Lauren Lapkus Has Personality — Several, In Fact — In ‘Netflix Presents: The Characters’

If you want to get a sense of just how different the comic sensibilities of eight sharp young comedians can be, give each of them a decent production budget, send them out into the world, and watch what happens.

Netflix just performed this thought experiment, and the results — in the form of the new series Netflix Presents: The Characters — are a snapshot of comedy circa 2016. The common parameters among the eight episodes are that each is a self-contained 30-minute story and that the comics play multiple characters within that story. The tones and styles, though, range widely — even within a single episode.

John Early starts as a cringe-inducing narcissist at a rehearsal dinner, channels a loser on a bad date, and ends with some David Lynchean weirdness that shouldn’t be missed. Natasha Rothwell comments on everything from TV spoilers as a homeless guy on the subway to ethnic stereotypes as a room full of working-class characters waiting for jury duty.

Lauren Lapkus builds her episode around the overlapping stories of characters like a vapid pop star on a TV reality show, a precocious kid who makes up his own swear words, and a depressed stripper. You would probably recognize her from more her serious roles as a prison guard on Orange Is the New Black or as a control room operators on Jurassic World, but those are high-profile aberrations from a career built around improv comedy.

We sat down with Lapkus earlier this week to talk about her career, the alter egos she has developed in her improv work, and her episode of Netflix Presents: The Characters.

DECIDER: Your episode has several criss-crossing stories where you play multiple characters. Is that the setup of all of these episodes?

Lauren Lapkus: Right. Everybody plays multiple characters in their own episodes. Beyond that, we had 30 minutes to do whatever we wanted to do. They turned out very different from one another.

Do you cross over into each other’s episodes, or are they completely unrelated?

Some of the comedians may appear in each other’s episodes. A lot of us are friends and work on each other’s projects, but they’re not connected.

Did someone at Netflix develop the idea and approach different comedians about doing it, or was this something the comedians developed and took to Netflix?

Netflix’s comedy development team put the concept together and asked each of us to do it.

Did the story of your episode come out of characters that you’ve done in improv and stand-up?

I’ve done most of my characters before on the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast and TV show and on my own podcast, which is called With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus.

You’re always playing a character on With Special Guest, right?

Right, I’m a different character every episode, which the guest determines. The guest is the host of the episode, and they tell me what character I’m playing as we record it. The whole thing is improvised.

So for The Characters, how did you mesh your standalone characters together?

I wanted to involve a few specific characters like Whitney Peeps, who is a pop star in a Bachelor-like reality/dating show called The Single Celeb. I had a lot of fun playing her on the Comedy Bang! Bang! TV show. Pamela from Big Bear and Todd are both characters done on the podcast that I had never done outside of an audio format.

The Whitney Peeps character doesn’t blend her makeup very well.

[Laughs.] Yeah, she’s very bronzed.

Are most of the other actors that are in your episode from the improv/Upright Citizens Brigade world?

Yeah, a lot of people that I included in the special are people that I know from doing UCB in New York. We shot in New York, and I have a lot of friends there from UCB. And Susan Blackwell is a Broadway actress and play’s Todd’s mom.

Bobby Moynihan appears near the end of the episode and has really bad hair extensions. I guess you had run out of money by that time?

[Laughs.] Yeah, he has a great rat tail.

You recurred on the first two seasons of Orange is the New Black and had a significant role in the Jurassic World film that were both non-comedic characters. Do you like doing those kinds of roles?

Yeah, it is fun to do more dramatic kinds of scenes — watching people get mauled by dinosaurs. That’s a dream I didn’t know I had, but I’m glad those roles happened.

What else do you have coming up this year?

I have guest roles coming up on a few different shows. I’m doing some voice work on a few episodes of an animated show on HBO show called Animals. I’ll be back on Another Period on Comedy Central

You’re doing a lot of dissimilar things between podcasts, films, TV, specials and live improv. Is that something you do because it’s part of the survival handbook for comedy today, or do you like having all of those things going on at one time?

I like having different projects going. It keeps me stimulated. I like the podcast because it’s the one thing in my career that I can control. As an actor, you have to book roles and wait. The podcast gives me something I can do every week with no filter. I also started out with improv, and it’s something I really like to do.

[You can watch Netflix Presents: The Characters on Netflix]

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.