photography ADAM POWELL
styling SAM KNOLL
hair KAZU KATAHIRA
makeup ANDREW D’ANGELO
photo assistance JASSIA AHMAD
styling assistance DAVIEL CASTAÑEDA
You can never quite tell when Mary Beth Barone is joking. That’s partly because her tone, dry and consistent, can often feel like she’s both making a grave admission and delivering a cutting satire.
That is her job, after all, and she’s so good at it. For the better part of a decade, she’s been a comedian, performing stand-up sets to crowds in New York bars, where, in 2018, she just so happened to meet her now best friend, Benito Skinner. Over the years, they have revelled in each other’s rise: Skinner as a comedian who found fame for his sketches online; Barone as a stand-up breaking into the late night TV sphere. Now they host a podcast together, called Ride, filled with enough brainrot internet verbiage––complimentary––that could kill a Victorian child.
But way back then, Skinner had the idea for a television series based on one of his own stand-up sets about a closeted high school football star going to college and discovering he can’t play it straight. He knew Barone had her own part in it somewhere.
Fast forward six years and that show is finally premiering. Overcompensating, produced by A24 and streaming on Prime Video, sees Skinner––who became a particular kind of online celebrity in the early 2020s––become a showrunner, writer, and lead star for the first time. Barone, rightfully so, plays the imperative role of his bitch sister, Grace, whose reign as the college cool girl is threatened by his arrival.
“People ask us all the time if Benny and I are siblings, which I always love, because we have different last names,” Barone says, on a video call from the floor of her New York apartment. “I’m like, ‘Wow! How modern!’” She’s just got home from a tour of American colleges, where the cast has shown the first two episodes to students in special screenings. They showed up to Coachella as a crew too. She’s glad to be back home now, in the company of her dog Pinkie, who lies sweetly on the sofa in the background: “She wants to make sure I don’t have to, like, you know, go off the record,” Barone says.
Grace—gorgeous, sort of terrifying—carries shades of Barone’s personality. She’s forthright and well-liked, but (perhaps less like Barone) harbors the anxieties of someone who’s ascended the rungs of the social ladder, leaving ghosts behind her. Every character in the show is layered like this: A surface and something simmering beneath it. The show’s frat boys will simultaneously be the most cocksure chauvinists while struggling to get boners because they’re on SSRIs. Barone, before she was cast, was in the writer’s room, chipping in and witnessing Skinner’s own genius. She calls him an “auteur” and you can’t deny the man has vision.
She believes it: “Christopher Nolan, if you’re reading this: Watch out.”
The part was written for Barone, but she still had to audition for it. (“Two things can be true,” she says.) In most cases, shows of Overcompensating’s size either need megawatt stars to draw attention to them, or they flex the Euphoria muscle, casting younger, lesser known actors who then go on to become bigger deals. Barone, front and center, feels like the one primed for that fate. She’s been acting in indie films and shorts for five or so years, but few projects of Overcompensating’s stature have given her the space to prove herself as someone capable of delivering something with more pathos than a punchline. “The stakes were incredibly high,” Barone says, “Amazon and all the production companies behind it put a lot of faith, trust and money in the team, so I think it was fair that they wanted to see that I had the chops.” After four rounds of auditions, she got the job, and a week later moved to Toronto to start filming.
When she got there, she’d dedicate her weekends to taking acting classes with her tutor, Nancy Banks, “so I could bring my best for Benny.” She learned how to wear her drama hat, which, for reference, would be a bucket hat, she thinks, “because bucket hats are so many things. There’s that safety: Like, you can pull it down, or you’re feeling a little flirty, you just pop it up.”
Her sense of humor, somewhat dismal, was formed growing up as a stubborn kid in Stamford, Connecticut, the youngest of six children. “I’ve sort of been a Rebel Without a Cause from an early age, and my path makes so much sense when you zoom out and see that,” she says. She can recall a time when she was essentially kicked out of pre-K for two weeks because she cried for attention. “I remember telling my mom, ‘Why would I want to be at school when I have all the same toys at home and I don’t have to share them?’,” she says. “I felt really confined by having to live on someone else’s terms, even as a kid.”
In school, her dream was “to be a Disney Channel kid, a singer and actress or a model,” as if performing was the only thing that could make her happy. But she sacrificed those ambitions, and spent her teen years working part time in Sephora, and later studying to be an English teacher at Boston College. All of these things acted as tentpoles in character building that seeped into her comedy. Thirteen years ago, she dropped out and moved to New York. Later, she’d cash out her 401k to make a comedy webseries (“that’s girl economics” she deadpans), working side jobs until it became her full time gig. The city’s been her mainstay ever since, save for some extended periods in London owing to an old English lover, the actor Edward Bluemel. They broke up recently but are still on good terms. (When I ask about her coming to London any time soon, she says she’s “repairing her relationship with the UK community.”)
Relationships fed much of her early material. Just before the pandemic, she did rounds of press for a web series called Drag His Ass that framed Barone as a fuck boy identifier who could sniff out bad men from a mile off. In her stand up, she’s talked frankly about how vibrators have gotten too intense, and other subjects that would make other purveyors of the mostly sexless profession squirm.
