‘Euphoria’ Star Martha Kelly on Zendaya, Playing Laurie, and Stand-Up

Martha Kelly begins most of her TikTok videos, filmed in tight focus on her face, with a simple greeting: “Welcome back to Forehead Corner.” 

This tongue-in-cheek intro is indicative of the longtime comedian’s bone-dry brand of humor. “I never noticed my forehead as much as I do looking at it on TikTok,” says Kelly. We’re sitting at the Groundwork Coffee Roasters in North Hollywood, a short drive from her home in Burbank, where she’s been based since 2019. She hugs a black cardigan closer to her body between occasional slugs of mineral water. “I live alone, so [TikTok] is a real social thing for me. Like, I have to make plans and do a lot of logistics to meet up with friends, which I love to do, but it’s also much easier to just make a TikTok and feel connected to people.”

It’s easy to see why fans — roughly 160,000 and counting since she started posting in 2024 — keep coming back to Forehead Corner. Kelly’s videos, delivered in her distinctive, pitchy voice (think Valley girl with notes of humdrum detachment a la the famously monotone comedian Ben Stein), are both personal and woven with running gags. She frequently dons the garish “Republican Makeup” filter while launching into a stream-of-consciousness dialogue that flows from what she did that day to political developments to the latest season of Love Is Blind. Every now and then, Kelly will pause to scold one of her two cats (the black and white one, Barry, likes to climb up her leg or into the oven). 

Her engagement on the app recently exploded, though, thanks to her role on the HBO series Euphoria, where she plays the drug lord Laurie. Kelly joined the show in Season Two, back in 2022, and was nominated for an Outstanding Guest Actress Emmy. When the long-awaited Season Three teaser, which prominently featured Laurie threatening Zendaya’s Rue, dropped in January, Kelly’s page blew up. Now, her comments have been flooded with teens and twentysomethings calling her “diva,” “queen,” and “baddie.” Others pretend to be scared while quoting Laurie’s chilling trailer line back to her: “Hello, Rue. You owe me money.” 

Kelly, 58, is tickled at her newfound memedom, partially because it means she gets to look cool to her college-aged niece, who texted Kelly a series of exclamation points after the trailer came out. “Finally, I can impress her. I’ve been trying for 19 years,” Kelly jokes.

Ever since her breakout role as the kindly wallflower insurance adjuster Martha Brooks on FX’s Baskets, Kelly has worked steadily, nabbing bit parts in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Marriage Story (2019), Grace and Frankie, Hacks, What We Do in the Shadows, and Fallout. Adult-animation casting directors seem to love her idiosyncratic tone for voice acting: In 2023, she played an underwhelmed middle-school secretary facing a planetary apocalypse in Netflix’s Carol & the End of the World; the next year, she voiced a DEA agent in the Adult Swim series Common Side Effects. But it took decades for her to find consistency in her career (she couldn’t even get approved for a credit card until booking Baskets), and she’s still not sure why anyone feels compelled to cast her in anything. “With my Irish Catholic ancestry, I don’t know that I am physically capable of answering a question about why I’m good at something, or what I think is good about something that I do,” she says.

However she came by this success, Kelly is acutely aware that it means something very different to her now than it would have 20 years ago. “When I was younger, it was always about, ‘I want to get this thing,’” she says. But whenever she reached a rung on that ladder, like her first late-night stand-up spot on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, she undermined her own confidence. “I was so in my head,” she says of that big break. “I didn’t enjoy it at all, really, except for how nice Conan was. And now when I get to work on Euphoria, I’m like, ‘How did I get here?”

ORIGINALLY FROM THE Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, Kelly grew up with an older brother, a fraternal twin sister, and a half-brother from her dad’s first marriage. Her father was an elementary school principal, and her mother was a kindergarten teacher. “I did not enjoy my childhood in a lot of ways, but I also was lucky in a lot of ways,” Kelly says. “My parents were both born in the 1930s and came from the kind of childhoods where people didn’t really think about kids as having feelings… They tried really hard to be different than how they were raised, and they were, but they also were from a generation where nobody got therapy for any trauma.” 

Kelly describes her family dynamic as argumentative; knowing that she could hold her own contributed to an early interest in comedy. “[Our] sense of humor was often at each other’s expense,” she says. “So I had that urge to, like, get into it with people, or tease people and make fun of sincerity.” In high school in the late Eighties, she was especially inspired by female stand-ups like Roseanne Barr and Janeane Garofalo. “Seeing women comedians who were doing material that wasn’t, ‘I need a good man. Why am I still single?’ Or, ‘My husband hates me.’ How smart and funny and unique they were — it made me want to do it.”

