How Wally Baram Wrote Herself into A Starring Role

Wally Baram never set out to be an actress.

She was perfectly happy cracking jokes, punching up scripts and building a stand-up career — until one day, during a writers room session for Prime Video‘s Overcompensating, the producers asked her to audition. She humored them with a self-tape, fully expecting to be ignored.

Instead, one callback led to another, and then another. When the final call came offering her the part, Baram was mid-argument with her boyfriend and barely registered the news. “I hung up and went right back into the fight,” she says, laughing. Even her lawyer, stunned to see an acting contract, called her to ask, “How did this happen?”

Now, Baram, 28, is starring alongside series creator Benito Skinner in a show tailor-made for digital natives: It’s co-produced by A24, with original music by Charli XCX (who also makes a cameo and serves as executive music producer) and buzzed about on every social feed.

She plays Carmen, a frizzy-haired Jersey girl trying — and mostly failing — to fit in at college. “She can’t do the same song and dance as everyone else and she’s overcompensating romantically,” Baram says. “That was me at a certain point in my life.”

Baram’s own path started early: Raised in New Jersey by a Mexican-Syrian family, she was doing stand-up by 16 and briefly attended Barnard before dropping out to chase comedy full-time. She studied the career playbooks of Amy Poehler, Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling, hoping to build a life that mixed writing, performing and creating. “I think I’m part of the first generation that understands that being a few different things is a genuine career path,” she says.

By 2021, she’d landed a stand-up set on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and later staffed writers rooms for What We Do in the Shadows and Shrinking. Still, despite her growing résumé — and writing for Shrinking star Harrison Ford — Baram says she battles imposter syndrome. Even joining the Overcompensating writers room felt surreal.

“I was working with people I’d admired for years,” she says, citing stand-ups like Pat Regan and Mary Beth Barone. “But you have to be careful how you say that. If you tell someone in their 30s you look up to them, they have a crisis.”

Baram admits she always had “vague aspirations” to act, but the brutal realities of casting made it seem too unattainable. Now that she’s on the call sheet, she’s savoring the ride — marveling at things like professional makeup artists (“I had no idea I could look like that!”) and mingling at Coachella, where she watched Charli XCX perform from the VIP section alongside Kate Hudson, Hailey Bieber and Timothée Chalamet.

“Stand-up gave me a great skill,” she says. “When something’s done, I can move on. So if I see a bad photo [from these events], it’s like — OK, my face does a lot of different things. That’s fine.”

Overcompensating, which premieres May 15, will be a test not just of Baram’s on-camera chops but of whether social media influence can translate into old-fashioned TV viewership. She already counts the project as a win: It had to clear multiple hurdles just to get greenlit, including an eight-episode table read for skeptical execs from Amazon, A24 and Strong Baby, Jonah Hill’s production banner.

If audiences take away anything from the show, Baram hopes it’s the art of laughing at yourself — something she’s gotten good at over the years. What We Do in the Shadows taught her absurdity; Shrinking taught her heart; and Overcompensating taught her how to mine her own life for comedy — even the most undignified moments.

“I’ve had a few … issues making it to a bathroom on time,” she says, not exactly shy about it. “Unfortunately, I think that’s very funny. And now I cannot be stopped from telling people about the time I was walking in a parade — and also had an Activia.”

This story appeared in the May 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.