She’s not a gross out comedian, or overly crass, nor is she one to punch down. But the fuckboy stuff is mostly behind her, because “the fuck boy has evolved into a fascist person,” she says. Barone knows it’s funny to point and laugh at the straight man and his ways, but she’s also conscious of “the wedge we’ve driven between straight men who are on the internet and the rest of the world” and the disastrous consequences of it. Her new material tackles that. “I want to stop being so divisive and reach across the aisle. At this point, it’s like more than what a comedy show can address. But I’m hopeful that the current administration that we’re in will sort of open people’s eyes a little bit and make people want to get involved.” She’s a vocal liberal (raised in a Republican home) who protested a Tesla showroom in her hometown earlier this year and hosted a “Politics for Hot People” Q&A with New York City’s socialist mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani.
Barone’s “hot girl” reputation stems from the fact that she seems undaunted by the possibility of being discredited based on her appearance. She’s the rare comedian to wear a 1999 silver Versace dress for a set, as she did for her YouTube special last year, or know the significance of Tom Ford’s Gucci. Her shoot for this story was a “dream come true” moment, she says, wearing Schiaparelli and Marc Jacobs. “I’m gonna get hit by a car soon.”
At this point, Pinkie’s head spins to something out of frame. “Benny’s home!” Barone shouts, as she gets up to let him in. Later, mid-conversation, she’ll spin her camera around to show Skinner lying on her bed, Pinkie on top of him, like they’re wrestling. Skinner lets out one of his instantly recognisable laughs.
The shared language between Skinner and Barone off-screen can be confusing to anyone who hasn’t pressed play on Ride, which remains the only form of media that has forced me to stop in the street because I’ve been laughing so much. A new iteration of an old project called Obsessed (whenever that word is uttered on Ride, it’s bleeped like an expletive), each episode sees the pair select something to go to bat for. In past episodes, that’s been everything from Galileo to “cutting someone out of your life” to “Zootopia as a Neo Noir.”
To their audience of “Baronies”, as they’re known, they talk about each subject with seemingly minimal preparation, wandering into weird corners of popular culture. Some of those tidbits are so hyperspecific––like one line spoken by Jenny in an episode of Gossip Girl––that, until that point, you might have thought you were the only person in the world to have remembered it. Several other subjects of conversation, like Dr. Bronner’s soap, nurses wearing Figs scrubs, and Mary Beth’s unlikely obsession with My Chemical Romance, all make appearances in Overcompensating too. “I think we were excited to be able to give the Baronies those little things,” Barone says, “because they’re such a special part of who we are now.” Last year, the podcast toured as a live show. Naturally, knowing Barone, it featured her and Skinner’s rendition of Hilary Duff’s landmark “With Love” performance on Good Morning America.
A few years ago, in a full circle moment, Barone auditioned for the Lizzie McGuire reboot at Disney+ (unofficially dubbed Lizzie McGuire, But She Fucks Now by the internet). “I remember thinking, ‘This is my dream role,’” she says, “but I respect the fact that they thought they couldn’t really present people at that age with the same ethos as Lizzie McGuire.” Not only did Barone not get the part, but the show didn’t get greenlit. “For the whole project to get scrapped, I think that’s like artistic integrity to me.” When Barone says sentences like this so matter of factly, you can’t quite tell if she means it, but she hammers it home. “[Duff] was probably gonna get a fat check,” she adds, “and she was like, ‘No, I’m an artist’.”
If that show had worked out, maybe it would have been the one that shifted Barone into the wider public’s consciousness. If all goes well, it’ll be Overcompensating that does that instead. Her dreams of becoming the third Olsen twin are becoming more and more real every day. “It’s hard to stop and smell the roses in this industry, but this feels like a moment that I can’t believe is happening.” Years after that first conversation between two friends, in a shitty bar in New York, that pipe dream for the both of them came true.
“I think I’m in a good place… randomly.” Barone takes a pause and looks straight into the lens of her MacBook camera, and playfully points her finger: “Print that,” she says.
SEVEN FURTHER QUESTIONS FOR MARY BETH BARONE
What’s something you have no desire to do?
Skydive. Or fly in a private jet. Until TheRealReal releases second hand PJs, they’re not for me.
What makes you cringe?
Thinking of some of the people I’ve slept with. Most of the people I’ve slept with. It would send a shiver down your spine.
What would you spend your last dollar on?
If it’s my last dollar, I assume I’m close to death. I’m dairy and gluten intolerant, so I’d get a slice of pizza from Joe’s Pizza in Williamsburg. I’m not gonna have stomach cramps in the grave.
What’s bothering you right now?
JK Rowling. Time to deplatform. That woman––actually, I don’t claim her as a woman. If that person has a problem saying people with vaginas, well what about people with a heart? If I saw her in a bathroom… shudders.
Whose number don’t you have but you’d like?
Glen Powell’s, so I could text him and ask him who he voted for.
What’s the hardest thing about being hot?
Everyone is mean to me all the time. It’s so hard. We literally went to dinner last night, and they sat us in a booth that, like, wasn’t as nice as a booth that was available. So one of the straight guys we were with just asked if we could sit in another booth. And they said yes. If I had asked to sit in a different booth, I would have been shot on site. But I guess this is just my cross to bear.
What movie do you wish you starred in?
It Takes Two, which is a Mary Kate and Ashley movie. I always describe it as The Parent Trap without the science because they’re identical strangers. I actually performed that show in New York one night only just before the pandemic. I played all the parts. Many people say that is actually what started the pandemic.
A remake? Well, those contracts over at Dualstar are ironclad. The Olsens definitely still have the rights, and they can do whatever they want with them. They built that empire at age 10, and so they said, ‘What haven’t we done?’, and it’s design $1,000 flip-flops.
‘Overcompensating’ streams on Prime Video from 15 May
Lead image: Mary Beth Barone wears dress and shoes MARC JACOBS, necklace and bracelet D’HEYGERE