Wally Baram On 'Overcompensating' & Working With Benito Skinner

Walking through the aisles of Pacific Aquarium & Plant on the Lower East Side, Wally Baram has a fact for nearly every tank. “See, that’s actually not an albino arowana. Albinos are really sought-after,” the Overcompensating star tells me, pointing at a mislabeled school of fish. Lately, Baram is teaching herself to be able to identify every North American reptile — like the glass catfish before us, which she says is really sensitive to magnetic fields — a hobby she picked up after learning to fly-fish during the writers strike.

Before fish, Baram’s first great love was snakes — she’s kept them as pets ever since high school; her current one is named Jersey Mike — but she’s well aware this isn’t the most crowd-pleasing passion. “Whenever I talk about snakes in stand-up, you can see a visceral reaction from the audience. I thought about writing a show involving reptiles, because it’s a big part of my life, but no one wants it,” she says before becoming preoccupied by a bucket of “mystery snails.” (Baram is easily distracted, but in a way that’s delightful to behold. Everything fascinates her, from the existence of dinosaurs to the dalmatian we walk past on the street.) “I could do [a show] about lizards, but I find lizards have such a smug expression. I don’t know. A gecko always looks like it knows more than you.”

Luckily, her cold-blooded-vertebrate material hasn’t hindered the 27-year-old from breaking out in the world of comedy. Baram has worked as a stand-up since she was 18, and her irreverent-yet-disarmingly-sincere sensibilities earned her credits writing on shows like Betty, Shrinking, and What We Do in the Shadows. She was always interested in acting — sending out countless self-tapes and auditioning over endless Zooms — though it wasn’t until she took a gig in the writers room for Amazon’s Overcompensating that the dream began to feel within reach.

The series follows a closeted college freshman named Benny (played by the show’s creator, Benito Skinner) and his group of friends — including his makeout buddy-turned-bestie, Carmen. From the moment Baram read the initial material for Carmen, she was stunned by how much she related to the character. “She’s from New Jersey, she overcompensates with love. She’s a more vulnerable, dramatic character, and I’m naturally very earnest, which was how she was written to be,” Baram says. The coincidences inspired her to audition for the role, but it wasn’t until Skinner gave her some words of encouragement that she thought she might have a shot. “Benny was like, ‘I just want you to know, I want it to be you.’”

Within weeks, Carmen was hers and Baram was off to Canada to film the series alongside a freshman class’ worth of rising stars like Adam DiMarco, Mary Beth Barone, Kaia Gerber, and Lukas Gage. But as rewarding and life-changing as filming was, it wasn’t without its hiccups. First, there was the fact that Baram had left her expired passport in an Uber. (“I come from a long line of whatever the opposite of Type A is,” she says.) Then there was the rampant conjunctivitis.

“I come from a long line of whatever the opposite of Type A is.”

“I wore a pink-eye prosthetic for one scene, and it was like an hour-and-a-half process to get it off. Then, my prosthetic gave me pink eye,” she says in her soft-spoken, Muppet-y register. “Everyone on set got it. I don’t know if it’s some sort of magic spell where you say ‘pink eye’ and then suddenly it pops up, but before then I had never seen an adult with pink eye in my life.”

Thankfully, between the stellar reviews for the series (The Guardian calls it “an exquisite frat-bro orgy of shirt-ripping, chest-thumping … and self-love”) and for Baram herself (another outlet declared her the show’s breakout star, and I’m inclined to agree), all the antibiotic eye-drop usage was worth it. Especially since the experience has inspired Baram to dream even bigger for herself. “Whether it’s [careers like] Judd Apatow’s, Seth Rogen, Ali Wong, or Mindy Kaling, having multiple forms to be able to express myself is very attractive to me,” she says.

But first, she has to pick up her pet snake in Los Angeles and drive it to her new apartment in Brooklyn. “I love a hobby. My brain is just always going, so it’s really satisfying,” she says of the undertaking. “Then it reflects back into the work. You can find lessons in anything.”