Comedian Leslie Liao Breaks Down Her Journey From Netflix HR Gig To Netflix Special: “It Almost Was Like A Superman-Clark Kent Thing”

Matt Grobar
·7 min read

Over the last six years, Leslie Liao has been living a double life.

By day, she’s an employee in the HR department at Netflix — by night, a fast-rising stand-up comic. “I tried to keep both parts of my life very compartmentalized,” Liao tells Deadline of her rise from beginner to emerging comic during her time at the streamer. “So, it almost was like a Superman-Clark Kent thing.”

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Now, though, Liao is going full Superman, after landing a stand-up special with the company she was working for in an entirely different capacity.

Liao is among the rising comedic stars doing short sets in Verified Stand-Up, a two-part special that dropped on the service November 28th. She first came to Netflix’s attention, as a performer, while performing in front of its stand-up team at L.A. venue Dynasty Typewriter.

While working at Netflix, Liao says, she hasn’t actively hid her artistic aspirations. In point of fact, she’s welcomed co-workers, and even her boss to shows over the years. But while those in her immediate circle have always been “supportive,” she’s been cognizant during her time at the company of making sure that those overseeing comedy, including Vice President of Standup and Comedy Formats Robbie Praw, would meet her first as a comic. “I tried to avoid [Praw] at all costs at the office,” Liao admits. “I didn’t want him to know me as just this employee who dabbles in stand-up.”

Since joining Netflix, Liao has put any and all free time toward her stand-up career, including time allotted for vacation, which, she says, is “why I’m very sleepy.”

Fortunately though, she’s gained so much traction on stage in such a remarkably short amount of time that she won’t be pulling double duty for much longer. When her new headlining tour kicks off in the new year, she’ll begin working as a comedian full-time.

Raised in Orange County by Chinese immigrant parents, the Angeleno says that the last year has felt like a “cartoonish…Hollywood montage,” given how quickly things have evolved. After making it her New Year’s resolution last year to begin building a digital presence, she’s seen that take off with clips going viral, also getting passed at the Hollywood Improv and securing new management at Levity Live. After the team there got her a tryout for the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival’s prestigious New Faces showcase, which many a comic pursues a spot in for years, she landed one in the second round of auditions.

Just for Laughs can be a career-making platform for emerging stand-up comics, and for Liao, the 2023 edition was “the best time ever,” leading to a round of agency meetings that culminated in a UTA signing, and her TV debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. It was at JFL, Liao reveals, that she got her long-awaited introduction to Praw, and it was “a dream scenario” to meet the Netflix exec that way.

An admirer of everyone from “classic joke writers” like Mitch Hedberg to autobiographical storytellers like Jim Gaffigan, Liao began performing stand-up later than many, at the age of 29, simply because it didn’t seem like the most practical of career choice, even if she’d loved the art form ever since she was a kid. She first came to dabble in the craft during her time at Netflix, after a period that saw her on a path to become a Hollywood exec.

After attending USC Film School, Liao worked at such famed companies as ICM, Brillstein Entertainment Partners and Entertainment 360, as your typical “tortured Hollywood assistant” who “made no money” and “ate M&M’s for lunch.” She began to feel a real pull toward the professional world of stand-up while working at Bluegrass Films, the production company run by Scott Stuber prior to his time at Netflix. While working in comedy development, she took it upon herself to serve as a “comedy scout” for the company, even if no one needed or had asked her to do so. Almost every night, she’d be out seeing the shows of comics like Jo Koy and Ali Wong, taking in the best of what the city had to offer.

What really got her fired up to perform, though, was the first time she experienced a stand-up show that was no good. “I only went [previously] to headliner shows and watched specials on HBO, and I had never been exposed to actual bad stand-up,” she says. “It all clicked that night, where I realized how much I understood it and loved it, and was so protective over it. I remember almost standing up and being like, ‘Give me the mic.'”

There was a bit of insecurity for Liao in taking the stage just ahead of her 30s, so she committed to husting “extra hard” to excel once she embarked down that path, which was made easier given the confidence and sense of self that came with a level of life experience. Earlier in life, she says, she felt she didn’t know her voice “as a human being wandering the earth,” much less in a creative sense.

Honing that voice would be a process of trial and error. “Right after the pandemic, I hit this groove where I looked back at all the jokes I loved, my favorite ones I did for Just for Laughs, and even I could look back at them and say, ‘That feels like a very Leslie joke,'” she shares. The process of developing her skill set is far from over, she acknowledges. “But when I look at my own jokes pretending like I’m an outsider, I felt like, ‘Oh yeah, that feels very me,’ which is a super cool feeling.”

Part of what’s remarkable in assessing Liao’s work, whether in Verified Stand-Up or on The Tonight Show, is a level of stage presence inconsistent with her short time as a stand-up. When Liao first started performing, she says, she knew that “no matter how good of an actor you are,” there would be no way to fake the confidence of a Katt Williams or Chris Rock. “So to try to get that quickly, I tried to write material that I felt was so good that no matter how I delivered it, it would go well,” she explains. “I tried to write very strongly, so the writing was my armor, and so that my stage presence would catch up to my writing.”

Most recently announced to be playing Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever as part of Netflix Is A Joke Fest in Los Angeles on May 3, Liao’s hope as she looks to the next chapter of her professional life is to move toward her first hour special, and maybe even a podcast, if she can find the right angle. But because her first hour will mark her “formal introduction” as a comic and she’s “a bit of an overachiever,” she’s only going to put it out when she’s really ready. “I’m going to hopefully use this tour coming up next year, maybe beyond, to just be wild, write, really be a little more risky and focus on all that stuff, and maybe put out the hour whenever it makes sense for me,” she says. “There’s a lot of content out there. Even if it’s a 30-second clip on social media, if I put anything out there, I want it to be worth interrupting you when you’re at dinner with your family.”

Also entertaining possibilities in film, TV and other areas, Liao jokes that she’s “kind of a monster” with so many opportunities in front of her and wants to take them all on. “But I do want stand-up to be the forever thing in my career and what I’m known for,” she says.

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