything in the 2013 fire. She is an ambassador for the relief agency CARE Canada, and she has a tattoo of James Stewart‘s silhouette on her wrist, a tribute to his performance in Harvey.

What comes next is less settled than the reviews suggest. All That She Wants left Toronto without an announced distributor, Poser has no Netflix date, and Witness Protection, the comedy Carrie Brownstein was announced to direct in 2022, with Murphy starring and producing from a script by Schitt’s Creek writers Rupinder Gill and David West Read, has yet to reach a screen. Its heroine is a woman who has always defined herself through her relationships and is forced to find out who she is under a false name. For an actress who has spent six years hiding from one character, it reads like the part she has been rehearsing for.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Annie Murphy, black mirror, Cooper Raiff, All That She Wants, Catherine O'Hara, Schitt's Creek

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