Aidy Bryant

Aidy Bryant is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer whose warm onscreen presence, sharp comedic instincts, and championing of stories about complicated women have made her one of the most distinctive comic voices of her generation. Born Aidy Bryant on May 7, 1987, in Phoenix, Arizona, she grew up in the desert suburbs of the Southwest and discovered her love of performing early, gravitating toward improv and sketch comedy as a teenager. She has spoken in interviews about attending a teen theater camp in Phoenix where she first encountered improvisation, an experience that would set the course of her professional life. She graduated from Xavier College Preparatory, a Catholic all-girls high school in Phoenix, in 2005, before leaving Arizona for the Midwest to pursue comedy in earnest.

Bryant enrolled at Columbia College Chicago, the arts-focused institution in the South Loop, where she took part in the school's comedy studies program developed in partnership with The Second City. The curriculum allowed her to train full-time at the legendary improv theater for a semester while completing her degree, immersing her in the Chicago comedy scene that has produced generations of American comic actors. She earned her B.A. from Columbia in 2009 and stayed in the city to continue her training, studying at the iO Theater and eventually joining the resident company of The Second City's E.T.C. stage. Her stage revues there, including shows such as Sky's the Limit, Weather Permitting and We're All in This Room Together, earned local acclaim and helped build the reputation that would soon carry her to New York.

That opportunity came in 2012, when she was cast as a featured player on NBC's Saturday Night Live for the show's thirty-eighth season. She was promoted to the repertory cast in her second year and ultimately stayed with the show for ten seasons, departing at the end of its forty-seventh season in 2022. Over 207 episodes, Bryant established herself as a reliable anchor of the ensemble, known for characters rooted in specificity and genuine affection rather than cruelty. She became a regular presence on Weekend Update through recurring bits, scored viral success with sketches such as the spoof commercial Girlfriends Talk Show alongside Cecily Strong, and delivered memorable impressions of figures including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Adele. Her tenure made her one of the longest-serving female cast members in the program's history, and she received three Primetime Emmy nominations for her work, including two for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.

While still a cast member on SNL, Bryant took on the role that would most fully showcase her range. In 2019 she starred in the Hulu comedy Shrill, adapted from Lindy West's memoir of the same name. Bryant played Annie Easton, an aspiring journalist in Portland navigating dating, friendship, family, and her own relationship to her body in a culture fixated on thinness. In addition to headlining the series, she co-created it and served as a writer and executive producer, helping shape a show that was praised for treating its heroine as a full human being rather than a problem to be solved. Shrill ran for three seasons through 2021, and Bryant's performance earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, cementing her as a serious dramatic-comedic lead as well as a sketch performer.

Her screen work around and beyond SNL has been steady and eclectic. She appeared as Shoshanna's college friend Abigail in Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls, popped up on Broad City, and lent her voice to the animated Netflix series Human Resources, in which she played the lovestruck lovebug Emmy Fairfax across multiple seasons. On the film side she has taken supporting roles in features including The Big Sick in 2017, the Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty in 2018, and the animated family film The Star, also in 2017. She appeared in the Alison Brie–led Netflix psychological drama Horse Girl in 2020, contributing a warmer, more grounded register to a film that trafficked in paranoia and mental unraveling. She has also appeared in the Peacock musical comedy Girls5eva, created by Meredith Scardino, reuniting her with the pop-inflected, joke-dense tone of her Tina Fey–adjacent collaborators.

Throughout her career Bryant has been closely associated with a loose cohort of alt-comedy peers from Chicago and New York, and her personal life reflects those roots. She met the comedian and writer Conner O'Malley in 2008 while both were performing at the Annoyance Theatre in Chicago, where their shared sensibility and years spent grinding through late-night shows formed the basis of a long partnership. O'Malley, known for his absurdist man-on-the-street videos and his work as a writer on Late Night with Seth Meyers, became her frequent collaborator and creative sounding board. The couple married on April 28, 2018, in a ceremony that drew coverage in entertainment press both because of their SNL-adjacent circle and because of their reputation as one of comedy's more genuinely beloved couples.

Since leaving Saturday Night Live, Bryant has continued to develop projects that emphasize character and heart alongside laughs. She has been a vocal advocate for size inclusivity in Hollywood, speaking openly in interviews about the industry's narrow assumptions about leading women and using Shrill and her own production choices to push against them. She has written essays, appeared on podcasts, and lent her support to causes around body autonomy and reproductive rights. Her public persona, both onscreen and off, is marked by a disarming mixture of Midwestern-trained generosity and Arizona-bred directness, paired with a comic sharpness honed by more than a decade inside one of American television's most demanding writers' rooms.

Across sketch, sitcom, film, animation, and producing, Aidy Bryant's body of work reflects the arc of a performer who trained in Chicago's improv tradition, matured on the SNL stage, and is now steadily building a filmography on her own terms.