Entertainment
How Leslie Liao left Netflix's HR department to return as a rising star in stand-up comedy
Pacing the stage, Leslie Liao muses about the various moisturizers she, an almost 37-year-old, feels compelled to use. “I spend most of my time rubbing creams all over my body. … Face cream, eye cream, foot cream, just constantly creaming myself.”
She continues; a mic drop about modern dating imminent. “I just learned there is a neck cream. I have to cream my neck. … I overheard a man complaining once how he spends all his money on drinks for girls and it’s so unfair. Bro, I am wearing $300 worth of face paint and body jam to not scare you away. I’d like my Moscow mule now, please.” The crowd erupts with laughter.
“That joke was a real conversation I had with a man years ago,” Liao says, seated outside at Jewel in Silver Lake. “He was really making the argument. He was like, ‘I would love if a girl bought me a drink.’ And then I went on this rant. I was like, ‘Do you know? I had to put on my face for you to even talk to me. I’m in debt. So, you owe me a Moscow mule.’ And he laughed so hard.”
This is precisely the type of deadpan observational humor Liao, an L.A.-based comedian, tends to lead with. In addition to riffing on various body creams, Liao’s shows cycle through such topics as the cognitive dissonance of “being attracted to men” but “not finding men attractive,” fixing said men, growing up Asian American in Orange County, and putting a 100-mile search radius on dating apps to achieve “maximum efficiency,” among other daily indignities.
The comedian’s two worlds started to overlap late last year when Liao booked a gig on “The Tonight Show” and a short set on Netflix’s “Verified Stand-Up.” “My bosses at Netflix saw me on Netflix. They saw me on Jimmy Fallon,” Liao says.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Liao might be self-deprecating about her hyper-methodical nature, but it’s because of her personality that she finds herself here today working as a full-time comedian, free of the corporate world for the first time in her adult life. From 2017 to January of this year, she was living a double life—from 9 to 5, she worked in HR at Netflix. In the evenings, she did stand-up. One had nothing to do with the other. “I just didn’t sleep,” Liao says of that time. “The shows were so late. I would have to be awake so early and be so sharp. Some meetings, I would have to lead them. They’re not always a Zoom meeting where you can be off camera and like, put your feet up and secretly be in PJs.”
The comedian’s two worlds started to overlap late last year when Liao booked a gig on “The Tonight Show” and a short set on Netflix’s “Verified Stand-Up.” “My bosses at Netflix saw me on Netflix. They saw me on Jimmy Fallon,” Liao says. “In a nice way, they were like, ‘What are you doing here? They were so cool and supportive. They were like, go be a star. They didn’t fire me, but they were like, ‘It’s your time.’”
Though she was well on her way to achieving financial stability as a stand-up, Liao maintains that she needed a little bit of a nudge from Netflix bosses to take the leap away from a corporate job. “It was so scary — because all I knew was having a somewhat safe day job. But I’m so happy.”
Since leaving Netflix, Liao has applied her high-key scheduling to a creative’s life. Her Google Calendar reveals a rainbow of appointments and events. (“When comics see my calendar, they scoff, laugh, and barf.”) When she arrives at the café for her photo shoot, Liao has on an oversized blazer and pulls two pairs of potential shoe options out of an oversize black tote — low-top sneakers and heeled black boots. She ultimately picks the sneakers, agreeing that the juxtaposition of a workwear top and casual trainers feels symbolic.
When fellow comics find out Liao had been employed at the streaming behemoth, Liao says, they nearly always ask if that’s how she got her foot in the comedy door, to which she responds with a look that can only be described as, Girl, no. “Do you think I’m gonna slide my demo under Ted Sarandos’ door?” she cracks. “Do you think I’m gonna find any exec in Content and try out a bit in the elevator? Do my shtick in the cafeteria?”
Born to Chinese immigrant parents, Liao was drawn to entertainment from an early age (she’s a big fan of Jim Gaffigan, Conan O’Brien, Mitch Hedberg, and Tig Notaro).
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“Honestly?” she continues. “If I went to any comedy exec at Netflix and told them, ‘You should put me on Netflix, I’m a comic. Did you know? Have you seen my stuff?’ They should fire me. It’s so inappropriate and unprofessional — and lame. They would have had every right to escort me out of the building that day.” Liao never even imagined that she’d be a stand-up comedian. Born to Chinese immigrant parents, Liao was drawn to entertainment from an early age (she’s a big fan of Jim Gaffigan, Conan O’Brien, Mitch Hedberg and Tig Notaro), but she always pictured herself doing something behind the scenes. “I used to want to be a ballerina,” she says. “And then it turned into like, some vague version of a corporate job. I was like, I’m gonna have a briefcase and a blazer.”
