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Ana Gasteyer

Ana Gasteyer has built a career around a particularly useful combination: sharp comic instincts, musical confidence and the ability to make heightened characters feel completely committed to their own strange logic. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1967, she studied music at Northwestern University before developing her sketch and improvisational skills with the Groundlings in Los Angeles. After early television appearances on shows including Seinfeld, Frasier and NYPD Blue, Gasteyer joined Saturday Night Live in 1996. Across six seasons, she became known for characters such as operatic high school music teacher Bobbie Mohan-Culp, NPR host Margaret Jo McCullen and folk singer Cinder Calhoun. Her impressions of Martha Stewart and Céline Dion also made good use of her gift for finding the specific rhythm of a public persona rather than settling for a broad imitation. That same precision has carried into her film and television work. In Mean Girls, she played Betsy Heron, mother of Lindsay Lohan’s Cady, bringing an agreeably grounded comic presence to a movie filled with bigger personalities. She took a more overtly musical turn as Mae in the 2005 film Reefer Madness. Later television roles included Sheila Shay on Suburgatory, the leader of an alien-abductee support group in People of Earth and Katherine Hastings in American Auto. Gasteyer’s stage career is just as central to her range. She originated Elphaba in the Chicago production of Wicked and later played the role on Broadway. Her other theatre work has included The Threepenny Opera, Passion, The Royal Family and a 2024 Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress, in which she played Queen Aggravain. She has also recorded as a singer, releasing the jazz-standards album I’m Hip in 2014 and the holiday album Sugar & Booze in 2019. Whether working in sketch comedy, sitcoms, movies or musicals, Gasteyer tends to play from a position of total conviction—and that commitment is usually where the laugh begins.