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Like many aspiring performers living in LA, Milana Vayntrub made the hard choice and got a job at AT&T to cover the bills. Also like most aspiring performers living in LA, it would become the job that would define the majority of her career.
The key difference being that while most folks in that position spend the rest of their lives getting reprimanded by a guy named Kenny for not pushing accessories hard enough, Vayntrub became the face of the company, playing the puckishly adorable Lily in AT&T’s ads from 2013 to 2016, and again from 2020 onward.
Her killer comedic timing and Pixar character eye-to-face ratio weren’t lost on Hollywood either. Here are a few of her best performances that didn’t include a polo shirt with a communications company’s logo stitched to the front.
This is Us
Eight episodes. One season. In her brief but memorable role as playwright Sloane Sandburg on This is Us, Milana Vayntrub proved that she was superior to other, more permanent characters on the show, if not through staying power, then thanks to her implied ability to work a slow cooker without burning to death.
Key & Peele
If you know, you know. Key & Peele’s “Sexy Vampire” sketch took every trope from 50 years of overly grindy, leather-clad vampire movies and deconstructed them in four and a half minutes. Vayntrub’s small but significant role in this classic moment in sketch comedy history doesn’t get enough credit.
Other Space
There’s a good chance that you don’t remember this, and that you’re young enough that you only remember Yahoo! as the site that aggregates other sites’ articles and used to crowdsource the worst advice imaginable. But for a minute there, Yahoo! was giving Google a run for its money as the world’s favorite search engine. Ask Jeeves was also still in the mix. It was a different time.
When beating Google stopped looking like a solid bet, Yahoo! went through an identity crisis, trying to be all sorts of things. For a brief, glorious moment, it tried to be a television studio. The most famous thing to come out of this was a prophesied sixth season of Community. The second most famous thing, by a wide stretch, was Other Space.
And it’s too bad. Other Space was a lot of fun. Created by Paul Feig, it was an episodic sci-fi comedy that cast Milana Vayntrub as Tina, a deeply unqualified and frequently violent navigator on an ill-fated starship. It’s a fun, bleak sitcom, stacked with spectacular talent. Like so many largely-forgotten stories canceled before their time, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube now.
The MCU, sort of, then not really, then sort of some more
Not that long ago, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was fractured – not by cosmic and unknowable powers, but by interdepartmental temper tantrums between the company’s film and television divisions. The TV side of the business pounded out property after property, generally without bothering to work their stories into the larger universe. It’s how you got stuff like Inhumans and that Runaways series that you forgot about coming out the same year as Spider-Man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok. Hulu, FX, FXX, Netflix, and ABC all got their own slices of the MCU.
And so did Freeform. Freeform got its own pretty forgettable Marvel series, cementing its place in television history as the network that basically only did that. Which is a shame, because for a hot minute, they almost made a show that seemed kind of rad.
In 2017, Milana Vayntrub joined a powerhouse cast that included Keith David and Calum Worthy in New Warriors, an MCU comedy series that honestly? Looked kind of rad. It would have seen Vayntrub playing Squirrel Girl, the fan-favorite character who does exactly what you’re imagining, but well enough to beat Galactus. Behind-the-scenes photos that have come out since the show was unceremoniously shelved in a pre-Batgirl Batgirling make it look like a goofy, faithful adaptation of one of Marvel’s most colorful teams. While we’ll likely never see an episode of the show proper, Vayntrub stuck the landing, hanging onto the Squirrel Girl role as a voice actor across the Marvel Rising series of animated shorts.
Werewolves Within
Live-action video game adaptations spent decades as Hollywood’s third rail. Today, they’re, you know. Still that, mostly. Like, no matter how much you liked Five Nights at Freddy’s, it’s still an inescapable fact that Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City came out less than two years before it.
But then there was Werewolves Within, the feature-length take on the Red Storm Entertainment game of the same name. Written by UCB’s Mishna Wolff and directed by Dropout’s own Josh Ruben, Werewolves Within sees Vayntrub as a friendly mail carrier in a town suffering from a severe lycanthrope crisis. Part The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, part gore fest comedy, it became the best-rated video game movie of all time. Yes, even including Angry Birds.