Want to Know What Ivy Wolk Thinks About the Massachusetts Lesbian Bar?

Within the span of 12 hours, comedian and actor Ivy Wolk posted these things on her Instagram: an AI-generated video of an animated wooden paddle spanking a woman with a wooden paddle; a video of comedian Nick Viagas’s mother asking people to “see my large disabled son on tour”; a video edition of her monthly advice column “Born Sexy Yesterday” for the Julie morning-after pill; a photo of Newt Gingrich’s wife “Cally” (in bright blue) posing awkwardly with a U.S. ambassador-at-large (also in bright blue); a clip from the show English Teacher in which Ivy played a high school student; a shot of the marquee for her latest acting project, the Broadway play Downstate; and no fewer than four pictures of a police horse outside the aforementioned Broadway theater. “Bitch it’s a horse outside of Downstate rn” she wrote. “When you’re a machine of the carceral state but you’re also a horse,” she said in another.

It’s no accident that a collection of Instagram Stories on a random day sums up Ivy’s unique résumé and singular point of view: brainy, absurd, charming, occasionally abrasive, very online, and thoroughly booked. Ivy’s internet isn’t just a vehicle for bald promotion; it’s an artistic medium. This year, the media, as well as iconic, equally polarizing stars like Sandra Bernhard and Courtney Love, caught on to what Ivy’s online fans and haters have known for years: When she posts (or talks or acts or writes), we pay attention.

You’re in rehearsals on Broadway for the play Downstate, which begins previews this week. Tell me about your character?

Her name is Effie, and she is a bratty, steadfast girl who works at Staples in Southern Illinois. One of her coworkers is a registered sex offender, and she drives him to and from their job every day, and they have a volatile, funny relationship. The play is a chamber drama, and it all takes place over the course of one day in a house where the coworker lives with other sex offenders. Effie is the kind of a girl who is just bored after work and wants to go somewhere, even if it’s in the house of four, you know, messy pedophiles.

I think this show is going to be the zeitgeist-y ticket of the season. I also hope that my inclusion in this cast will get young people who know me from the internet or stand-up comedy or TV out to come and, like, sit their asses down for two and a half hours and just fucking pay attention. There’s a misconception that Gen Z are not good, attentive audiences or they’re not interested in being audiences of live performance, and I think that’s just not true.

Your online presence is prolific, and you’re gaining attention for your work in film and TV, so it’s surprising to see you do theater, which is such an offline, old-school, time-consuming medium.

I’ve always wanted to do theater. It’s what made me fall in love with performance as a craft. I grew up in a children’s musical theater conservatory. I’m very accepting of lowbrow culture in all other facets of art, but theater is the one thing that I’m very pretentious about.

Primarily, I’m a stand-up comedian and the immediacy of the form is really important to me. It’s why I use the internet the way that I do—posting constantly, very quickly—it feels very intimate. That’s what I love for art to feel like. Theater provides this immediacy and sort of acceleration of response. I want to hear people gasping in the audience. I want to hear people laughing. I want to see where people pull back. That’s something that you don’t really get from film.

A lot of people either perform and then get a huge following, or they have a popular online persona with the idea of moving into more “legitimate” entertainment. How did you end up doing both at basically the same time?

It’s the fullest extent of what it is that I want to do. I think that my ideas are interesting—ergo people should hear what I have to say. But I also think that the work I can do is interesting, and I like being a conduit for somebody else’s vision. I don’t ever really view myself as an extension of a TV network or movie studio. I’m not a product for them to move around and place. I am an autonomous person with thoughts and ideas, and that comes from being a comedian. Some people make a choice to just be a performer and then disappear in the interim. I think, especially for people of my generation, that schism is fear-based. But I’m not fearful of people knowing what I have to say or what I think. What I’m offering on the internet is a very uncurated-seeming sense of self, and there’s not much pretense. Most people cling to the idea of privacy as a big thing, but I am private when I insist that I want to be private. It doesn’t have to be so bifurcated for me.

And clearly, some people find the uncurated-seeming presence off-putting, controversial, or abrasive. A headline for the recent New York Times profile of you was literally “This comedian Is Everywhere. That Bugs Some People.”

All the press about me is like, “A lot of people on Twitter are saying you’re a nasty bitch and you’re everywhere. Care to comment?” And yet, even if people expressed disdain for it or judgment, they could not ignore me. I think people find me, for better and for worse, very sticky and attractive, not always in a good way.

When did you first realize you had that effect on people—that sticky quality?

I’ve been labeled annoying since I was a very little girl. I have this high voice, and it sort of hits above other people’s vocal registers, so even at school, when everybody was talking, the teacher was like, “Ivy, be quiet.” Because you could just hear me over everybody. I’m very intense about the things that I like and care about. I have a thorough perspective on my own self and my own work and my own taste. I always have, since I was a very small child.

Around the time I was 13, I started posting publicly on the internet and pretty much immediately the general response was like, “Who the fuck are you? You’re so loud. Why is this what you think is funny? Why is this what you think is interesting?” Which was the same shit that I faced at school and at summer camp. And yet, even if people expressed disdain for it, they could not ignore me. Today, regardless of who was paying attention, I would be posting myself on the internet willy-nilly. I do it because I like connecting with people and using the internet as an artistic medium.

