Acting isn’t a new thing for Iliza Shlesinger. As she told us on Collider Ladies Night, “I've been auditioning at a really high level for a very long time.” It looks like that persistence is paying off because her film career is taking off in a very big way right now. She starred opposite Mark Wahlberg in 2020’s Spenser Confidential, shared the screen with Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn in the Academy Award nominated Pieces of a Woman, and now she’s celebrating the release of a new Netflix movie she wrote, executive produced and stars in, Good on Paper.
Inspired by her own true experience, Shlesinger leads Good on Paper as Andrea Singer, a stand-up comic who’s always prioritized her career. However, when she meets a guy (Ryan Hansen) who seems to check all the boxes, Andrea starts to think it might be time to give a relationship a go. But the big question is, is this guy really everything he appears to be?
With Good on Paper now available to watch on Netflix, Shlesinger joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to recap how she went from Last Comic Standing winner to headlining her own feature film. Shlesinger already knew a thing or two about the behind-the-scenes process when she competed on that reality TV show, and it came in handy big time. Here’s how she put it:
“This is in the heyday of reality TV. This is around Rock of Love and The Girls Next Door and that type, and I watched a lot of it so going into that show, I knew what not to do. And what you don’t do is give anything incriminating and you don’t talk sh*t on the other people and you don’t go into a confessional to vent. I knew how these things were edited. I didn’t want to give them a reason to make the cute blond girl a bad guy, and I didn’t want to ever devote any of my stage time to talking about someone else, because the second you mention someone else’s name, they cut to b-roll of them. So all the garbage TV I watched actually served me quite well!”
So clearly Shlesinger knew what she was doing on that show - in terms of making the most of the reality TV filming format and also her craft because, after all, she won! But translating a reality TV win to a full blown career is a different story. How often are we enamored by someone’s ability, watch as they win big on a show like Last Comic Standing and then never hear from them again? That wasn’t the case for Shlesinger though. She took that Last Comic Standing win and ran with it. What’s her secret?
“It’s a choice. You are given this moment and this energy, and you can sink or swim, and you can rest on your laurels or you can use that as a jumping off point. So I just kept working. I just kept writing and kept going on the road and you’re auditioning, you’re doing whatever, but I just kept moving forward. And I never wanted to be the person that did that one thing that you never heard from. And I love stand-up so much and I’ve grown so much in my point of view, it just kept feeding itself and progressing. So it was a choice to not fade away. It was a choice I had to fight for.”
And fight for it she did! Shlesinger is a hugely successful stand-up comic with a whole batch of Netflix specials to her name and now a flourishing film career, too. And with Good on Paper, she gets to combine the two formats. What’s the key to taking her stage experience and applying it to a screenplay? Shlesinger explained:
“At this point in stand-up I have a very good grasp of timing, cadence, delivery. This speaks to the craft versus just structural joke telling, right? We all know the way a knock-knock joke should sound, we all know the way a good story should sound, but there is like a math behind it. So you apply that, and also I am the one delivering these jokes so I know how I would deliver a joke. It’s something that I wonder sometimes if writers do; I will say the joke out loud. And with Andrea at the beginning, I kind of poke fun at the audition process because she reads this thing that’s written so weirdly in her audition and she’s like, ‘You shouldn’t say it this many times. It should be rule of three,’ and they’re just like, ‘You’re a dumb girl. Who cares?’ So I was very committed to making sure it all flowed comedically, but then very open to, at the table read, on the day, being okay with cutting it or adding an adjective or a word because maybe it isn’t as funny as I thought it was when I was alone. Or maybe that person, we’re delivering it a different way and we need to adjust it. So being confident in your writing, but being okay with pivoting.”
That right there only scratches the surface of our Collider Ladies Night conversation with Shlesinger. If you’d like to hear more about her very first feature film, a deleted scene from Pieces of a Woman, the true story that inspired Good on Paper and loads more, you can catch our Ladies Night video by clicking right here or you can listen to the uncut version in podcast form below: