When she's not hawking cell phones, she's been known to turn into some unforgettable
furry creatures and pop up in hilarious comedies.
Here's the story of Lily Adams, aka Milana Vayntrub.
Milana Vayntrub's first big break came in 1995 at the age of 8, when she appeared on
three episodes of the classic medical drama ER.
That led to a gig on the popular daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives, on which she played
a young version of Kristen Blake, who would later become Kristen DiMera.
The character of Kristen is one of the show's main villains.
As Vayntrub recalled to Esquire in 2015,
"It was really weird.
I actually don't have tons of memories from it.
I played someone in a flashback version.
I ended up not auditioning for that.
They just called me after they saw me on ER to do that."
As is fairly typical of long-running soap operas, the role of Kristen has been played
by many different actors over the years.
Considering that, maybe there's a chance that Vayntrub could one day reprise the role as
an adult someday!
Soon after Days of Our Lives, Vayntrub booked a small but notable role on an episode of
the Disney Channel sitcom Lizzie McGuire.
Entitled "Gordo's Video," the Season One episode concerns Lizzie's friend Gordo setting up
hidden cameras around the school.
In the midst of doing so, he happens to catch Vayntrub's character eating and belching.
Appropriately enough, her character was officially billed as "Cute Burper."
As she recalled to Esquire,
"I didn't even really have to burp but I practiced my burps for a long time before that.
I'm a professional disgusting person!"
Vayntrub made two more appearances on Lizzie McGuire.
On the episode "Here Comes Aaron Carter," she plays a dancer, and she later appears
as an extra in Season 2's "You're a Good Man, Lizzie McGuire."
As she noted to Esquire,
"Comedy came early.
I knew when I was a kid that I was silly and I knew that I liked people who were funny,
but I don't think I knew I was funny.
I didn't really think about it."
"Well, you've got to figure out a way to get everyone to see this."
With ER, Days of Our Lives, and Lizzie McGuire on her resumé, Vayntrub had a pretty good
run as a child actor.
But then she nearly quit the industry for good.
Her reason wasn't burnout or exposure to vices or anything dramatic like that.
Instead, she simply thought that it wasn't for her.
As she explained to Esquire,
"I stopped around middle school and high school.
I remember thinking, 'I should probably focus on something more realistic.
This is probably not going to work out.
I have high hopes but that's probably not enough to make it in film.'"
But Vayntrub couldn't quite shake the acting bug when she went to college, as a terrible
bout of boredom during that time in her life convinced her to return.
She attended the University of California, San Diego, but she didn't particularly enjoy
it until she got herself on stage.
As she divulged to Esquire,
"They had a really great theater program so I just took theater classes so I could not
go crazy and keep myself busy.
I totally got sucked back in."
When Vayntrub won the role of Lily Adams in the AT&T commercials, she thought it would
be just another short-term acting gig.
But the response was so strong that within three years, she had appeared in more than
40 ads for the telecom company.
As AT&T Vice President of Advertising Valerie Vargas revealed to Adweek in 2016,
"The first spot was so successful for us that we thought, let's do another one and then
another one and then another one.
It was so well-received that we kept bringing her back."
So what is the secret behind the success of these commercials?
According to Hank Perlman of Hungry Man, the company that produces them,
"I think Milana's Lily resonates with audiences because she's a multi-dimensional character
in a way that's rare for commercials.
[...] We try as hard as we can not only to make her funny but to make her as strong,
smart, and human as possible."
"Who's on TV, now?"
NBC's time-jumping, tear-jerking family drama This Is Us was one of the most popular broadcast
network shows of the 2010s and early 2020s.
Over the course of its six seasons, the Emmy Award-winning series was a ratings juggernaut
that also served as a showcase of some amazing acting.
This Is Us was beloved for its unique style of switching back and forth between three
siblings growing up in the '80s and '90s and their adult lives in the present day.
The oldest sibling was Kevin Pearson, played by Justin Hartley, a dissatisfied TV star
who leaves his top-rated show and joins an off-Broadway play called Back of an Egg.
Vayntrub had a recurring role on This Is Us as Sloane Sandburg, a playwright who dates
Kevin for a brief spell.
She ultimately appeared in a total of eight episodes in the show's first season.
Vayntrub has some serious comedy training, having studied improv at the Upright Citizens
Brigade and starred in a number of CollegeHumor videos.
That humorous background has led to some small but memorable roles in several high-profile
projects.
In the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, for example, she made a brief, dialogue-free appearance
as "Subway Rat Woman."
The scene involves her reacting with visible disgust when scores of ghost rats poured out
of a subway station.
The director of that movie was Paul Feig, who also worked with Vayntrub on the short-lived
Yahoo! Screen sitcom Other Space.
Vayntrub seems to be a favorite of another popular comedy director, as she popped up
a couple of times on the Netflix series Love, which was co-created by Judd Apatow.
She played Natalie, the ex-girlfriend of the main character Gus.
While she's not yet an A-list name, Vaynttrub has certainly been rubbing shoulders with
the right people.
"It's 11:00 AM, and you're stoned, and you're at my house.
I'm worried."
