She claims her ‘big, pale face’ helped her land her lead role – even though she can’t learn her lines. But, as her new memoir reveals, that’s not the only reason she is the most upbeat woman on screen
There are lots of reasons why Ellie Kemper, the 38-year-old star of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, first came to the attention of the show’s creators, Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. As Erin, the daffy secretary in the US version of The Office, for example, she turned a small role into an arresting comic showcase. And she was well known within Manhattan improv circles and had contributed pieces to the Onion and McSweeney’s. After five seasons of playing Kimmy Schmidt and with a possible movie in the works, however, Kemper is adamant that Fey’s original interest in her came exclusively down to her “big, pale face”.
It’s true, Kemper’s physiognomy has particular comic overtones. She is wide-eyed and almost manically sunny – “Oh my gosh! I love that question,” she says more than once – with a guilelessness so pronounced she imagines Fey taking one look at her and saying: “OK, thinking about her face, what could be funny? A cult victim!” (Kimmy Schmidt is the story of a woman released after 15 years of being imprisoned in a bunker by a doomsday cult leader.) In Kemper’s new memoir, My Squirrel Years, she describes herself as about as near to a jolly-hockey-sticks type as you can get in the US, the product of a wealthy St Louis family, who took pride in being great at PE and is not really interested in introspection. “I’ll be perfectly honest,” she says. “I signed on to write a book of personal essays and then I thought: ‘Oh my goodness, this is a very delicate task because how personal do I want to be? How deep do I want to go?’ And I realised I wanted to be entertaining and make people laugh – and I don’t want to reveal everything about my life in this book. The voice is a heightened version of me.”
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