Case in point: When Liao would watch the Academy Awards growing up, she liked how the celebrities would thank their agents in their acceptance speeches. “I’d be like, that sounds cool. I didn’t want to be Charlize Theron or Halle Berry. I wanted to be their agent. For whatever reason, it didn’t click for me to want to be the star. I wanted to be who’s helping the star get that gig.”
After attending USC Film School, Liao started doing what many 20-something entertainment hopefuls do — work as an assistant and begin climbing up the ladder. Prior to landing the job at Netflix, Liao assisted a comedy producer at Universal Studios, where she volunteered to help scout new talent. That’s when she started attending stand-up shows every other night. “They didn’t really need me to,” she laughs. “I was an assistant, so they were like, ‘Please stay and answer the phones. None of us are asking you to go to the Hollywood Improv. But I just got in the habit, and I loved it. I tried to make it part of my job.”
Liao didn’t even consider doing stand-up until witnessing a less-than-impressive showcase. That’s when the wheels started to turn: Should she try this herself? “At that time in my life, in my late 20s, a lot of my friends would tell me I should do stand-up. … But I never thought I could do it. It seemed like such an imaginary world to me. I didn’t know any comics personally. My parents had such business-y jobs. So, I couldn’t grab on to the idea that I could be on stage and people will clap for me. It just didn’t seem real.”
“I was scared of it going well,” Liao says when talking about her budding stand up career. “Because I knew that it meant I would never stop.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Prior to her very first set at the Haha Comedy Club in North Hollywood, Liao took a writing class, where she’d write, hone and workshop ideas along with a handful of fellow students. For graduation, the class performed sets for friends and family, each comic cheering the other on. “[The class] was designed in a smart way to [show you] this is how good it can be. You could have an amazing night, rather than starting on your own and having a ton of s— shows. I remember it like going as well as it possibly could. I remembered all the jokes, and everyone laughed where I thought they would, and at one moment I even riffed. “I was scared of it going well,” Liao continues. “Because I knew that it meant I would never stop.”
And she hasn’t. In addition to making the rounds at go-to venues like Dynasty Typewriter, the Comedy Store and the Laugh Factory, last summer Liao was included in Just for Laughs Festival’s New Faces of Comedy showcase. Next month, she’s playing the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever as part of Netflix Is a Joke Fest.
Her path to comedy might be unconventional, but Liao has zero reservations about starting slightly later than most. If anything, chasing a comedy career in her 30s has proved advantageous. “I think I waited till I was 30 to make sure that I could feel a teeny bit confident to preach my thoughts onstage into a microphone,” Liao says. “A lot of comics start young, like at 20, or a teenager. I’m like, where’s the life you’ve lived? I knew I was lacking perspective in my 20s. I had to live some life to have things happen to me and be like, ‘What was that?’”
Memories of cinema past and present come rushing at you like 2001’s Star Gate sequence in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, his first return to cinema since 2016’s Neon Demon and his first project since dying for 20 minutes from a serious heart condition three years ago. Somehow, it was excluded from the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition in favor of films that look very much like 20th-century television, but so far Refn’s film is the only suggestion at this year’s event that one of its key directors is even remotely curious as to what the real future of film might look like — as opposed to a mess of known IP and AI recreations of people who’ve been dead for 50 years. It seems the French, who once disdained le cinema du papa, have a little bit of catching-up to do.
The film it most closely corresponds to is last year’s Resurrection by China’s Bi Gan, another awake-dream that aims to haunt rather than entertain (although the two things are by no means mutually exclusive). In terms of art, it brings to mind ballet, since so much of what’s important in that medium is hardly what you’d call storytelling in the Hollywood narrative sense. To expand on that further, it would be impossible to discuss the power of this film without mentioning Pino Donaggio’s phenomenal score. Bringing much-needed context to Refn’s style-overload, Donaggio’s achingly emotional soundtrack guides the film in a way music hasn’t since the early silents, or the heyday of Powell & Pressburger, and even, at a push, the experimental films of Kenneth Anger.
What’s it about? Whatever you like. The setting is a surreal futuristic Japanese city of the most unrealistic high-rise kind, and at the story’s core is Elle (Sophie Thatcher), who is about to make a film with a younger influencer type named Hunter (Kristine Froseth). Hunter is obsessed with fame and obsessed with Elle, and the whole film draws quite heavily, in a similarly symbiotic way (whether knowingly or not), on Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychodrama Persona, which no genre director ever has ever not found endlessly fascinating. As they prepare for the shoot, Hunter meets Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s former lover and now her father’s new wife. It’s a complication that obviously hurts, but Hunter is either slow on the uptake or, more likely, couldn’t really care less.
