Leslie Grossman, the Actress Ryan Murphy Keeps Writing Parts For

Leslie Grossman

Photo: Fabio Sousa / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 25, 1971 Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, Can't Hardly Wait, Studio 666

Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt was supposed to be the joke of the apocalypse. When Ryan Murphy introduced her in the Apocalypse chapter of American Horror Story, she was a vapid Beverly Hills heiress waiting out the end of the world in a fallout shelter; by the final episode she had turned out to be a witch with a gift for divination and a room at Miss Robichaux’s Academy. This autumn Coco is back, in the crossover season titled simply 13, and the actress who plays her knows the pattern by heart. Leslie Grossman keeps being cast as the woman nobody takes seriously, and Murphy keeps finding the trapdoor underneath her.

The trapdoor was there from the start. Grossman went to her first major audition hoping to land a lead in Popular, Murphy’s first television series, and read for both Sam McPherson and Nicole Julian. She got neither. Murphy wrote her a third part instead: Mary Cherry, a cheerleader with a bottomless credit card and no internal brakes, built around what Grossman had done in the room. “All the things I did I promise you were just to make Ryan laugh,” she later told Entertainment Tonight. The show lasted two seasons on The WB and, by her own account, “nobody really watched it.” Mary Cherry outlived it anyway. Strangers still bring her up.

Grossman grew up in Los Angeles, where she was born on October 25, 1971, and came to performing sideways. At Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in Santa Monica she directed plays rather than starring in them, and she did not start acting until her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College. A bit part in Can’t Hardly Wait and a one-episode turn in Charmed came before the audition that set her course.

After Popular ended, The WB kept her. In What I Like About You she played Lauren, co-worker and closest friend to Jennie Garth’s Val, in a sitcom built around Amanda Bynes; she began as a recurring presence and joined the main cast in the second season. The decade that followed was a working actor’s decade in the most literal sense. There was a guest role in Nip/Tuck, her second Murphy show, and a part in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous opposite Sandra Bullock, then a long run of single episodes on network television. In The Good Place she played Donna Shellstrop, the neglectful mother who explains a great deal about Kristen Bell‘s Eleanor.

Then Murphy sent a text. “I want you to be on this upcoming season,” it read, and Grossman has admitted she said yes with “a lot of trepidation about whether I was good enough.” The season was Cult, in 2017, and she played Meadow Wilton, a neighbor pulled into Kai Anderson’s cult, plus a flashback turn as the Manson follower Patricia Krenwinkel. A year later she was a series regular. Since then American Horror Story has used her as a utility player with one particular gift: Margaret Booth, the devout owner of Camp Redwood in 1984, whose sweetness hides a killer; the ruthless literary agent Ursula in Double Feature; Barbara Read, the wife of a closeted police detective, in NYC; the publicist Ashleigh in Delicate.

The obvious reading of this career is gratitude, and Grossman supplies it freely. Murphy, she told Nylon in 2018, “really has been such an unbelievable gift to my career.” The less flattering reading is dependency. Popular, Nip/Tuck, The New Normal, American Horror Story and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story all came through the same producer, while the rest of the industry mostly asked her for one or two episodes at a time. The oblivious rich woman is a type she plays better than almost anyone working, but it is a narrow corridor. The parts that broke out of it, such as Margaret Booth’s piety curdling into murder or Barbara Read’s grief, were written by Murphy’s rooms for an actress they already trusted. Her best work has relied on someone else’s willingness to look past the punchline.

That trust carried her into true crime in 2024. In Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Netflix‘s dramatization of the Beverly Hills killings, she played Judalon Smyth, the mistress of the brothers’ therapist Jerome Oziel, whose information pointed police toward his recorded sessions. The same autumn she appeared in one episode of Nobody Wants This as Rabbi Shira, the former camp counselor who mentors Adam Brody’s Noah, in a series led by Kristen Bell, whose mother she had once played. In 2022 she had already gone full horror-comedy as Barb Weems in Studio 666, the Foo Fighters’ haunted-recording-session film.

This year the corridor widened in a direction no one had mapped. In June, Starz premiered the fifth and final season of Power Book III: Raising Kanan with Grossman as Florence “Flossie” Siegel, Manhattan’s most prolific madam. The series was created by Sascha Penn, whom she married in July 2025 on Martha’s Vineyard, after the two met on a dating app. Penn has insisted the casting came from his writers’ room, where Flossie already existed on the page before a staff writer suggested his wife. “It wasn’t even my idea,” he told People. In August it was reported that Grossman would carry Flossie into Power: Origins, the prequel Penn created with Courtney A. Kemp.

Meanwhile American Horror Story: 13 premiered on FX on September 24, 2026, streaming on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ internationally. Set in a Manhattan building called the Apollyon and built as a crossover of every earlier season, it returns Coco to the company of Sarah Paulson, Jessica Lange, Evan Peters and Angela Bassett. Grossman has described the show as one universe with different timelines that “intersect in a way that makes sense.”

Grossman, who is Jewish, has a daughter, Goldie, from her earlier marriage to Jon Bronson. When she and Penn celebrated their wedding with a New Year’s Eve dinner at the Chateau Marmont, it was Murphy who planned it.

The thirteen-episode season runs until its finale on October 29. After that the next confirmed stop is Power: Origins, which has no premiere date yet. For an actress whose first great part was invented around her, Flossie is a different kind of test: a character written before anyone thought of Leslie Grossman, which she now gets to take into a second series.

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