M
eg Stalter was fighting in a hot tub. She had come to a water park in Wisconsin to relax between stops on her comedy tour, which was styled as a series of fake rallies for a rich, famous, and clueless person running for president. (I know this is a difficult political scenario to imagine, but please stay with me.) While Stalter soaked, she became enraged by a group of hot-tub dwellers who were not embodying what she considered to be the spirit of the aquatic center, and she began screaming back and forth with them. “Wow, you seem like a lot of fun,” Stalter yelled, informing them that there were three other sections of the park they could move to if they had a problem with this particular one. Then she stood up, said, “You know what? I’m going to show you that if you don’t like to be around someone, you get up and leave,” turned, and banged her head on the wall.

This is probably tracking for those who know Stalter from her live performances, or Hacks, on which she plays the indefatigably clueless nepo-agent Kayla, or Stalter’s Instagram, which showcases her myriad well-­meaning, clueless characters, such as the personification of a business attempting to project allyship to the LQBTQIA+ community. (“Hi, gay! Happy Pride Month. We are sashaying away with deals.”) These talents are deployed to great effect on Too Much (July 10), the new Netflix series from married co-creators Lena Dunham and Luis Felber, in which Stalter plays a fictionalized version of Dunham, a voice of a clueless generation.

But Meg Stalter is not so much clueless as compassionately guileless. See, she was at the water park with her girlfriend, and there was a tiny child swimming alone in the hot tub. Some adults started sticking their arms out and pushing the boy away so he couldn’t enter “their area” because he was allegedly “scratching and splashing.” (At an all-ages water park, this seems like a barrier of entry.) When Stalter told them they could not touch another person’s kid but could feel free to steep elsewhere in the massive facility, the man in the group started cursing at her. And then she was so upset, actually shaking with anger as she went to go find the little boy’s parents, that she clonked her skull in front of those assholes. “It was so embarrassing,” Stalter says. “It was, like, out of a movie.”

Stalter’s protective instincts for the innocent extend to her own inner child, who is close enough to the surface as to be visible; her grooming tends toward pigtails and the kind of glittery makeup job one applies after receiving a fully stocked Caboodles makeup kit from Santa. Today, sitting in the empty audience of her favorite Los Angeles performance spot, Largo, before it opens, Stalter is wearing Hello Kitty Crocs and a one-shoulder dress in Lisa Frank-lite pastels. When we greet each other, she gives me tangerines she’d picked the day before on a trip to a farm with her girlfriend. The produce bag is sweetly tied with a sextuple-looped yellow ribbon.

In person, with her comedic cutie-brat persona tucked away, Stalter is earnest and vulnerable, frequently invoking the importance of her faith. “I’m very, like, a God girl,” she says. “So I believe that God has a plan for me, and if something happens, then he’ll have another plan.” Stalter is also, against all evidence, quite soft-spoken. “If I was in a store and someone shushed me in a scary way, that would affect me,” Stalter says. “If someone was mean to me, I could feel like the little girl. ‘Why would they be mean to her?’ ”

During Stalter’s childhood in Ohio, they were mean to her. After graduating from Catholic elementary school, she attended civilian middle school and struggled to understand why everyone wasn’t friends. The popular girls “tortured” her, she says. In an effort to facilitate the missing camaraderie, Stalter invited everyone to a Hawaiian-themed party at her house. She discovered invitations she’d lovingly handed out tossed in the trash at school. Two people wound up attending.

Stalter’s mom was (perhaps unsurprisingly) an early ally. She found Stalter funny for the things she still perceives to be true about herself: being “embarrassing or nervous and confident at the same time.” Stalter would do interpretive dances on the sidewalk; the joke was that her mom was the only one who knew she wasn’t crazy.

That tension of not everyone getting it is Stalter’s comedic modus operandi. She recalls a show at the Laugh Factory in Chicago, before she was famous, where the audience was full of drunk tourists — and a lone friend of Stal­ter’s. She had a bit where she would take the stage with blood pouring out of her mouth and open by saying, “Sorry if my mouth bleeds tonight. My mouth bleeds when I get nervous, but I think I’m OK tonight.” The only person who laughed at that show, and hysterically, was her buddy. It was a great night.

“It’s fun if it’s even just one person,” she says of connecting with an audience. “And sometimes that could be me.”

