WITH LOVE, MEGAN

Hacks breakout Megan Stalter enters the canon of rom-com heroines in Lena Dunham's Too Much

- BY JUDY BERMAN

MEGAN STALTER TALKS ABOUT THE EXPERI-ence of starring in Too Much, a Netflix romantic comedy series from Lena Dunham, with the dreamy satisfaction of a person describing her soulmate. It began with a digital meet-cute, when the Girls creator slid into her DMs. “She messaged me on Instagram and said, ‘I have a project for you,’” Stalter recalls. “I was like, ‘What?!’ And she said that she wrote it with me in mind, which is the craziest thing to hear from my No. 1.”

The fantasy continued in the U.K., where she filmed her role as an operatically heartbroken New Yorker who crosses the Atlantic and meets a disarmingly gentle London boy (The White Lotus’ Will Sharpe). Even after growing a cult following on social media with videos of unhinged characters, then breaking out on Max’s Hacks, Stalter might have felt nervous about anchoring such a high-profile show. But her immediate rapport with Sharpe, as well as Dunham and her husband and co-creator Luis Felber, set her at ease, right from the awkward kiss she and Sharpe had to share in the first scene they shot together.

Maybe Stalter got lucky in finding such simpatico collaborators, but after our video chat in June, I suspect she could get along with almost anyone. “We clicked,” she says four separate times about different collaborators. She brims with appreciation for the people in her life. Brilliant at embodying characters high on their own questionable supply, Stalter speaks earnestly about herself. What comes through is buoyancy, warmth, and self-assured gratitude—all auspicious traits for a rom-com ingenue in the making.

FOR AS LONG as she can remember, Stalter, 34, has been fascinated by beauty pageants and their pick-me-princess competitors. The title character of