StarsInHerEyes
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Jacobs grew up in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania suburb of Mt. Lebanon. She made her name locally at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. There she was a perennial contender in the Public's Shakespeare Monologue Contest, which led to her being cast as Titania in their production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. After graduating from Mt. Lebanon High School in 2000, Jacobs moved to New York to study acting at Juilliard.
Jacobs's first national exposure came in her recurring role as Adele Congreve on the television series The Book of Daniel. Although she played Kimberly in the pilot Traveler, the role was recast when ABC picked up the show.
In 2006, Jacobs starred off-broadway in Chris Denham's cagelove. While overall critical reaction to the play was negative, Jacobs earned praise in several reviews. The New York Times advised readers to "make sure to remember the name of Gillian Jacobs, a stunning Juilliard graduate who has the glow of a star in the making". Among her other theater credits are The Fabulous Life of a Size Zero (2007) and The Little Flower of East Orange (2008), directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Jacobs's recent film work includes Gardens of the Night (2007); writer-director Adam Rapp's Blackbird (2007); and Choke (2008), based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, and the films Watching TV with the Red Chinese and The Box. She currently stars in Community on NBC.
And from Interview Magazine:
Gillian Jacobs
By LUCY SILBERMAN
On the first day shooting the new film Choke, 25-year-old Gillian Jacobs found herself standing on a stage wearing nothing but underwear and a pair of 5-inch heels as she tried to convince everyone on the set that she was a stripper named Cherry Daiquiri. Luckily for Jacobs, it wasn't her first twirl around a pole. In the 2007 Adam Rapp-directed indie film Blackbird, she played a runaway-turned-exotic dancer. She researched that role by taking her first trip to a strip club and later attempting to choreograph her own striptease while her family prepared Thanksgiving dinner downstairs.
While one might not expect a performing-arts school graduate like Jacobs to practically have a degree in stripping, the actress's small but growing list of stage and screen credits has given her an opportunity to learn all kinds of things. Just a few years out of Juilliard, she's already played a r*pe victim (in a stage production called Cagelove), a drug addict (in the Philip Seymour Hoffman-directed play The Little Flower of East Orange), and a homeless teenage prostitute (in the forthcoming film Gardens of Night). "I thought I was going to be the ingenue, playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet or some innocent young thing, and instead I'm playing these lost girls," says the girl who spent her teenage years in her hometown of Pittsburgh poring over American Theatre magazine with earnest visions of one day starring Off-Broadway. "I'm not conservative, but I am kind of clean living in my own life. I've had to learn how to fake taking drugs-I've snorted fake coke, smoked fake -her-oin. It's been an education." Jacobs says that part of what has attracted her to these characters is the opportunity to prove that there is more to them than addiction and anguish. "There's always been something about the character that's drawn me to them," she explains. "I think what's common in all of them is vulnerability."
In Choke, based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, Jacobs's character Cherry-secretly wise with the proverbial heart of gold-falls for the well-meaning best friend (Brad William Henke) of the film's protagonist, a scam artist played by Sam Rockwell. Both men are professional historical reenactors with sexual dysfunctions, and Cherry's love interest is a chronic masturbator. "We shot the strip club scenes at this place called Titillations in New Jersey," recalls Jacobs, who thought she recognized the location recently on a TV show. "I was actually watching a rerun the other day, and I was like, ‘I recognize that place! I've seen that swing before!'"
Fortunately, Jacobs's next role, in Donnie Darko-director Richard Kelly's new thriller, The Box, offers somewhat of a reprieve from her usual bump-and-grind. "I play a babysitter," she says. "So I don't have to take my clothes off in that one."
interviewmagazine.com
Love her in Community as Britta!
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