When she performs, Stalter says, “It’s something that comes over me like a trance. One of my best friends, [Saturday Night Live star] Sarah Sherman, told me that when she does stand-up, it feels like meditation. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God. It feels like that.’ ” Stalter says when she’s performed with a headache, she stops feeling it until she leaves the stage. “I think that’s when [I know] I’m meant to do that,” Stalter says. Any pain goes away while she enacts God’s purpose for her. 

In Too Much, Stalter’s Jessica is a celebration of the show’s title. The character is caught between a manic id fueled equally by a painful breakup and the lust of new love, and the debilitating superego induced by the same life events. Jess records a series of videos she doesn’t intend to release, directly addressing the woman her ex is now engaged to (played by the comically hot Emily Ratajkowski), and whips herself into self-­sabotage by questioning her new relationship with Felix (Will Sharpe of The White Lotus Season Two fame), who is loosely based on Felber. Any time you fear things are getting unsustainably tumultuous, you need only remind yourself that every episode is a play on the title of a famous rom-com (e.g., “Notting Kill”) and that its creators are now happily married enough to want to work together.

“When I’m performing, something comes over me like a trance. That’s when I know I’m meant to do it.”

The show gives Stalter her first major leading role. She is perhaps the only person besides Dunham who could have played it, which is why Dunham wrote it for her. 

Andrew Scott, who also appears in Too Much, introduced Dunham to Stalter’s work. Dunham says he’d shown her Meg’s videos “in the heart of Covid and said, ‘Do you know this girl? She’s your sister.’ ” (Dunham does play Stalter’s onscreen sister, hilariously despondent after her husband decides to explore bisexuality and polyamory while she languishes in a series of increasingly sedentary supine positions.) “I became totally transfixed,” Dunham says. “Someone whose characters operate on the edge of delusional, on the edge of cringe, but is always ultimately in on the joke — that, to me, is my comedy DNA.” Dunham cites the characters David Brent on the U.K. Office, Patsy and Edina on Absolutely Fabulous, and Valerie Cherish of The Comeback as Stalter’s fictional ancestors.

Around 2022, Dunham DM’d Stalter on Instagram and said she had a project in mind. Stalter was a mega Girls fan and had felt a kinship with Dunham through the screen. “I’d connect to this person,” she’d thought about a hypothetical but unlikely future meeting while watching Dunham play Hannah Horvath, the series’ divisive protagonist. 

When Stalter and Dunham got on Zoom, Stalter’s instinct was confirmed. Dunham had made a deck of the show — kind of a mood board/game plan for a television series — and there were photos of Stalter on it as the main character. Then Dunham told Stalter, “Girls was about sex, and this is about love.” It was kismet; Stalter had met her now-partner only four months earlier and refers to her this way: “No one’s perfect except for my girlfriend.”

“We’re very different, just like Lena and Luis,” Stalter says. “When me and Lena first talked, we were bonding over that. I feel like I’m the Lena, and I’m the one bringing home a thing.”

Stalter is referring to the chaos of her life, but sometimes the “thing” is literal. Imagining a conversation between Felber and Dunham, Stalter riffs, “She could be like, ‘Honey, I bought a pig today.’ And then he’s like [affectionately], ‘Oh, Lena.’ ” Working with the couple proved the premise of the show. “It just feels like Luis fully lets Lena, and Lena lets Luis, be exactly who they are,” Stalter says. “I think sometimes you could be with someone who likes all the differences.”

In her own menagerie, Stalter currently has two cats — one rather more aloof, and one hairless snuggler named Suki — and a dog called Bunny, who manages an anxiety disorder with medication and as much physical contact with Stalter as possible. On Too Much, Jess, like Dunham, has a bald dog, procured after giving up a rescue (in this case named Cutesie) because of behavioral issues. 

In 2017, Dunham went through several heinous press cycles, including one around the saga of her and then-partner Jack Antonoff’s real-life dog, Lamby, whom they surrendered to a canine rehabilitation center after multiple instances of aggression. In Too Much, Jess’ boyfriend forces her to “get rid” of their dog after it nearly bites someone. It’s one of many moments that invite a close read, especially in the context of Dunham’s autobiographical pieces of writing about her wrenching breakup with Antonoff and her subsequent move to London — the city where Stalter’s character decamps after the end of a relationship with a Jewish ex-boyfriend.