As a young adult, Kelly juggled odd jobs, from dog walking to waitressing, copywriting, and delivering pizza. When she was 25, she did her first open mic at L.A.’s Laugh Factory. She bombed. She took long breaks to recover and tried again. More bombing. She began drinking before going onstage to build her confidence. It didn’t quite work. “I wasn’t getting any better at stand-up,” she remembers. 

Kelly’s luck shifted just before hitting 30, when she started frequenting a coffee shop in the Palms neighborhood of L.A. where her sister was working. “One night, I heard them doing an open mic, and I started going to watch,” Kelly says. “Zach Galifianakis was there, Maria Bamford and Tig Notaro would do it. Just a bunch of great comics.” She worked up the courage to participate. “Since the audience was just other comics who were wanting to see people try different material, they didn’t care if you weren’t confident. It was really dynamic and fun and funny.”

The more informal venue proved beneficial for Kelly, though she continued to use alcohol as a crutch before going onstage. In 2002, there were some bright spots. She won Comedy Central’s Laugh Riots competition and was invited to the Montreal Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, where she took part in the “New Faces” show. She also did that Conan appearance — her late-night TV debut — where she cracked jokes about preparing to start a new temp job by having a friend tie her up in a burlap sack, sink her to the bottom of a pool, and pull her back up for a lunch break. 

Still, she was chugging along in fits and starts, splitting time between Austin, where it was easier to get a spot in comedy festivals, and Torrance. Even after she quit drinking in 2003, Kelly struggled with periods of depression and an eating disorder. Her car got repossessed, and she was nearly evicted. By 2012, she had rebounded back home to California for good, feeling adrift.

Then, in 2014, Kelly’s old friend Zach Galifianakis left her a life-changing voicemail. He was pitching a new pilot about a motel-dwelling rodeo clown — would she be up for playing his personal assistant? Kelly told Galifianakis she didn’t think she could act. Galifianakis didn’t care; he just wanted her to show up as herself. The leap paid off. “I knew I could trust Zach and our showrunner, Jonathan [Krisel], to not yell at me if I did something wrong,” Kelly says of her experience on Baskets. “They were the most gentle, safe people to be a stumbling new actor [with].”

A WHOLE NEW LEVEL of trepidation set in when Kelly was approached for Euphoria. For starters, she wasn’t sure about playing a villain. “I’m a comedic actor, which means you have to have people like you for them to want to watch you,” she recalls thinking. “I can’t play this awful monster and who’s who hurts kids.” She was comforted after meeting with the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, who she calls “very sweet, reassuring, and down-to-earth.” But there was one more hurdle: “I was out of my mind with fear about working with Zendaya, because she’s such a gifted actor, and I’m like, ‘I’m gonna go in there and ruin their beautiful show and everyone’s gonna hate me.’ ”

Kelly was so nervous that she forgot her lines on the first day, but her new colleagues were warm (“[Zendaya] was like, ‘It’s totally fine, we’re really low-key here’”) and she quickly found her stride, blending Laurie’s unassuming self-presentation with the character’s more sinister vibes. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly makes Laurie so frightening, but it probably has something to do with the fact that her girlish voice and hot-pink T-shirts make her seem approachable, even friendly. At the same time, she’s never not surrounded by an entourage of tatted-up, pistol-carrying enforcers, all of whom defer to her without question. 

Season Two never reveals what Laurie’s had to do to claim her place at the top of the drug-dealing pyramid, but the viewer’s mind can’t help but fill that empty space with imaginary scenarios. Consider her nonchalant threat to kidnap Zendaya’s Rue and sell her “to some real sick people” if she doesn’t make her money back on a drug deal. “I always read all of [Laurie’s] lines as a snake-in-the-grass sociopath,” Kelly says. “Those are the scariest people — the mild-mannered person who has no conscience and no line they won’t cross to get what they want.”

Kelly says Season Three will dig into Laurie’s backstory — “a different part of her life with a nemesis.” Other than that, she can’t be certain how many episodes she’s in, because they shot everything out of order.   

Despite her long road to recognition, Kelly, ever self-deprecating, calls her Emmys experience in 2022 “stressful and unpleasant.” There were redeeming factors, though. “One was the table I got to sit at [during] the actual awards,” Kelly says. “It was the actors who were nominated for their guest appearances on Hacks, and then Bill Burr and his wife, and then [Euphoria co-star] Colman [Domingo]. It was a fun, nice table of people who were way out of my league, career-wise, but let me feel like one in the gang.”

The best part was still the car ride home, which Kelly took with her niece, who’d been her date that night. “She talked my ear off,” Kelly says. “She hadn’t talked to me that much about her life for years… The thrill of it — sitting at that fun table and then just listening to my niece tell me about her life — I was like, ‘This is one of the best nights of my life.’”