Missi Pyle

Age: 35

Hometown: born in Houston; raised in Germantown, Tennessee

Currently: Making her Broadway debut in Boeing-Boeing as Gretchen, a formidable flight attendant with a heavy Teutonic accent and a hypersensitive heart.

About Face: Though not born into a particularly funny family, Pyle was a fan of The Princess Bride’s sly wit and discovered she had a gift for comedy while doing school plays. Almost six feet tall and quite beautiful, she also possessed a wildly expressive face, with sharp angles and inviting yet borderline-maniacal eyes. As Pyle remembers, “Teachers would tell me, ‘You know what’s good about you? You’re not afraid to be ugly.’ And I took that to heart. Like, ‘I can play the roles other people can’t play because I’m not afraid to look strange.’”

Funny Girl: While studying acting at North Carolina School of the Arts, Pyle dated a guy who’d formed an all-male sketch-comedy group, which inspired her to create an all-female troupe. “Being onstage has always been easier for me than living my real life,” she confesses. “The relationship you have with an audience is so intimate. On one hand, the character you’re playing is not you, and yet, maybe it’s more you than you’re aware of. Making people laugh was this incredible thing to be able to do.” In addition to theater, sketch comedy and eventually feature films, Pyle branched out into stand-up and even leads a band, Smith & Pyle, with her actress friend Shawnee Smith. Their alt-country-rock album, It’s OK To Be Happy, which includes songs with titles like “Wish You Were Dead” and “Frumpy Flannel,” was released earlier this year.

Small Parts, Big Laughs: After a short and not very lucrative stint as a New Yorker, Pyle relocated to Los Angeles to give TV and movies a shot. She was called in at the last minute for a part casting agents were having a hard time filling; the only way they could explain what they were looking for was by playing Pyle footage from other actors’ near-miss auditions. “I was like, ‘I totally get that!’” she recalls. The part was Laliari, the shape-shifting alien in 1999’s Galaxy Quest, who had little to say yet scored big laughs and lived happily ever after with Tony Shalhoub. More work in movies Bringing Down the House, Dodgeball, Anchorman and on TV Chicago Hope, My Name Is Earl, Heroes followed. Fittingly, Tim Burton put Pyle’s seductively surreal visage to good use in Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which she struck comedy gold just by standing still. “Shakespeare is not easy for me,” Pyle says. “But to play, you know, that sort of strange and slightly ‘off’ person? I can do that in my sleep.”

Taking Off: Pyle auditioned for Boeing-Boeing last December with director Matthew Warchus, and was told she’d get the part of Gretchen if Mary McCormack turned it down. McCormack, of course, said yes going on to earn a Tony nomination, but when she moved on, Pyle got the call. Rehearsals felt a bit awkward. “They kept telling me, ‘It’s such a different play once the audience is around. You’ll walk out the door and they’ll laugh. You’ll be shocked!’” Once onstage at the Longacre, she needed to set aside the desire to go for a quick laugh and focus on her character. “Matthew told me, ‘The audience thinks they’re going to get trash, and it’s our job to give them something real. I want the laughs to be big, but they’ll be bigger when your character is sincere.’” Pyle also needed to take those crazy facial expressions down a notch. “Matthew also said, ‘You’re very freakish. And Gretchen shouldn’t necessarily be a freak.’”

An Old Boyfriend, a Husband, a Bear: Having seen her on film, one half expects Pyle to be a side-splitting conversationalist, when in fact she keeps interrupting the interview to listen for mysterious noises “Oh, it’s just the air-conditioning on the closet hangers” and obsess about burning candles “Google it, they’re as bad as second-hand smoke”. But when she says “I’m really not that interesting in my own life,” she’s couldn’t be more off the mark. Not after sharing how her stand-up act included material based on her three-year engagement to a Cuban guy whose parents couldn’t stand her. And certainly not after she talks about her husband of one month, Casey R. Anderson, who’s a grizzly bear specialist for National Geographic. “I was filming a movie in Montana that had a bear in it, and we only hung out for one day. Then a year later, he found my band’s MySpace page and sent a message saying, ‘If you’re ever in Montana…’” She reaches for her laptop to show a picture of their wedding day, the happy couple nearly edged out of frame by a huge, overjoyed brown bear. “We wanted him to be the ring bear-er. But that got a little complicated.”