Actress, writer and director mneelzy takes THR behind the scenes of her self-shot musical theater tributes, which became a viral phenomenon during the coronavirus lockdown
When she returned, the videos became more and more elaborate. Her penultimate video was "The Schuyler Sisters" from, which was met with Miranda's approval. "I feel like he's the king of musical theater right now, at this moment in time. I couldn't believe that. That was the biggest compliment," she said.
Growing up as a musical theater lover, the Los Angeles native planned to move to New York for school. She attended high school summer theater programs at UCLA and Carnegie Mellon, but as she applied for college in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, she decided to stay closer to home and out of debt and attend the UCLA acting program on a scholarship. She began working as a commercial actor while in school, landing a long-term Pepcid gig and later a major Tide campaign.
"Commercials gave me the freedom and the liberty to be able to fund my first short film and take the time to write scripts and make other projects," she said. Those other projects include several short films, including one,, that played at South By Southwest in 2018. "I had imposter syndrome for years, not thinking that I was a director or a writer just because I never studied it.
Now, though, she's getting plenty of interest. Her agents, who have been supportive of her goofy project from the beginning, have fielded plenty of calls about Neely throughout the past few weeks. "People have been sending my agents projects that they want me to be a part of, and I've gotten some Zoom meetings out of it. I've gotten showrunners of Netflix shows asking for my specs," she said. "I have a half hour pilot and then I have two features. One of them I want to direct, the other one I'm like, you just can sell that. A head of casting at a network just reached out today. This is — wow. It's so cool.
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