Checking in with Casey Wilson

By Jacqueline Cutler

Casey Wilson, Penny on ABC’s Happy Endings, isn’t sure but thinks she probably always was funny.

Her first memory of working an audience was cracking up her parents. Her aunt left the room and she did a spot-on impersonation.

“I don’t even change my material,” Wilson says. “I still do the same impression of her.”

Her dad used to take her to see Second City, the Chicago improv group, twice a year, and she wound up working on Saturday Night Live and writing comedies.

Yet, Wilson thought she “would do very serious dramas, and I was always the girl in the Sam Shepard play,” she says. “In college, I did darker stuff. I went to the Yale summer drama program, and the teacher there (said), ‘You should do comedy.’ And I had never thought about it. All of my favorite actresses are comedians at heart: Shirley MacLaine and Madeline Kahn, Diane Keaton and Debra Winger. And they are all amazing dramatic actresses, but everything they do is funny.”

A high school star - she was class president and played field hockey - Wilson went to NYU, but when she arrived in Greenwich Village, was taken aback.
“I remember feeling I wouldn’t have wanted to go to NYU if I weren’t doing acting,” Wilson says. “All of my friends were going to mixers and ice cream socials. I never met the people who lived down the hall from me. I was startled by the lack of community spirit. There was no campus spirit. You’re just thrown into Washington Square Park. As college went on, I felt lucky and independent to be in New York.”

Like her favorite actresses, she made a pretty funny choice there. Wilson joined a sorority at a university that has precious few, and a Jewish one, even though she is a gentile.

Born: October 24, 1980

First time on stage: In pre-school, she was one of the monsters in “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Credit: Julie & Julia and Bride Wars, on which she was a co-writer

On her “SNL” gig:  “Someone described it to me as, ‘You were in the huddle, and not many people get to be in the huddle,’ ” Wilson says. “I will still genuinely say, ‘Was I on that show?’ It was such a blur of highs and lows. Ultimately, it was not the best fit for me. I am definitely where I should be.”