Geraldine Viswanathan Goes from Stand-Up Comedy to Sundance

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Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if Steve Buscemi were God? According to the new TBS comedy Miracle Workers, the answer is not so great. In the first season of the anthology series from Simon Rich and Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, Buscemi’s Creator is a vain, petulant, and ineffectual boss, with shades of The Office’s Michael Scott, overseeing a vast bureaucracy of angels who handle the everyday minutiae of life on Earth. After a particularly disappointing day at work, God resolves to replace Earth with a concept restaurant inspired by Lazy Susans. Craig and Eliza, two low-level workers in the basement Department of Answered Prayers, are left to win a bet to fulfill an “impossible prayer” by getting two awkward introverts to kiss to prevent God from destroying Earth, which he treats as a failed folly ready to be tossed aside.

Craig is played with unpresuming facial hair and a harried mien by Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, while Eliza is embodied by the Australian newcomer Geraldine Viswanathan, who readily admits that the show “definitely felt out of my league when I was auditioning for it.” A veteran of standup comedy and sketch comedy with the troupe Freudian Nip and a breakout of last year’s raunchy high school sex comedy Blockers, Viswanathan is no stranger to laughs, which are laced with a deeper existential tone in Miracle Workers. Like the hit The Good Place, the show tackles questions of free will and mortality with a deadpan touch, led by Buscemi’s vividly hilarious performance. “He’s such a man-child, but it’s beautiful and you still have so much love and empathy for this character who is just way out of his depth. Steve is just so funny,” says Viswanathan. “I had many moments where we would be doing a scene and I was like, ‘I am acting with Steve Buscemi right now.’”

Coming soon after Blockers, Miracle Workers is another step on Viswanathan’s entrance to Hollywood, a development that has happened quickly and, she offers, as somewhat of a surprise. Growing up as the daughter of an Indian father and a Swiss mother in Australia, she started acting in kindergarten after her mother performed in a local production of Annie and a fellow chorus member suggested she study drama. “She was like, ‘Oh there’s this performing arts school. Geraldine talks a lot, she should go there,’” the twenty-three-year-old laughs. She auditioned by telling a story about the zoo at the age of six and was quickly accepted to the program. Given her innate verbosity, she was naturally drawn to the quick patter of comedy and began doing her own sketches and skits. On a family vacation to Los Angeles at fifteen, a manager she met through family friends told her she had potential. “I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s all I needed to hear,’” she recalls, “and then I was set on making this my career.”

After high school, she took a gap year and moved to Los Angeles for six months to start auditioning and returned to Australia for a brief stint at university before realizing it wasn’t the right choice for her. “I went to school for international studies and media. I thought maybe I would want to be a diplomat,” she laughs. “I had a few teachers tell me that I’d be a good diplomat so I was like, ’Ok!’ But luckily I have very supportive parents who were like, ‘You should drop out of uni and be an actor.’” She began doing standup regularly and joined the all-female comedy troupe Freudian Nip, which tackles issues of gender in its sketches and videos, an early experience that helped affirm Viswanathan’s decision. “It felt so good to be actually doing what I wanted to do, performing,” she recalls. “With standup, you don’t have to wait for someone to ask you to do it. I was frustrated with auditioning and not getting anything, so it more was just for the soul. It felt good to be proactive. I think it did give me confidence because standup is terrifying. It definitely makes everything seem a little less scary.”

That confidence would come in handy when she was asked to audition for Kay Cannon, the 30 Rock, Pitch Perfect, and New Girl writer who would be making her directorial début with Blockers, in which Viswanathan played Kayla, one of three high school girls who form a pact to lose their virginity on prom night, to the chagrin of their parents, who attempt to thwart them. John Cena played her father. The story is one well known from decades of teen sex comedies, but told from a female perspective, gaining new relevance and value. “There’s notes on my phone being like, ‘Dude, you are on the plane about to go meet with Kay Cannon,’” she recalls about a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles to meet the director for the first time. “It was pretty intimidating. I wanted to do the best I could, but I think there was also an element of like, ‘Fuck it, I’m just going to roll with this and see what happens,’ like, ‘I don’t know how to behave on a Universal Studio set! I just have to trust my instinct I guess.’”

Blockers premiered to rave reviews at South by Southwest last year, with many critics singling out Viswanathan’s performance and the film’s feminist undertones, which she reveals didn’t become obvious until she saw the finished product. “It was a female-fronted, raunchy sex comedy, Seth Rogan-style, but I don’t think we really knew what we were doing while we were doing it,” she explains. “It wasn’t until I saw it that I was like, ‘Oh this is fucking cool, this is actually different and bold and also just overdue. Why hasn’t this been done yet?’”

Between filming Blockers and Miracle Workers, Viswanathan exercised her more dramatic side to lead Minhal Baig’s Hala, which follows a Muslim teenager who rebels against her conservative parents. As her first lead role, the film was “probably the most challenging to shoot,” she says, but ultimately worthwhile. “I found the script really interesting and beautiful and it felt really deeply personal. I could really feel the texture and nuance because Minhal wrote it and it’s based on her life,” she elaborates. “I thought it was an important story to tell and a really bold way to tell it because it was so quiet and reserved. We see a lot of coming-of-age stories about these self-possessed teenage girls who are very liberated and I thought it was interesting to have this coming-of-age story where there was so much restraint, there was so much duality, there was so much depth.”

Hala falls in love with a white classmate played by Jack Kilmer and frequents the skate park with her best friend, both of which cause her parents considerable consternation. Given the film’s autobiographical nature, Viswanathan says that most of the work came in speaking with Baig to understand Hala’s desires and motivations. “The character is so different than me, sometimes I had to wrap my head around it,” she says. “Maybe I wouldn’t do some of the things that the character did, but I just had to trust Minhal completely because she was like, ‘No, this is the character.’ That was challenging but rewarding because I had to let go a lot and throw myself at it and hope that Minhal would catch me.”

The daughter of two immigrants, Viswanathan says that she recognized the tensions between Hala and her parents, although not perhaps from her own family. She describes her Indian father “as very Australian” and has only visited his native country once, while her mother is “quite Swiss and is still very proud of her identity.” Her family visits Switzerland often and they speak German at home and, most importantly, they are “very relaxed,” she says. “I could definitely see my Muslim friends from Sydney, the similarities of having to lie to your parents pretty often and that rebellion,” she adds. “It does feel pretty universal, the first-generation feeling like you’re leading a double life with one foot in that culture and one foot in American culture.”

Hala premiered at Sundance earlier this year, offering Viswanathan her first experience of the snowy ski resort often seen as a lodestar of independent film and a peek of what might lie ahead in her burgeoning career. “It was such a charmed first Sundance to have a movie that was so well-received because it felt extremely vulnerable,” she recalls. “After the screening, I felt completely naked, but it was really nice to feel so welcomed. I felt a warmness from everyone instead of this competitive energy which I feel like film festivals could have. It was so beautiful. It took me a second to get over the altitude sickness. I definitely felt insane and didn’t sleep, but it was great.”

Miracle Workers continues on Tuesdays on TBS.