Why Serena From Good On Paper Looks So Familiar
Being a stand-up comic isn't all jokes and good times. It involves many long hours and minimal pay, and even if you start gaining a following, you then have to travel a lot. It can make for a lot of lonely nights, as depicted in the most recent Netflix romantic comedy "Good on Paper."
The film stars Iliza Shlesinger as a semi-autobiographical version of herself. She plays Andrea Singer, a stand-up comic who's put her career first for so many years she's never really had the chance to settle down. That all changes when she meets a guy who's everything a woman could ever want out of a partner, but there's just something about him that seems too good to be true. Shlesinger has support from an impressive comedic supporting cast, including Margaret Cho, Rebekka Johnson, and Rebecca Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse plays Serena, another actress who typically ends up auditioning for the same roles as Andrea. As such, Andrea has a meltdown during one particular casting notice when she sees Serena acting chummy toward the casting department. Rittenhouse plays the character with a sincere charm where you like her and see where Andrea comes from. The actress has ample experience in comedic roles, and you may have seen her before in some surprising places.
She broke out playing Anna on The Mindy Project
After "The Mindy Project" jumped from Fox to Hulu, it added various new characters to shake things up throughout its final seasons. One of those characters was Anna Ziev (Rittenhouse), a Harvard graduate who's a little too persnickety for her own good. She goes so far as to check the pH balance of all the water she drinks and even weighs her food.
Since her time on "The Mindy Project" ended, Rittenhouse has been vocal about how much she enjoys working with Mindy Kaling. It's a significant reason why she agreed to star in another Kaling-backed project, "Four Weddings and a Funeral." In an interview with Decider, she discusses the challenge of moving between different genres: "Making that change was ... I tried to be thoughtful about it because it's not like you're just setting up jokes. You really do have to invest more in the reality of the situation and also find the humor in it so that you have the heart and you have the humor."
Over the years, Rittenhouse has proven she can effortlessly move between tones with ease.
Rittenhouse delved into horror with Unfriended: Dark Web
Rebecca Rittenhouse must look like a Serena, as that also happens to be the name of her character in "Unfriended: Dark Web." The sequel to the original 2014 film also follows a group of friends who log on to an innocent Skype chat only for things to take a cruel turn. The friend group soon has their conversation interrupted by a mysterious entity that messes with them in increasingly fatal ways.
Rittenhouse shows off a side of herself she's never really demonstrated before, and she had the chance to speak about forming the friendship with her costars throughout the production. As she said to Nerd Reactor, "I feel like we had a lot of time to rehearse beforehand and go over the script. It's funny because, at some point, the process was kind of like a Skype call between friends."
While she managed to squeeze some fun out of the experience, watching the movie is enough to keep you far away from the Dark Web.
She hung out with Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" may not have been an actual person, but he's surrounded by genuine people who resided in Hollywood in the 1960s. The film puts Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) front and center as the epitome of how much the entertainment industry had changed since Dalton's start. But she's not the only famous face to make an appearance.
One of her famous pals is Michelle Phillips (Rittenhouse), who in real life started as a singer in The Mamas and the Papas before leaping into movie roles, eventually earning a Golden Globe nomination for "Dillinger" (via Vanity Fair). While Tarantino's film doesn't get into it, Phillips had an affair with Tate's husband, Roman Polanski, in real life after she became pregnant with their child (via People).
Rebecca Rittenhouse embodied the old-school Hollywood aesthetic, but thanks to a plethora of roles within the last few years, she's paving the way for the next generation of actresses.