Lauren Lapkus, the improviser Hollywood kept at the edge of the frame

Lauren Lapkus

Photo: Fuzzy Gerdes / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 6, 1985 Evanston, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Actress and comedian
Known for	Jurassic World, Blended, Happiest Season
Awards	SAG Award (shared)

There is a version of Lauren Lapkus that comedy obsessives know by heart and most television viewers have never met. On an improv stage or in a podcast booth she builds a character out of nothing, keeps it alive for an hour and dares the people across the microphone to keep up. On screen, for most of her career, she has stood at the edge of the frame: the rookie prison guard, the receptionist, the ex-wife, the woman behind the comic-book counter. Her current job, a sitcom built on parallel universes, asks her to play one woman in several versions at once, which is the closest television has come to showing what she actually does.

The habit started early and close to home. Lapkus was born and raised in Evanston, the lakefront suburb on Chicago’s northern edge, in a family of Greek and Lithuanian descent. As a child she filmed sketches with her older brother; at Evanston Township High School she performed in YAMO, the student revue, and in her senior year she started taking classes at the iO Theater, the Chicago improv school co-founded by Del Close. She kept performing most nights while studying English at DePaul University, and she has credited a childhood spent watching sitcoms and Saturday Night Live with pointing her toward comedy.

After graduating in 2008 she moved west, where the work began with commercials for Snickers and Jack in the Box and a sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, enough to land representation and then a supporting part in the short-lived sitcom Are You There, Chelsea? The break came from a self-taped audition. Lapkus was cast as Susan Fischer, a green correctional officer, in the first two seasons of Orange Is the New Black, and she returned for the final season in 2019. In 2015 she shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble performance in a comedy series.

The work that built her reputation among comedians happened in audio. In 2014 she launched With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus on the Earwolf network, a show that inverted the interview format: each week the guest was the host of another podcast, and Lapkus arrived as a character for them to interrogate. It ran for some 150 episodes. She has since co-hosted Threedom with Scott Aukerman and Paul F. Tompkins and, from 2020, Newcomers with Nicole Byer, in which the two watched franchises such as Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings for the first time. She has admitted she never expected to get into podcasts at all. Onstage she has been part of Asssscat, the long-running flagship show of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and of the improv group Wild Horses.

Film and television caught up in pieces. In Jurassic World she played Vivian, a technician in the park’s control room, and improvised much of her material with Jake Johnson. She wrote and starred in her own episode of the Netflix sketch series Netflix Presents: The Characters, then co-hosted the fake 3 a.m. morning programme The Earliest Show with Ben Schwartz for Funny or Die, a largely improvised web series that earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination for short-form acting in 2017. On HBO she played Jess, the ex-wife of Pete Holmes‘s character, across the three seasons of Crashing. In the last stretch of The Big Bang Theory she became Denise, the employee and later girlfriend of comic-book store owner Stuart Bloom, and on NBC she spent two seasons of Good Girls as FBI agent Phoebe Donnegan. Animation used her range more freely: she voiced Lotta in Harvey Girls Forever! and the Andorian ensign Jennifer Sh’reyan in Star Trek: Lower Decks.

The awkward part of the record is where her biggest showcases landed. Her most-watched lead arrived in The Wrong Missy, a Netflix comedy from Adam Sandler‘s Happy Madison company in which she plays the nightmare first date David Spade accidentally invites to a corporate retreat. Critics dismissed the film, and the Rotten Tomatoes consensus said she lifted it above abject failure; in Variety, Owen Gleiberman wrote that she was “like a grenade of happy insanity tossed into the middle of every scene.” Netflix reported that 59 million households watched it in its first four weeks. Two years earlier she had been Millie, the object of Sherlock’s obsession, in Holmes & Watson, which won the Razzie for worst picture. Even her Emmy nomination came for branded content sponsored by a breakfast cereal. The pattern says less about her than about an industry that measures comedians by vehicles: the improvised, long-form, audio-first work that made her reputation is precisely the kind no awards body or casting grid knows how to count.

The recent run looks different. After supporting roles in Happiest Season and the Netflix action comedy The Out-Laws, and a lead in the independent Another Happy Day, which she also executive produced, Lapkus became a series regular in Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the Big Bang Theory spinoff created by Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady and Zak Penn. It premiered on HBO Max on July 23, 2026, with Kevin Sussman as Stuart, who breaks a quantum device and has to stop the multiverse from collapsing, and with Lapkus playing Denise along with the alternate Denises he meets on the way. The ten-episode season drew generally favourable reviews, and HBO Max renewed it four weeks into its run; Penn has said the second season should film early in 2027 and arrive later that year. In June she was also at the Tribeca Festival with That Friend, a comedy by Alex Wall and Will Sterling in which she plays Jessa alongside Harvey Guillén and Billie Lourd, and in May her old high school brought her back as its commencement speaker.

Lapkus, who was born on September 6, 1985, married the actor Mike Castle in 2018; they have two daughters, born in 2021 and 2024. An earlier marriage, to the actor and improviser Chris Alvarado, ended in divorce in 2016.

Her next project points straight back at the material that made her. Amplify Pictures has ordered a full season of The Earliest Show as a television series, written and directed by Schwartz, with Lapkus returning as his co-host Sam and Henry Winkler among the recurring cast. No premiere date has been announced. Between that and a second trip through Stuart’s multiverse, the improviser who spent years at the edge of other people’s shows is heading for two that put her much closer to the middle of the frame.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Ben Schwartz, the big bang theory, Orange Is the New Black, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Kevin Sussman, Lauren Lapkus, The Wrong Missy

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