Kristen Schaal, the voice of Louise Belcher whose best work happens on small stages

Kristen Schaal

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 24, 1978 Longmont, Colorado, United States
Occupation	Actress and comedian
Known for	Toy Story 3, Toy Story 4, Despicable Me 2
Awards	2 Annie · Barry Award, Melbourne International Comedy Festival (shared) · Andy Kaufman

Millions of people could pick Kristen Schaal out of a crowd with their eyes closed. The voice does it: high and bright, a child’s pitch carrying an adult comic’s timing, rented out for years to a bunny-eared schemer behind a New Jersey burger counter and to a sweater-loving twin in an Oregon tourist trap. What it rarely reveals is the person using it, a writer-performer who still books small rooms to stage a ballet about a creature with a secret, and who looks more at ease there than on any soundstage.

The road to those rooms starts on a cattle ranch in the countryside outside Boulder, Colorado, where Schaal grew up in a Lutheran family of Dutch descent; her father worked in construction and her mother as a secretary. After Skyline High School she spent a year at the University of Colorado Boulder, then finished her degree at Northwestern University.

Schaal, who was born in nearby Longmont on January 24, 1978, moved to New York in 2000 with the stated aim of becoming a comedian. In 2005 her character work at the People’s Improv Theater put her on New York magazine’s list of “The Ten Funniest New Yorkers You’ve Never Heard Of,” and the prizes followed: the Andy Kaufman Award that year, Best Alternative Comedian at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen in 2006, and in 2008 the Barry Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, shared in a tie with Nina Conti. That August she and Kurt Braunohler were nominated for the If.comedy award in Edinburgh for their double act Double Down Hearts. She also co-founded the Story Pirates, a company that turns children’s stories into sketches and songs, an early clue to the register she would make her own.

Television found her through two very different doors. On HBO’s Flight of the Conchords she played Mel, the band’s lone and alarmingly devoted fan, whose affection for two deadpan New Zealand musicians tipped cheerfully into stalking. From 2008 she turned up on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show as its “Senior Women’s Issues Correspondent,” a run that lasted until 2016 and aimed the same wide-eyed sincerity at actual news.

Then came the part that rearranged everything. Since Bob’s Burgers premiered on Fox in 2011 she has voiced Louise Belcher, the youngest of the family, a nine-year-old operator in pink bunny ears whose cynicism usually loses, at the last minute, to her conscience. A year later Disney Channel’s Gravity Falls cast her as Mabel Pines, twin sister to Jason Ritter’s Dipper, a role she played until Alex Hirsch closed the series on his own terms in 2016. Each brought her an Annie Award for television voice acting, Mabel in 2013 and Louise in 2016. Pixar, meanwhile, had made her Trixie, the triceratops in Bonnie’s toy box, from Toy Story 3 onward.

Live action kept her mostly at the edge of the frame. She was the unsettling NBC page Hazel Wassername on 30 Rock. In 2015 Will Forte gave her the nearest thing to a lead she has had on network television: Carol Pilbasian in The Last Man on Earth, a rule-bound notary from Delaware who answers the “Alive in Tucson” sign and insists on a wedding before anyone repopulates the planet. On Netflix‘s BoJack Horseman she voiced Sarah Lynn, the former child star whose collapse gave the series some of its darkest episodes, and that performance earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2017.

Here is the bargain the voice strikes. The instrument that makes Louise and Mabel impossible to mistake also makes it easy to file Schaal under a single heading, the oddball, and most of her screen work stays inside it. Carol was built as the irritant in one man’s empty paradise, and some early viewers of The Last Man on Earth took the bait; critics noted that the second season, rebuilt around her chemistry with Forte, won some of them back. Fox cancelled the show in 2018, days after a cliffhanger it never resolved. The sidekick label also misses how much say she has had behind the microphone. At the 2018 Bob’s Burgers Comic-Con panel, creator Loren Bouchard acknowledged how male the voice cast was and credited Schaal with “reprimanding” the producers over it.

The following decade was an ensemble one. On FX’s What We Do in the Shadows she floated through the series as the Guide, the Vampiric Council envoy who teleports short distances and keeps failing to win over the vampires she serves, until the series ended in December 2024. Disney+ made her Number Two in The Mysterious Benedict Society; on film she played the daughter of George Carlin’s character in Bill & Ted Face the Music and Bobbi in the My Spy films.

This year has been one of her busiest. She returned as Trixie in Toy Story 5, which opened in US theaters on June 19 and has grossed $1.148 billion worldwide, the highest total in the franchise. In July Adult Swim launched President Curtis, the Rick and Morty spin-off from Dan Harmon and James Siciliano, and its second episode had her voicing Amelia Earhart, a nod that Bob’s Burgers fans caught at once: Louise worships the aviator in an episode named after her. In May she sprinted onto the stage of the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles from the audience, back in character as Mel, during a Flight of the Conchords reunion show.

The project that says most about her is the one she wrote. The Legend of Crystal Shell, in which she stars alongside John Roberts, Linda Belcher to her Louise, follows a special soul who has been hiding from the world because of a fantastic secret, revealed during a performance of Swan Lake danced by the title character. Big Black Delta wrote the music and Frank Smith directed. It played SF Sketchfest in January and Netflix Is a Joke Fest in Los Angeles in May, then went to the Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, the festival where she and Braunohler were nominated nearly two decades earlier.

Schaal has been married since 2012 to the comedy writer Rich Blomquist, formerly of The Daily Show, with whom she wrote the humor book The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex; their daughter was born in 2018.

The Belchers come next. Fox has moved the 17th season of Bob’s Burgers to a midseason premiere in early 2027, and a four-season order keeps the show on air through its 19th season in 2028–29, so Louise’s ears, and the voice under them, are booked for years. What she puts in the gaps between recording sessions is the better guide to who she is, and Crystal Shell suggests it will keep turning up on small stages.