Another cast member who has lovely memories of WILAY.
“That show was a really fun and good time in my life,” Grossman said on E!’s Busy Tonight in 2018, “and we had such a good time doing that.”
When she joined the cast as Lauren, Val’s at-times exhausting BFF, toward the end of season one, she had already won fans for life playing the deranged Mary Cherry on Ryan Murphy‘s gone-too-soon WB dramedy Popular.
And while you’ve seen her face in so many shows, those two series were her most memorable roles until she joined Murphy’s American Horror Story in 2017 and ascended to the throne of scream queen. She’ll also be in the next installment of the prolific producer’s Netflix true crime anthology series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (the first season tackled Jeffrey Dahmer).
“Forever, people were like, ‘You’re too weird: Your face is weird. Your voice is weird. We don’t get you,'” Grossman, now 52, told The Daily Beast in 2022, reflecting on her slow burn in Hollywood. “I had to figure it out for myself. I kept myself employed, doing series, doing guest star parts, doing pilot after pilot—pilots that didn’t get picked up.”
But Murphy got her. She added, “Ryan was always like, ‘I like all that you’re selling. I buy what you’re selling, and I’m gonna give you a platform so everybody can see what I like in you.'”
On the personal front, Grossman shares daughter Goldie, 17, with Jon Bronson, who filed for divorce in 2020 after 20 years of marriage.
