Casey Wilson

Cathryn Rose "Casey" Wilson (born October 24, 1980) is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter, director, and podcaster.

Her mother, Kathy Higdon, was a women's rights advocate and served as the chairwoman of the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) throughout the 1980s.

Kathy Higdon Wilson retired from politics in the late 1980s; switching to a career in early childhood education, she began serving as the director of childcare and development centers in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1991.

Under Higdon's leadership, the NWPC endorsed Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election.

She graduated from T. C. Williams High School in 1998 and studied theater at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, where she was a recipient of NYU's "Excellence in Acting" award when graduating in 2002.

She is of Irish and Italian heritage, and was raised Baptist.

Her parents worked in politics, and she credits her politically opposed parents (her mother was a Democrat, her father a Republican) in shaping her sense of humor, having grown up in a "blue-state/red-state, forever-clashing political household", as she called it in an interview with Washington Flyer.

She also has a younger brother, Fletcher.

Her father, Paul O. Wilson, is a political strategist and consultant who runs campaigns for Republican party candidates.

After graduating from NYU in 2002, Wilson and her best friend from college, June Diane Raphael, began studying improvisational comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City, where they eventually ran their two-woman sketch show for a number of years.

Performing the long-running stage show opened doors for them as writers.

Among her best-known work at UCB was the long-running two-woman sketch show Rode Hard and Put Away Wet, written and performed alongside her comedy partner and best friend June Diane Raphael; the show ran from 2003 to 2006 in New York and Los Angeles and was an official selection at 2005's US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado.

She died of heart failure at age 54 in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on September 1, 2005.

Casey Wilson and her family have since continued to run the Kathy Wilson Foundation, a charitable organization honoring her mother's work in helping children with disabilities.

Wilson's passion for performing began at an early age, and she has said that her first memorable exposure to theater came when her father took her to New York City to see a production of Cats, inspiring her to create her own plays.

When Wilson was nine years old, her father built her a homemade stage in the family's backyard, where she put on plays with other children from the neighborhood.

From there, she started taking singing and acting lessons as a teenager.

She became involved in her high school's theater program, starring in (and occasionally directing) many of the school's plays and musicals, including a production of The Sound of Music, in which she played the lead role of Maria.

While studying acting at the Stella Adler School of Dramatic Arts, Wilson originally set out to be a dramatic actress, but later started to focus on comedy at the suggestion of an acting teacher.

After performing the show at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in 2005, they were hired by New Regency Pictures to write the film Bride Wars and landed a development deal with UPN to create a sitcom pilot.

Wilson has cited her biggest influences as Catherine O'Hara, Diane Keaton, Madeline Kahn, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Debra Winger, and Shirley MacLaine.

Wilson started her comedy career writing and performing with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCB) in New York and later in Los Angeles.

At UCB, she was a member of the Harold improv teams "Mr. and Mrs. All-Star", "Sentimental Lady", and "Hey, Uncle Gary!".

The two women, who first met in a clowning class during their freshman year at NYU, went on to win the ECNY Award for "Best Comedy Duo" in 2005.

Wilson and Raphael's comedic partnership has since branched out into an active writing career in film and television.

They co-wrote their first screenplay for the comedy Bride Wars, in which they also played supporting roles.

They landed a development deal with UPN in 2005 to create a half-hour comedy pilot.

Wilson made her film acting debut as an acting student in the final scene of the 2006 Christopher Guest film For Your Consideration.

She has since appeared in Julie & Julia, C.O.G., The Breakup Girl, The Guilt Trip, Killers, The Brothers Solomon, Freak Dance, The Great Buck Howard, and the Bob Odenkirk-directed short film Derek & Simon: A Bee and a Cigarette.

In 2007 they worked as writers and story editors on the Americanized version of Creature Comforts on CBS.

Originally known for her performances with the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe in New York, Wilson's first major television appearances came during her two-season stint as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2008 to 2009.

Following SNL, she starred as Penny Hartz in the ABC comedy series Happy Endings for which she was twice nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, and has since starred in comedies such as Showtime's Black Monday, Apple TV's The Shrink Next Door, Hulu's The Hotwives and Marry Me on NBC.

Other notable work includes supporting roles in films such as Gone Girl, Julie & Julia, and The Meddler, recurring in the HBO series Mrs. Fletcher, the Amazon comedy One Mississippi, and the Netflix series Atypical, and her 2013 Sundance film Ass Backwards, which she co-wrote and starred in with her creative partner June Diane Raphael.

Wilson co-hosts (alongside Danielle Schneider) the Earwolf podcast Bitch Sesh.

Casey Wilson was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia.

She also co-starred in the David Fincher thriller Gone Girl (2014), the 2016 dramedy The Meddler, with Susan Sarandon, and the 2019 comedy Always Be My Maybe.

Wilson is a frequent contributor to the popular humor website Funny or Die, writing and starring in many viral videos for the site, including a series of political parodies where she plays Callista Gingrich.

Wilson continues to collaborate with writing partner June Diane Raphael on scripts for film and television.

They have worked on numerous script rewrites for films in development, such as projects with Anna Faris and America Ferrera attached to star.

As writer-performers, Wilson and Raphael also continue to generate material for themselves.