If we’re going to apply film-school formalism to a film that intends to live rent-free in your imagination whether you want it there or not, the “inciting incident” that the girls see a murder in a nearby tower block, and a young woman is defenestrated. It corresponds to the myth of The Leather Man, a tormented, Orpheus-like demon with piercing red eyes and razor-sharp diamond-studded gloves who stalks and kills young women in a bid to replace the daughter he lost to the underworld. We then jump-cut to a scene from a breathlessly exciting space movie, with Elle starring as the leader of an female sci-fi movie that looks like a fantastic space-opera version of Tarantino’s Fox Force Five and which serves as a reminder of Refn’s past interest in remaking Barbarella.
Things get more puzzling and more interesting — depending, of course, on your tolerance for ambiguity — with the arrival of Private K (Charles Melton), an American GI on the trail of The Leather Man, avenging mistreated women wherever he sees them, and drawn like a moth to the dress shop where he used to shop for his now-missing daughter. Private K isn’t at all connected to the main story, but as in Refn’s Thailand-set horror-thriller Only God Forgives, there is a sense that, somehow, justice can be willed into life in the east, and there is a sense that — perhaps — Elle has somehow summoned Private K into being, as the father she will never have.
How does it all fit together? Well, it does and it doesn’t, and Refn leaves you alone to figure out the true significance of The Leather Man and his two fabulously gnomic assistants (Ms. S and Ms. T). The genius of Her Private Hell is that, like a kind of visual ASMR, it offers nothing really concrete, just a lot of satisfying triggers and sensory associations. The actors feel that energy too, and the performances almost dare you to follow them, experimenting wildly with their characters in ways that make only the most subliminal kind of sense.
Is it pretentious? You bet! But it’s the kind of pretension that’s been missing for far too long in cinema; where once critics used to applaud Luis Bunuel for casting two actresses as the same character in 1977’s That Obscure Object of Desire, now they castigate Christopher Nolan for putting Elliott Page in The Odyssey.
Her Private Hell is either for you or it isn’t and you’re either for it or you aren’t. Either way, this is a film that demands you pick a side.
Title: Her Private Hell
Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenwriter: Nicolas Winding Refn, Esti Giordani
Cast: Sophie Thatcher, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Charles Melton
Distributor: Neon
Running time: 1 hrs 49 mins
It’s a tight three-way race at the top, with a second helping of “Beef,” which won eight Emmys for its first serving, barely ahead of Richard Gadd’s “Baby Reindeer” follow-up, and a suburban noir with abundant heart from Steven Conrad, the maker of “Patriot.”
Glenn Whipp says, “ ‘DTF St. Louis’ is the standout limited series, a murder mystery in form that’s really about suburban loneliness, particularly the isolation that can cripple middle-aged men.”
While Lorraine Ali calls “Half Man” “the series to watch in this race,” not all of her Buzzy buddies are as enthusiastic: “I fear that ‘Half Man,’ Richard Gadd’s aggressively unpleasant follow-up to ‘Baby Reindeer,’ will get a knee-jerk nomination here,” says Kristen Baldwin, “but that vote would be better spent on PBS’ superb adaptation of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ or Riz Ahmed’s ‘Bait.’ ”
Tracy Brown says, “Recent trends suggest this race might come down to voters’ appetites for bleak British miniseries” such as “Half Man,” but “ ‘Adolescence’ co-creator Jack Thorne’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptation was a bit more in my lane so I’ll give it the edge.”
The twice-cooked “Beef” isn’t to all the panelists’ tastes, either. Matt Roush says it “left me cold but probably has a better chance than the streamer’s terrific historical drama ‘Death by Lightning.’ ”
More predictions: Limited / TV movie actor | Limited / TV movie actress
1.“Beef”
2. “Half Man”
3. “DTF St. Louis”
4. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
5. “All Her Fault”
6. “The Beast in Me”
7. “Bait”
8. “Lord of the Flies””
Los Angeles Times
Lorraine Ali
1. “Half Man”
2. “Bait”
3. “DTF St. Louis”
4. “All Her Fault”
5. “The Beast in Me”
“ ‘Half Man’ is the series to watch in this race, but what should you watch on your screen at home? ‘Bait,’ which follows a struggling British Pakistani actor (Riz Ahmed) as he auditions to become the next James Bond. Is the world ready for a brown Bond? Not really. Hilarity ensues.”
Freelance Critic
Kristen Baldwin
1. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
2. “Beef”
3. “The Beast in Me”
4. “DTF St. Louis”
5. “All Her Fault”
“I fear that ‘Half Man,’ Richard Gadd’s aggressively unpleasant follow–up to ‘Baby Reindeer,’ will get a knee-jerk nomination here, but that vote would be better spent on PBS’ superb adaptation of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ or Riz Ahmed’s ‘Bait,’ a surreal blend of showbiz satire and immigrant-family comedy.”