In the summer of 2017, Milana Vayntrub landed one of the most sought-after roles in Hollywood.
She was cast as Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl, on Marvel's New Warriors, a superhero
comedy series that was set to air on Freeform.
The show was going to revolve around six 20-somethings dealing with the challenges of young adulthood
and being a superhero.
Vayntrub was a relatively surprising choice for such a high-profile part, especially since
better-known actors such as Anna Kendrick and Shannon Purser had publicly lobbied to
play the character.
But ultimately, Vaynthrub's admission into the club that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe
wound up rather muted.
In 2019, Freeform and Disney canceled several small-screen projects that were not set to
air on Disney+, including New Warriors.
But Vayntrub eventually did get a chance to play Squirrel Girl, as she voiced the character
on the animated short series Marvel Rising: Initiation and the TV movie Marvel Rising:
Secret Warriors.
She also played her again on the narrative podcast Marvel's Squirrel Girl: The Unbeatable
Radio Show.
In addition to her acting career, Milana Vayntrub has been known for putting pen to paper.
Or finger to keyboard, as the case may be.
She's been credited as a writer on five Robot Chicken episodes as well as multiple CollegeHumor
sketches.
Outside of sketch comedy, she has a co-writing credit on the 2019 film Mother's Little Helpers,
which she also starred in.
She's also written for websites like The Daily Beast and PopSugar as well as on her own Instagram,
where she offers her unique perspective on family, Judaism, and the acting life.
Vayntrub's writing has even been nominated for awards!
In 2020, she was recognized as part of the writing team for the streaming sketch comedy
show Making Fun with Akilah and Milana at the YouTube Streamy Awards.
And her miniseries That Moment When was nominated for a Webby award and three Telly awards.
A squirrel isn't the only furry creature that Vayntrub has inhabited.
In 2021, she starred as a mail carrier named Cecily in the horror comedy movie Werewolves
Within.
When a blizzard causes the residents of a small town to seek shelter in a lodge, an
even bigger problem is revealed when a werewolf starts picking off the characters one by one.
As the lack of trust gradually grows within the group, the bodies continue to pile up.
"Be a good neighbor, like Mr. Rogers."
"With guns, though."
"With guns, yes."
Skip ahead if you don't want to be spoiled, but in the end, Cecily and the friendly forest
ranger named Finn are still alive.
The evidence seems to point to Finn as the werewolf.
But that's a big fakeout, as it turns out that Cecily was the lycanthrope all along,
and she planted the seeds of paranoia to make it easier to hunt everyone down.
Maybe she wasn't a fan of their current cell phone plans?
Vayntrub earned some rave reviews for the movie.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire, for one, declared,
"Milana Vayntrub [is] radiating movie star potential in a winsome performance that shades
her natural comic sass with all sorts of self-aware texture."
"Or you could be me."
In a 2022 essay for the Daily Beast, Milana Vayntrub wrote about some health problems
that she suffered back in 2020 that seriously impacted her quality of life.
As it turned out, she hurt one of her ankles so badly that she couldn't move her foot.
The injury sent painful jolts through her body, a sensation she compared to the complicated
and difficult labor she experienced when giving birth to her first child.
That comparison may have come as a surprise to many of her fans, as she had kept her motherhood
journey under wraps before then.
But as it turned out, Vayntrub and her husband had welcomed a baby boy back in May 2021.
He arrived perfectly healthy, but the labor experience wasn't so simple, as the baby's
head was pushing against his mom's spine during the delivery, which resulted in tremendous
pain for her.
While Vayntrub did reveal some of her motherhood story, she's also kept the rest of it private,
as she hasn't disclosed her son's name.
In addition to her showbiz career, Vayntrub has made time for advocacy.
This includes being outspoken about abortion rights, as she had an abortion herself when
she was 25.
In her 2022 essay for The Daily Beast, she revealed that at that time she was still taking
random jobs to get by and thus was not in a good financial space to raise a child.
So when she accidentally forgot to take her birth control and got pregnant, she immediately
had an abortion at her doctor's office.
When Vayntrub eventually did have a baby, she was able to bear a difficult labor because
she chose to go through it.
She emphasized that both her experiences with abortion and birth have impressed upon her
the right for all Americans to have the freedom and power to make their own choices about
their bodies, lives, and futures.
Milana Vayntrub was born in 1987 in Uzbekistan when it was part of the Soviet Union, but
she's spent most of her life in the United States.
Her father, meanwhile, spent much of his time working at his business in Russia.
During an appearance on the podcast Meditative Story, Vayntrub shared what it was like to
grow up with a dad who was around only intermittently.
While he split his time evenly during her elementary school years, his time away from
her increased as she got older.
This resulted in him missing a lot of important events in her life, including her Bat Mitzvah.
Vayntrub's father continues to spend much of his time away from his daughter, though
they do manage to stay in touch over the phone and via occasional in-person visits.
He also flew to the U.S. after the birth of her son, although COVID-19 pandemic protocols
required him to quarantine for five days before he could play with his grandson.
While Vayntrub feels that she now has a pretty good relationship with her dad, she wants
to have a different relationship with her own son that isn't similarly long-distance.