Judy Greer

Judy Greer is an American actress, director and author whose career is often cited as a model of modern character acting. Born Judith Therese Evans in Detroit, Michigan, on July 20, 1975, she grew up in the Detroit suburbs and trained at The Theatre School at DePaul University, graduating with a BFA. She adopted her mother’s maiden name professionally and began working in film and television in the late 1990s.

Greer’s first major film recognition came with Jawbreaker, where she played Fern Mayo, a socially awkward student pulled into a dark high-school comedy. Over the next decade she became a familiar presence in studio comedies and romantic comedies, appearing in What Women Want, The Wedding Planner, 13 Going on 30, Elizabethtown, 27 Dresses and Love & Other Drugs. These roles often used her timing and expressiveness in support of bigger-name leads, but they also established a screen persona: funny, slightly off-center, emotionally alert and able to sharpen a scene quickly.

Her filmography is unusually broad. She has appeared in prestige and independent work such as Adaptation, The Village, The Descendants, Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Men, Women & Children, Grandma, Lemon, Uncle Frank and Aporia. At the same time, she has worked in major franchises and genre films, including Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, War for the Planet of the Apes, Jurassic World, the 2018 Halloween trilogy entries, Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. In many of these films she plays characters who give emotional or comic texture to stories centered elsewhere, a skill that made her one of Hollywood’s most recognizable supporting actors.