Geraldine Viswanathan Is Comedy’s Newest Star. Prepare to Be Obsessed

“If you got to know me, you’d be obsessed with me,” says Geraldine Viswanathan in The Broken Hearts Gallery, a new rom-com now showing in theaters and drive-ins.

She’s speaking as her character, Lucy, an art gallery assistant who collects (read: steals) souvenirs from exes—hoodies, ties, even orthodontic retainers are part of her haul. It’s a bold statement to make, but the same could be said of Viswanathan herself. You might remember the 25-year-old Australian actor from her breakout role in 2018’s Blockers, the beloved comedy in which she played the ringleader of a trio of teen girls determined to have sex for the first time on prom night. (One memorable moment: When her character’s date, played by Viswanathan’s real-life boyfriend, actor Miles Robbins, says, “I mean, wherever the night takes us.” And she replies, “It’s gonna take your penis into my vagina.”)

You can recognize a Geraldine Viswanathan character by her boldness. Whether she’s playing a skateboarder in a hijab (Apple original, Hala), slamming a would-be-rapist over the head with a brick (short film Big Bad World), or exposing a giant corruption scandal as a journalist for a high school newspaper (HBO’s Bad Education), Viswanathan takes roles that simply simply didn’t exist for young women in mainstream entertainment even five years ago. More of her characters masturbate on screen, or at least talk enthusiastically about masturbation, than don’t.

When we spoke over Zoom, she was at the house in upstate New York where she’d been quarantining with Robbins and his family for four months.

“What’s it like moving in with your boyfriend’s family during a pandemic?” I ask, peering nosily through the screen into the large wood-paneled room behind her, hung with colorful fabrics.

“Oh,” she says, blushing. “Well. His mom is actually Susan Sarandon.” Shortly after, a dog named Bowie (named, presumably, after Sarandon’s former lover) wanders on screen. 

Viswanathan got her start doing stand-up comedy at open mic nights in Sydney right out of high school. It’s an experience she describes both as “fun” and “really painful.” She was just a teenager, pulling up to a mic and talking. “I felt kind of empowered by how I could just…do it.” 

Those experiences led to performing in an all-woman comedy sketch group called “Freudian Nip.” By 2015 she got a supporting role in a movie called Emo the Musical (she played a lot of tambourine for the role) and two years later had an arc on an Australian legal drama. In short, like most people who seem on the outside like overnight successes, she had been working for years by the time she booked her breakout role in Blockers.

After the success of that film, Viswanathan was starting to have her pick of projects. She chose, of all things, an extravagantly quirky TV comedy, TBS’ 2019 Miracle Workers, in which she plays both a literal angel in heaven and a medieval peasant named Alexandra Shitshoveler. Her costars, casually, are Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi. 

She says she was so nervous to audition with Radcliffe that she consulted an acting coach beforehand, who advised her to take the pressure off by pretending she had told the Harry Potter actor a secret before the audition, something that would make him feel like a friend. 

“I thought it was a good idea,” she says. “So I wore my most disgusting beige-colored-with-holes-in-it-high-waisted underwear to the audition. I pretended like I had told him I was wearing this gross, really ugly underwear, and it helped! It really lightened the mood!”

“Disgusting” underwear and all, Viswanathan is good at winning over her colleagues. “I love her as if she came out of my body,” says Natalie Krinsky, director and writer of The Broken Hearts Gallery. The movie, produced by Selena Gomez, has a stacked cast (including theater goddesses Bernadette Peters and Phillipa Soo), but Viswanathan stands out. Her character seems like an extension of the roles she played in Blockers, Hala, and Bad Education—but about five years and a lot of white wine and rejection later. 

“Geraldine and I wanted the women in our film to talk about sex and relationships like the women we know and love in our lives,” Krinsky says. It shows. Viswanathan’s career has been special, so far, in this way. Three out of four of her big movies—Blockers, Hala, and Broken Hearts Gallery—were written by women, directed by women, and featured a woman protagonist. They talk about vibrators and heartbreak and money and ambition in a way that is still new to the mainstream. 

