In between stealing scenes on Hacks, Meg Stalter plays up her cartoon-meets-real life aesthetic with exaggerated cat eyes and electric blue eye shadow.
her work as “essential escapist entertainment,” and that seems to ring true for Stalter as well—known to disappear under a peroxide wig or a sweep of banana-yellow eye shadow.
“I just feel like costume and makeup and the way someone’s hair looks, it tells so much about how they want the world to see them,” says Stalter, who came up in the sketch and improv world, where that kind of wearable transformation is often all that’s in the budget. It adds to that uncanny blur between art and artifice. “A lot of times people will see a video and be like, ‘I can’t tell if the wild makeup is her or the character,’ and now I feel it is kind of blending in together,” Stalter says.
At this juncture—soft pants traded for party clothes, lipstick smeared under the occasional mask, Zoom snafus segueing into IRL ones—it feels right that we are treated to so much Meg. In the eighth episode ofdropping tonight, Kayla inserts herself back into the plot, making power plays of a hapless sort. Later this month, Stalter returns to New York for a sold-outat the Bell House. “My mom has been freaking out. She cried when the first one sold out within a minute!” says Stalter.
Besides, Stalter adds, “there are so many characters I couldn’t do onstage the way I can do in a video in my mom’s backyard.” Or in a bathtub or in a Burlington Coat Factory parking lot. She knows how to give people what they want—and right about now, surely it’s a makeup tutorial: exaggerated cat eyes with, say, electric blue eye shadow. “People are like, ‘You can’t—it’s so ’80s.’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s fun!’”at Amazon“I always have black eyeliner everywhere.