“People love when they see something and they’re like, ‘Is that from that person’s real life?’ ” Stalter says. “Even if it’s not all factual or it’s not literally a biography, someone so open about sharing their real experiences or at least putting them into certain characters, it’s really beautiful, because we get to learn about her. That’s why when I saw Girls, even though [Lena is] not Hannah, there’s parts of her in her stuff. That’s the most beautiful thing to see, someone who’s putting their heart and energy into something and you get to learn about them — but then you’re not taking everything that happened as truth.”

At the precipice of her highest-profile role yet, Stalter is contemplating what the project might mean for nonconsensual probing into her own life. People watching her videos is fine, because she has complete control over them, and people are seeing them in their homes. When audiences come to her stand-up shows, well, that’s what she’s always wanted, and the work is begetting fans who want to see more work. “It feels contained or something,” Stalter says. “And then with Hacks, it’s been so huge and life-changing. But in my mind, I could be safe because I’m not the lead in it.

“Lena is someone I’ve been such a huge fan of, so it was really crazy to wrap my mind around being in the show,” Stalter says slowly. “But then when I got to know her, she felt like a sister and a friend. So now the show feels like a play that we did for each other, and that this really contains a special thing.”

“Getting to know Lena, she felt like a sister and a friend. So now the show feels like a play that we did for each other.”

Sharpe remembers filming an episode — one of the best of the series — that takes place over one night, in Stalter’s character’s apartment. The couple has had sex too many times, and Sharpe’s character has hit his refractory limit. Sharpe’s line after aborting the encounter was supposed to be something like, “I’m in my thirties, queen. I’m all out.” After an exhausting day of filming, it came out, in a posh accent, as, “That’s me done for the evening, I’m afraid.” Stalter named this imaginary interloping gentleman “the Midnight Man,” and pointed out every time Sharpe strayed into Midnight Man territory during production. Then she made him a shirt with the moniker on it. “Because of the energy of Lena — and Meg, in particular — it put you in quite a positive, hopeful, loving mindset,” Sharpe says of shooting the series. “Just seeing the best in everything and in everyone.”

The setting allowed Stalter the confidence and space to play a role that both exercises her obvious comedic virtuosity and shows previously untapped dramatic ability, from dealing with insecurity (not a state expressed by a typical Stalter character) to a breakdown during a breakup. “Some of the stuff that’s in the show I feel is like, Oh! Nobody would ever see me do this if it wasn’t on TV,” Stalter says. “When you’re crying in your room alone, people don’t see that unless it’s on TV. I’m really crying.”

Embodying what Dunham describes as Stalter’s “incredible mix of warm/fuzzy and boundaried strength,” Stalter explains how she approached fictional sex with the advice of intimacy coordinator Miriam Lucia: “During kissing scenes or during vulnerable stuff, it’s not actually you, and you don’t have to do it the way you do, because you can save that part for yourself.” As for Stalter’s corporeal being — beautifully showcased on a series in which her character is implicitly contrasted with one played by an actual supermodel — she says, “I’m very about taking care of my body and being healthy, but I have not wanted to be skinny or lose weight for cosmetic reasons since high school.” A beacon for us all.

To make public the kind of deeply personal moments fostered by Dunham’s writing is, by definition, exposing. “It just feels really vulnerable,” Stalter says. “It’s hard or strange to think of it being on such a huge platform. It’s exciting … but also, just, Netflix is so big.”

Stalter points to her career-long luck of collaborating with people like Dunham and the Hacks team. “I’ve not worked with evil people,” she says. “I don’t know how.” But she also considers the world this project is opening her up to. “I think there is power in Hollywood that is gross,” she says. “There’s a lot of darkness in the industry, and things that can corrupt you, like money and power.” 

Stalter isn’t particularly concerned. “I feel so connected to God and grounded that I feel like I would not get swept up by anything in Hollywood,” she says.

Stalter sees herself representing — in her life, in a movie she’s developing called Church Girls, and in the “evil, crazy, weird villain” version of herself she plays onstage — people like her, who grew up with God in places like the Midwest, and who maybe didn’t finish college either. “Their lives are just as big as ours,” she says, finally daring to group herself in with her famous peers.

“I’m always going to be sensitive,” Stalter says. “I am still that little girl in middle school being like, ‘Why don’t they want to come to the Hawaiian party?’ But it’s like, there’ve been so many other parties.”