You know Milana Vayntrub as Lily from the AT&T commercials,
but remember when she played Kevin's love interest
on This Is Us? Keep watching to find out where else you might have seen this versatile actor.
After Vayntrub's family fled from Soviet Uzbekistan and settled in Los Angeles, she starred
in a series of Barbie toy commercials when she was 5 years old. As she recalled to Collider in 2021,
"We're like immigrants, and we're like 'I don't know,
she talks too much. Put her in front of a camera!' We didn't know what we were doing."
Soon thereafter, Vayntrub landed a role on the first season of NBC's medical drama ER.
She played Tatiana, a young girl diagnosed with AIDS. Despite the dour tone of the role,
Vayntrub fondly remembers her time on the show. As she told Collider,
"Whenever I would get on set as a kid, I would get so energized,
cause I was so happy to be there, that my mom would have to calm me down."
She also fondly remembered watching ER star George Clooney playing basketball with Jaleel White,
aka Urkel from Family Matters. After ER,
Vayntrub landed roles on the soap opera Days of Our Lives and on Disney Channel's Lizzie McGuire.
Once Milana Vayntrub decided to pursue acting full time, she found herself frustrated by the casting
process. So she decided to create her own content rather than waiting for roles to come to her.
This drive for autonomy led to the creation of "Live Prude Girls," a YouTube web series
with her and Stevie Nelson, whom Vayntrub had met at auditions. The channel consisted
of interviews in a series called "Let's Talk About Something More Interesting," in which
Vayntrub and Nelson have painfully awkward chats with other comedians and celebrities.
"Hey, girls."
"Hi, Matt… Damon." “How you guys doing?”
The channel was a hit, as it generated millions of views.
Vayntrub and Nelson's popularity eventually caught the attention of TV networks like MTV.
Unfortunately, MTV ultimately passed on picking up the show, thereby ending the series for good.
Despite the setback, Vayntrub's popularity was just beginning to take off, as she booked the part
of Lily Adams for AT&T the day before she learned that MTV canceled the "Live Prude Girls" project.
Fans of sketch comedy should readily recognize Vayntrub.
She's appeared in videos for the likes of CollegeHumor and Funny or Die,
and she's also shown up in multiple Comedy Central projects. For example, she was in Key & Peele's
"Sexy Vampires" sketch, as well as the network's "Making Fun with Akilah and Milana" shorts.
Vayntrub's sketch comedy experience has really showcased her versatility and improv skills.
From a sexy bloodsucker to a narcissistic game show contestant,
she isn't afraid to show off her range! Another notable role for her was the interactive comedy
"That Moment When" on Eko , a platform for interactive videos. She played the
character of Jill, who carries out the choices of viewers who are interacting with the story.
The 2015 sci-fi comedy show Other Space followed a ragtag crew of astronauts as they embarked on a
mission to further the universal mapping project. Vayntrub played the character of Tina, the crew's
unhinged navigator with pigtails and a penchant for violence. The show was created by Paul Feig,
who's known for directing such movies as Bridesmaids and the 2016 female-led reboot
of Ghostbusters. In the latter film, Vayntrub played the bit-part role of "Subway Rat Woman."
In a 2015 interview with Box Angeles, Vayntrub said that Feig and her Other Space co-stars Neil
Casey and Eugene Cordero were some of her favorite people to work with in her career.
Every member of the cast had a strong background in improvisation,
and they were even asked to loosely improvise monologues during auditions. Unfortunately,
Other Space premiered on the ill-fated Yahoo! Screen streaming platform, so the show fell
into oblivion after just one season when the platform fell apart. It eventually found a
new home on the sci-fi streaming service DUST. In a 2020 interview with SyFy Wire, Feig said,
"For me, the perfect situation would be we get to make more seasons of it.
We had so many more stories we wanted to tell and such a great cast."
"Well, guess what?" "We're in a whole other space."
After a two-episode stint on Netflix's sitcom Love in 2016, Vayntrub went on to land the part
of Sloane Sandburg on NBC's This is Us. The series alternates between the Pearson family in the 80s
and 90s and the present day with the Pearson kids having grown up and now in families of their own.
Sloane is a sweet and shy playwright who becomes a love interest for Justin Hartley's Kevin,
the eldest of the Pearson siblings. Kevin is a troubled bachelor who's come home from his
career as a TV actor to find success and meaning elsewhere. He and Sloane
play the leads in the play that she wrote, and things appear to be on the up-and-up for them.
Alas, they're characters in a family drama, so unsurprisingly things quickly fall apart when
Kevin's ex-girlfriend Olivia comes back into the picture. So Sloane and Kevin break up,
which was ultimately probably more fortunate than not for Vayntrub and her career.
"It's the right thing to do."
Following her stint on This Is Us, Vayntrub's most prominent role has of course been Lily Adams,
but you may have also seen her in the 2021 sci-fi horror film
Werewolves Within, in which she plays a postal worker who teams up with a
park ranger to find out the truth about the werewolf plaguing their town when a snowstorm
traps everyone indoors for the night. In an interview with The A.V. Club, she admitted,
"I was excited by so many elements of it;
one was just the cast. I just wanted to be in that company."
We hope that Vayntrub has many more projects in her future that she's just as excited about!
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