You sound almost like a tech optimist. It’s really fascinating that anyone beyond a Silicon Valley billionaire feels excited about the internet today.

Yeah, they have to pretend that they’re stoked on tech so that we’re not so scared when the robots are breaking down our doors. But I am kind of a tech optimist. People are letting the phone serve them anything, and they’re feeling, like, beholden to the phone. You have to make the phone serve you. You have to make the world in the phone look how you want it to look, and you look at your phone and you see stuff that is funny and interesting and provocative and that makes you happy. You just have to train an algorithm. But it’s totally possible to not feel like you’re in a pit of shit at all times.

The commentary last month on the viral story of a Western Massachusetts lesbian bar that modified their mask mandate was exhausting. Everyone was trying so hard to have the perfect, definitive opinion, but I definitely wanted the Ivy Wolk take.

I am so down to talk about it. It’s interesting fodder that did not need to spread as far and wide as it did. It was like a circus article—“Look at the monkeys in the zoo”—which, of course, is fun, and there’s gossip and cattiness and it brought us all together on the internet for a week. But that community is so insular. There would be no way anybody who is not a part of that Western Massachusetts bar-going, mask-wearing community would have any interaction with these people—it’s so silly.

But also my big question, really, which is also silly, was: Which disabilities do you guys even have? Does every person at this bar have some sort of disability that if they take a mask off, they will immediately burst into flames? None of these people are being forthright about what they actually need protection from. It’s just that the mask wearers want to keep things exactly as they are. People want to feel safe. People want to feel like their communities are not being infringed upon. People want to feel like they can show up on Saturday night and see that everybody is wearing a mask because that’s what they’ve come to expect. Because the world outside this bar is so hectic. I have empathy for that, but also I would never be in a room with any of those people. Our lives don’t coincide.

How are you navigating being so outspoken professionally? We know that people in the public eye hold back their opinions because they don’t want to lose work.

At this point, the dossier is so long of anything that I could have said that would impede or prevent a career. I mean, I’ll probably never be in a Marvel movie, but am I interested in being in a Marvel movie? No, not really. Most of the filmmakers and directors and writers I’ve worked with are people who are similar to me in their senses of humor and references. They’re people who make work that is irascible and provocative and punchy, and that’s the kind of stuff that I make.

There was a moment where call-out culture hit the entire internet and people at the helm were responding to it. But these days, most people at the helm in Hollywood are not kowtowing to public pressure like that. I think everybody has realized that that is futile. And firing somebody from a movie for a tweet that they made 15 years ago is not what’s going to make the country feel like a more hospitable place to live. It’s deeper structural issues that are oppressing us.

Have you gotten pushback for being in a show produced by Scott Rudin? [Editor’s note: In a 2025 New York Times interview, Broadway producer Scott Rudin acknowledged prior “bad behavior” toward subordinates.]

People think that they give a shit about these things, but then they actually don’t. They’re not actually paying attention. That’s not a name that’s on people’s lips. He’s a nice, normal guy. I’ll say it: He’s a chiller. I find him to be normal and professional and pleasant. I think people can be different from what they once were. I don’t think anybody is so permanent.

People think that I am whatever I tweeted. That my entire being and my entire personality and all of my values can be encapsulated in one post on the internet. But life is long and things mutate and people move and people shift and you have awakenings and things startle you and you figure shit out. The fact that people still hold me to standards online that they held me to when I was, like, 14 years old is crazy to me. So I would never do that to another person. It’s a major tenet of my politics as an abolitionist, as an empathy-first leftist, that we actually have to meet people where they’re at and hope that against all odds, people’s hearts are intrinsically good and that people only want the best for one another.

Earlier this month on Instagram, you posted a series where you reproduced iconic photos of “women grappling with personal upheaval and collapse”—Amanda Bynes, Roseanne Barr, Dana Plato, Sean Young. You said you “have a spiritual channel to these kinds of stories brewing within me.” How does that manifest? What does that feel like for you?

It’s not literally like I’m sitting in front of a shrine of Elizabeth Taylor and pushing my crystals around. It’s more that it’s my heritage. They’re women whose fucking faces and output are seared into my brain. Who experienced the same shit as me. It’s like all of this knowledge that they’ve accrued flows through me. It’s intellectual. It’s emotional. It’s spiritual. It’s so deeply entrenched.

I read a lot about fame studies, celebrity studies, media theory, postmodern theory. I’m trying to understand and intellectualize using myself as the case study, so I am hitting the fucking books. I know so many young celebrities who pass off all the shit that they’re undergoing as frivolous or only acknowledge it with a sense of irony, like, “Isn’t this so stupid?” And it’s like…but you’re still here and you’re still doing it and this is still your life. Find out what motivates you toward this and become more intelligent and interesting.

I’m not interested in presenting as easygoing or simple. I guess the central thesis is that I’ve never done anything for anybody’s comfortability. Instead of trying to figure out how to make people comfortable, I try to figure out how I can be smarter.

Styled by Jackson Prus. Hair and makeup by Alina Friesen for Davines. Shot on location at Home Sweet Home.