“I feel very lucky,” Viswanathan says of her career. “Because it just hasn’t been this way in the past. It’s been men’s idea of what women think and feel.”

Viswanathan loves playing characters written by women, with women audiences in mind. And she seems, like those characters, unplagued by the need to be universally appealing. Within the same five minutes of our conversation, she says, “My soul hurts when I don’t see dogs for too long.” And then, “Racism is a totally manmade thing way of controlling people by pitting them against each other so that they don’t challenge power.”

Challenging power is interesting to Viswanathan. 

On whether she’s been asked to diet for a role: “I eat whatever the fuck I want because it brings me the most joy in the world. I do know that pressure happens—I talk to actresses sometimes and I hear, ‘Well, I’m an actress…I have to look a certain way…I have to be on a diet.’ I’ve just been too lazy to do that, or didn’t really see how it related to the job.”

On being active about Black and trans rights on social media: “I’ve always taken injustices quite personally and have felt them deeply. I’m in no way an activist, but I feel strongly about these things and it would be dishonest for me to not speak about that publicly.”

On how she gets her eyebrows so good: “You just know that I have a LOT of hair on my body. I definitely got so much shit in school for these brows—people would say, ‘Get the hedge cutters out.’ Not that I was, like, deeply impacted by this! Luckily now it’s good to have hair on this part, because for a long time it wasn’t.”

Growing up, dreaming of being an actor, Viswanathan did not expect a career like white girls have. “I was really happy to just be a guest star, like a medical student or exchange student,” she says. “The only Indian characters that I saw were stereotypes.”

Mindy Kaling was the exception. “She was exactly what I wanted to be,” Viswanathan says. And like Kaling, she’s drawn to writing and producing. “I knew that the opportunities already presented were pretty limited so I would have to try and create opportunities for myself.”

So far, those opportunities have been astonishing. Her costars from the four years she’s been working in the U.S. read like a list of everyone you’d fantasize about telling you there’s toilet paper stuck to your Louboutin on the red carpet who then become your best friend.

Radcliffe is “the most polite and considerate person I’ve ever met.” When the Miracle Workers cast flew to Prague to film the show’s second season, she says Steve Buscemi would stay out in the city until 4 a.m. befriending the locals and hanging out with bands. She knew the moment that Seth Rogen came on the set of Blockers. “Boy, oh boy, did the set smell like weed,” she jokes. “It was like, SETH IS HERE!” She says he ran into her while she was eating a banana with Nutella. “What the fuck is that?” she says he asked, in a friendly way.

The time she’s spent in America has also been her introduction to adulthood—she’s been tossed into the celebrity diamond lane while also witnessing a pandemic, an economic crisis, and a mass anti-racist movement. “My perception of America growing up is this place that has endless possibilities, that is so open, where people are so willing to take chances on people, where anything is possible,” she says. “I really put all my dreams here.” Now she sees it’s more complicated—but worth fighting for. 

While she’s been waiting out the premiere of The Broken Hearts Gallery—it was moved from earlier in the summer—she’s been educating herself, reading, among other things, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of America. (“It’s embarrassing if you aren’t talking about Black Lives Matter because it’s just so glaringly obvious,” she says. “It’s also really moving to see the whole world be introspective.”) She and her boyfriend have also been passing the time doing their favorite activity: donning swim goggles, cutting the tops off bottles with a contraption from Amazon, and turning them into candleholders. They’ve also been playing beer pong. (Sarandon “does a celebrity shot every now and then.”)

Viswanathan still dreams of an America with endless possibilities—of loud, funny women who masturbate and make fools of themselves and fall in love and make real, meaningful sacrifices for justice. An America that celebrates an actor who eats whatever the fuck she wants and doesn’t change her eyebrows or her name (which is no harder to pronounce than Saoirse Ronan or Chloe Sevigny, by the way). An America where you can own your favorite sweatsuit in every color of the rainbow (Viswanathan has five sets from the brand Entire World, but she wants more).

Remember the name Geraldine Viswanathan. You’re going to be obsessed with her.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.

Originally Appeared on Glamour