Los Angeles Times
Tracy Brown
1. “Beef”
2. “DTF St. Louis”
3. “All Her Fault”
4. “Lord of the Flies”
5. “The Beast in Me”
“Recent trends suggest this race might come down to voters’ appetites for bleak British miniseries. I wouldn’t be surprised if ‘Baby Reindeer’ creator Richard Gadd’s ‘Half Man’ is among the nominees, but ‘Adolescence’ co-creator Jack Thorne’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ adaptation was a bit more in my lane so I’ll give it the edge.”
Blavity
Trey Mangum
1. “Half Man”
2. “Beef”
3. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
4. “All Her Fault”
5. “DTF St. Louis”
“ ‘Love Story’ was the talk of the town when it first premiered, but the last few episodes seemed to have landed softly with the majority of people. I think later entries ‘Beef’ and ‘Half Man’ are immediately dominating conversations, and at the right time.”
TV Insider
Matt Roush
1. “Half Man”
2. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
3. “Beef”
4. “DTF St. Louis”
5. “All Her Fault”
“Not the strongest field this year, though Richard Gadd’s ‘Half Man’ and Ryan Murphy’s ‘Love Story’ seem unstoppable. The offbeat ‘DTF St. Louis’ might be a spoiler. Season 2 of Netflix’s ‘Beef’ left me cold but probably has a better chance than the streamer’s terrific historical drama ‘Death by Lightning.’ ”
Los Angeles Times
Glenn Whipp
1. “DTF St. Louis”
2. “Beef”
3. “Half Man”
4. “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette”
5. “All Her Fault”
“ ‘DTF St. Louis’ is the standout limited series, a murder mystery in form that’s really about suburban loneliness, particularly the isolation that can cripple middle-aged men. The cast — Jason Bateman, David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday — is superb. Emmy noms for all!”
Arts
Mother Mary
Director: David Lowery
A24, Topic Studios, Access Entertainment
In Theaters: 04.24.2026
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” or whatever the fuck those silly little Catholics say. With David Lowery’s ninth feature, our dear Mother Mary is anything but full of grace. Though she is full of something … g-g-g-GHOSTS!
Mother Mary follows a distraught pop star (take a wild guess at her name), played by the always lovely Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada), who dramatically ends up on the doorstep of her ex-best friend and costume designer, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel, Chewing Gum, Black Mirror). She confesses to Sam, after barging her way into her secluded design studio, that she needs a dress that feels like “her.” This is something she feels her current team of designers can’t do and is very important, as she’s performing a new unreleased song to celebrate her comeback. During the creation of the gown, the two women reminisce and catch up, all in the same haunted breath. During their heart-to-heart (pun intended), they both realize that at some point since their separation, they each have been taking turns experiencing a haunting by the red, shapeless form of a (what they both determine is at least female) “ghost.”
Now, not to sound like a broken record, kids, but what is my favorite saying? That’s right, “there are no perfect movies,” and Mother Mary is an example of a very complicated and imperfectly okay movie. Lowery’s writing is, at times, far too abstract or obtuse, which can lead to quite a bit of confusion for about 100 of the film’s 112-minute runtime. Before it’s clarified, the relationship between the two female leads is hard to decipher. Are they best friends, former lesbian lovers or a secret, worse, third option? Does this red ghost actually have anything to do with unresolved feelings these women still have for each other, or is it just aesthetic?
There are also interesting “visions” Sam gets when talking things through with Mother Mary that feel somewhat like they tangle the film’s overall seam. It also lacks a lot of raw edges you would normally see when two women discuss a “friendship break-up.” Mary Mother also has yet to break the curse of the inaccurate on-screen popstar portrayal. I’m not sure why, but for some reason, Hollywood cannot get the feel of a popstar just quite right on screen. Mother Mary is supposed to be Lady Gaga, yet it feels like her on-stage scenes are what dads imagined watching Hannah Montana must’ve looked and felt like to their daughters. This is something that seems unfathomable when you have Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX to help write the soundtrack.
That being said, once the ending hits you in the face and you finally get the full picture that Lowery is painting, the film saves itself. Lowery does something interesting and unique when it comes to the haunting genre of horror, as his characters are not haunted by ghouls and goblins but by emotional moments or memories in time. This is something that, when done right, is the epitome of beauty and is frankly more terrifying than any jumpscare by a James Wan demon. What’s more haunting than the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens of an intense connection with another human being, romantic or platonic? What’s more punishing than being the one who committed the sin that severed your red thread connection? Lowery also puts the infamous Bechdel Test to shame, as there is not a single male character with dialogue for the entirety of the film.
Do I love what Lowery is trying to do here? Yes. Does he stumble and fumble along the way? Absolutely. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t see Mother Mary, but also if you miss it … you’re not missing much. —Yonni Uribe
Read more film reviews by Yonni Uribe:
Wasatch Mountain Film Festival Review: Protecting Our Playground
Film Review: The Drama
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