“Hey, I loved you in Hawk,” yells a male voice. “How’s your little Biggie boy?” asks a woman. “They gave me three stars too. Those bitches,” says another.
And so it goes.
There’s palpable buzz at the Burbank Airport as fans yell out to Fortune Feimster as she takes a break from her crazy schedule for a quick phone interview. The sought-after actress, comedian, and writer will make a two-show stop at Lobero on October 24 as part of her Takin’ Care of Biscuits Tour. Balancing a flourishing standup career with an A-list slate of on-screen projects — including opposite Will Ferrell in The Hawk, the Netflix film The Fifth Wheel, and voicing “Nibbles” in Disney’s Oscar-nominated animated hit Zootopia 2 — she answered a few questions en-route to her next gig.
We’re excited to have you come to Santa Barbara. Have you ever played here before?
This is like my first proper theater show in Santa Barbara. I’ve done a few pop-up shows but not in a theater.
The Lobero’s perfectly suited to comedy. It’s big enough that you can feel people laughing, but we can see your face. Speaking of that, you obviously do a lot of acting and voice work, in addition to standup. Do you approach it differently if you’re playing a character that somebody else wrote for you versus yourself?
I think you’d always see a bit of me in every character. I don’t quite disappear into it completely, but when I’m acting, that’s when you rely on the writing to sort of help find those levels and to differentiate me from the character. Especially in the last show, The Hawk, they gave me some really good emotional moments to play with, and I feel like that helped show me in a bit of a different light than people have seen before.
Obviously with stand-up, I’m such a storyteller that everything’s very personal, and everything that I’m talking about relates to my life and my family and my mom, and so when you see that, you know that’s who I am. Who I am on stage is pretty similar to off stage and it does not differ very much, but it’s fun to do the acting and not be in charge of the content.
Did you always know that you wanted to be an entertainer?
No, not at all. I was pretty shy, and I really had to build my confidence and build my ability to like to be silly without being self-conscious about it. That definitely took time and age.
So, you came to L.A. and worked as a PA and started doing improv, and you’ve been writing your own material since you’ve been performing then?
Yeah. That was kind of the thing you don’t really realize when you go into standup, that writing is such a huge part of doing it. If you’re not writing material, if you’re not coming up with stuff, you kind of suck. … I have no choice but to sit and write, try to come up with stuff. Otherwise, my career, my career as a standup is just me telling old jokes. It’s just not like music where you play the hit. They want new material, new stories.
It’s an interesting thing to navigate because when you start having success, you’re busy. You’re working all the time, so your life becomes work. You have to really make a concerted effort to be a human and to live life and have experiences because you mine from your life and put it back on stage.
I feel like right now there’s just so much bad news going on in the world; do you feel like your role as a comic has evolved at all in light of that?
I never really talk about politics and daily news stuff because it changes so often. Everything’s so polarizing. I’m very clear on where I stand on things. I don’t shy away from standing up for human rights and things like that. But as far as political stuff, there’s so many people that do it better who are much more knowledgeable about it, and those are the people I even myself look at too. But for me, it’s all about levity. I want to be the air, like the thing that you go in for an hour and a half and forget about all the stress. I like to just keep it light and just feel good. There’s such a positive energy that people always talk about when they leave my shows, like how good it felt, and that’s what I want from people is to just to breathe for a second, have some fun. All that stuff will be there when you leave the theater. Come feel good here.Fortune Feimster performs at the Lobero Theatre (33 E. Canon Perdido St.) Saturday, October 24, at 5 and 8:30 p.m. See lobero.org.
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