Martha Kelly On Comedy, Her Fear Of Acting, And Having No Lines On ‘American Gods’

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With a droll, almost monotone delivery, and a fatalistic sensibility, stand-up comedian Martha Kelly has a style all her own. A longtime resident of Austin, Texas, Kelly was a featured act in the city’s annual Moontower Comedy Festival, a four-day event which features standup acts from across the country. While she’s still best known for her comedy, Kelly has recently taken to acting, first on FX’s Baskets, where she plays the ever-suffering insurance agent Martha, a role that was written with her in mind, and more recently as Zorya Utrennyaya on Starz’s epic new series American Gods.

We got the chance to talk to Kelly about her connection to the Austin comedy scene, as well as her growing more comfortable as an actor, particularly when she’s playing a character that has no lines.

What was it that made you decide to move to Austin from L.A. originally

The first time I moved here it was in 2000 and I was 32. A lot of it was it just was a party town, compared to L.A. It was partly just because I wanted to come somewhere where I could drink all the time and not stand out. I also really liked the comedy scene here and felt like it would be easier to get stage time and get better at stand up if I was somewhere besides L.A.

Was L.A. too oversaturated to get your foot in the door anywhere

At that point for me I’d only been doing stand-up a couple years. It’s dumb, but I felt entitled to some kind of a development deal, even though I didn’t have any ideas for anything to develop. I just wanted money so I could drink and not have a day job and do stand up when I felt like it. Out in L.A. I didn’t have any representation and I wasn’t doing anything to make that happen.

It’s kind of dumb because in the couple years before I started stand up, for some reason they were handing out development deals to people at comedy festivals. I just felt that’s the easy way to be able to party all the time and not have to work. Just being unrealistic about stuff, I guess. In that sense, L.A. was a frustrating place to live, because I wasn’t on that track to get what I thought was easy money. In reality it isn’t, but that’s what I thought at the time.

Now it’s more just that everything’s really spread out. You can drive an hour each way to do a four-to-ten minute set somewhere. I don’t really enjoy doing that. I’d rather be in Austin, where like tonight I have a thing I’m doing from 6:30 to 8:00, and then I’m just going to drive 15 minutes and do a show, and then it’ll be ten minutes home from there.

When did you start getting involved in the Moontower Festival

I did it for the first time last year, and then did it again this year.

You were part of one of the most hyped events, SHEBANG, the all-female comics’ showcase. The show was great, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that green room was just overflowing with hilarity.

I don’t want to ruin your nice picture of it. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fun, but it was just more like people wanting to watch each other. I was pretty much standing on the little balcony area watching the other women or downstairs watching them and I think other people were doing that, too. There wasn’t a ton of hanging out in the green room. To me, that made it more fun, that everybody seemed to want to watch each other’s sets. I loved the women that were on that show, so it was really fun. It was a different kind of fun than what you pictured, maybe.

It’s nice to know there’s so much mutual support among the comedians.

Yeah. It was really nice. It was fun to get to see some of the women that I don’t normally see, or to meet Michelle Collins who I’ve never met before who’s super funny. It was a really fun night.

How has Baskets been going Did being acting in your first ever role get any easier with the second season

I think when we shot season two I was less convinced that I was going to get fired at any moment. I still don’t feel comfortable acting, like I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t put a huge amount of thought into it. I memorize my lines so that I don’t make the day longer for people and then I just try to do whatever the director wants me to do. Whenever I’m doing scenes with Zach [Galifianakis] or Louie [Anderson], it’s a lot like just hanging out with them, so that makes it easy.

For a show full of funny people, there’s this tragic sensibility to it. Is the mood livelier on set than what ends up on the screen

Yeah, I think it definitely is. I was really surprised when I saw the pilot, because of that difference between what it seemed like when we were shooting and what the finished product was. It’s definitely pretty goofy on set, although sometimes Louis can make everybody either cry or be on the verge of crying, because some of the stuff he does is so sweet and moving as Christine. Most of the time we’re just all goofing around and it’s really fun and just nothing like what I thought it would be. I thought people would just be shitty and that it would be nerve-wracking. It’s mostly really fun.

What’s it been like to go from that to American Gods

They were super nice to me. That was the first thing they did after Baskets, and I felt like I don’t know why they hired me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I was very intimidated by working with Cloris Leachman and Ian McShane, [but] Ricky Whittle was super nice. Everyone was nice, but he’s super nice to everybody. He would frequently lighten the mood, but because it’s not a comedy, the vibe of the show and the set is much darker. We were shooting in Toronto and it was the end of the cold weather and the stage they built was really dark. It was just a weird change from how lighthearted the set of Baskets was.

Again, it wasn’t like people weren’t being nice to each other. I just felt like I don’t understand why they’re being so nice to me. I really don’t know what I’m doing here. Luckily, because I didn’t have lines, it made it a little less scary. I knew I’m not going to say the lines wrong, because I don’t have any. It ended up being really exciting to get to work with showrunners Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, and the director David Slade. They’ve been really great. I haven’t had any shitty show business experiences yet. I’ve been really lucky.