A DM From Lena Dunham Propelled Megan Stalter Into Her Icon Era ~ VOUX MAG

A DM From Lena Dunham Propelled Megan Stalter Into Her Icon Era Story By Photograph by PhilipDaniel Ducasse; Styling by Gabriella KarefaJohnson, Chelsey SanchezAugust 19, 2025 at 6:07 AM Megan Stalter Brings The Drama PHILIPDANIEL DUCASSE "Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on...

- - A DM From Lena Dunham Propelled Megan Stalter Into Her Icon Era

Story By Photograph by Philip-Daniel Ducasse; Styling by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, Chelsey SanchezAugust 19, 2025 at 6:07 AM

Megan Stalter Brings The Drama PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE

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Dress, Willy Chavarria. Serpenti Viper earrings, bracelets, and rings, Bulgari. PHILIP-DANIEL DUCASSE

It started, as so many great romances do, with a DM. Lena Dunham—TV wunderkind, best-selling memoirist, and controversial millennial—slid into TikTok darling, Hacks scene-stealer, and Hollywood neophyte Megan Stalter's inbox. Dunham was working on a new show for Netflix, marking an anticipated return to the small screen after her generation-defining Girls premiered more than a decade ago. This rom-com, which has inevitably been seen as a kind of sequel to Girls, may or may not take inspiration from Dunham's real-life love story with husband Luis Felber, and she wanted Stalter to step into the leading role. It was part kismet, part serendipity, and the 34-year-old comedian almost couldn't believe her luck.

"It was my dream come true," says Stalter, who was a fan of Girls long before Dunham fired off that fateful DM. "I felt a connection to her sense of humor, and I'm glad that she felt that toward me when watching my weird TikTok videos."

Millions have connected with Stalter's "weird TikTok videos" over the years; she has more than 200,000 followers, and she's amassed nearly five million likes on the platform since she started posting in 2020. In one of her most viral bits, she postures as a business owner capitalizing on Pride month ("We love gay!") with a lack of self-awareness that winks at the corporate tendency to pinkwash. ("We have been making butter since 1945, and we've been accepting all people since the last four months.") Her characters teeter between endearing and hysterical, and that same chaotic unpredictability can be found in Jessica, her character in Dunham's Too Much.

The show begins with Jessica breaking into her ex-boyfriend's apartment in the middle of the night. Inside, the sight of her ex, Zev (Michael Zegen), fast asleep in their former bed with his new influencer girlfriend, Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski), makes her go apoplectic. She screams, she curses, she delivers the lines "Write on a piece of paper that leaving me is the worst thing that anyone's ever done! You write that out, fucker! You write that out in blood, bastard!" with the same kind of frenzied rage anyone might feel when finding out an ex moved on with someone extremely hot. It's a masterful comedic performance, one that no one could have executed except for Stalter. Literally.

"Lena always says that she had me in mind," Stalter says, recalling how Dunham wrote and shaped the part specifically for her, "which, to me, is so crazy, but that's what she says. I must believe her."

"Meg often plays delusional, daffy roles, but she has incredible control and deeply considers every move she makes," Dunham tells me. "People say you have to be smart to play a ditz, à la Marilyn Monroe, and you have to be totally on your game to play a mess too."

Megan Stalter and Will Sharpe in Too Much, 2025 Netflix

Stalter and I connect over Zoom a few weeks before Too Much premieres on Netflix. Her eyelids are swiped with densely pigmented sky-blue eyeshadow, a hallmark from her menagerie of boisterous and chaotic TikTok characters. When Stalter speaks, though, it's with a grounded, gentle temperament that almost borders on demure. She laughs easily, often at the things she says herself, and is overwhelmingly gracious. She refers to Too Much as her "dream" job five times.

"Jessica is a character we both kind of created together," Stalter says. "I feel like if you put me and Lena together, Jessica's a combination of us. A very wild, more exaggerated version, maybe."

Megan Stalter in Too Much, 2025 Netflix

In the show, Dunham plays Nora, Jessica's emotionally catatonic older sister, whose husband has left her to experiment with polyamory in a Brooklyn commune. Their sisterly bond comes across organically through the screen. "She just speaks a language I understand," Dunham says. "Meg and I quickly developed our own language; we laughed, we cried, we had a shorthand that is very rare and a connection that's deeply special."

Stalter can't remember a time when she didn't want to make people laugh. Born and raised in Ohio, the oldest of four siblings, Stalter recalls her mom and aunts' laughter serving as a soundtrack to her childhood. "When you grow up and your parents or adult figures are laughing constantly and acting like teenagers, it makes you do that too," Stalter says. Stalter remembers making home videos and funny commercials with her sisters and cousins. "There's an importance [placed] on fun and play." After graduating from high school, she toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher or a nurse, like her mom, even though, deep down, she knew she wanted to be in front of an audience.

Stalter enrolled in an improv class and was encouraged by a teacher to perform. She stole the show at Wiley's Comedy Club in Dayton—or, at least, that's how she remembers feeling in the moment. "I wasn't great," she says now, with the crystal-clear clarity of hindsight. "No one is good when you do your first stand-up." Still, the five-minute set was enlightening. "I was like, Oh, I could be onstage and do whatever I want, and it could be anything that I think is funny? I only ever want to do that all the time."

So Stalter set out to do just that, first moving to Chicago in 2014, with its robust comedy scene anchored by the legendary improv hub Second City, and a few years later, to New York. There, she settled in with a vibrant comedy community that got her wacky and off-kilter stand-up sensibilities—until the pandemic hit. Covid-19 forced Stalter to pack up and move back home to Ohio. It could've sounded the death knell for a career that had barely begun, but it ended up kickstarting her ascent to stardom. Her internet presence, which had been steadily gaining traction, exploded, thrusting her eccentric and unhinged character sketches into the algorithmic spotlight. It inspired the showrunners of Hacks—the Emmy-winning HBO comedy starring Jean Smart—to create Kayla, a nepo-baby agent's assistant, who inhabited the exact kind of lovable cluelessness you'd expect to find in any one of Stalter's social videos. Then, they gave the part to Stalter.

Lena Dunham, Megan Stalter, Will Sharpe, and Luis Felber at the U.K. premiere of Too Much, 2025 Getty Images

"There's so much more trust I have now in myself than I did [during] Hacks season 1," she says. While Kayla is a fan favorite, Jessica presented a whole new challenge as Stalter's first leading role in a television series. (She previously starred in Cora Bora, Hannah Pearl Utt's 2023 indie comedy about a bisexual musician figuring out how to navigate an open relationship with her long-distance girlfriend.)

Stalter remembers feeling nervous about meeting Will Sharpe, who would play Felix, her onscreen love interest in Too Much. "I thought, He is an actor actor, and maybe he won't love my silly pranks," she says of Sharpe, who received an Emmy nomination for his role in the second season of HBO's viral sensation The White Lotus. On the first day of filming in London, they shot Jessica and Felix's first kiss—a scene that's constructed to be more awkward than it is romantic. "We were being so funny that I had no nerves anymore," Stalter adds. "He's more goofy and weird than you think. He's not too serious."

While Too Much is outrageously funny, Jessica was an opportunity for Stalter to stretch as an actor. Drama was unconquered territory, and Jessica—with her 50 tons of emotional baggage and narcissistic-ex-induced relationship PTSD—had plenty of material to work with. "It definitely feels interesting making yourself cry or putting yourself in a sad place, and then you're kind of in a weird mood the rest of the day, but you're like, Wait, that's okay. I'm separating it. It's not real," she says. Stalter dialed into Jessica's emotional lows with guidance from Dunham, who seamlessly weaved the show's humor into its characters' various tragedies. "It reminds me of when you're watching TikTok and you are laughing over a video and the next video is really sad and then the next one's funny again."

Hannah Einbinder, Megan Stalter, and Paul W. Downs in Hacks season 4 HBO

Jessica's labyrinthine complex of insecurities and unresolved wounds made Stalter dig deeper within her own artistry. "It doesn't matter what something will look like if it felt the way it's supposed to," she says. "Sometimes you don't feel a certain way in the scene, but it looks good. But, to me, it's fulfilling when I have gotten to an emotional place. If it feels real to me, I think it feels fulfilling."

Even as her onscreen star grows, Stalter doesn't plan to put her stand-up on pause. "You're having such an instant connection with the audience," she says. "It almost makes me kind of emotional when I think about it, because experiencing something all together—it's not recorded, it's not going to happen again just how it's happening now. It's like you're all inside of a joke."

Ultimately, she says her creative goals haven't changed much from when she was a college student testing jokes onstage at Wiley's in Dayton to today, as an actor performing roles written specifically for her on big-budget Netflix and HBO sets. "I just always want to perform. Too Much and Hacks—they're dream shows. Like, this was the goal," says Stalter. "Now, the goal is just to keep doing it."

Hair: Evanie Frausto for Redken; makeup: Kennedy for Dior Beauty; manicures: Marisa Carmichael for Essie; casting: Anita Bitton at The Establishment; production: Day Int.; set design: Bette Adams

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