Tig Notaro Might Be Our Next Big Movie Star

Zack Snyder has garnered such a passionate following because few filmmakers are better at turning regular people into gods. In movies such as 300, Man of Steel, and Army of the Dead, Snyder trains his camera at his stars with reverence, making them into icons that loom over we lowly regular folk and inspire awe in audiences. Now he’s ready to do the same with Tig Notaro, a deadpan stand-up comedian and emergency stand-in performer in Snyder’s Army of the Dead.

After realizing that she had gone viral for being a lesbian sex symbol in Army of the Dead, Notaro had a pitch for Snyder, as she told Kara Swisher on the latter’s podcast (via Variety). “What if we just went for it and everyone’s a hot lesbian?” And to his credit, Snyder responded positively. “He was like, ‘Oh my God, yes, let’s make that movie,'” recalled Notaro.

In some ways, Notaro is an unlikely choice for Hollywood stardom. She doesn’t have the muscles or figure that Snyder’s camera usually adores, nor does she have a demeanor suggesting she’s bearing the weight of the world or saving the galaxy. Instead, she excels at making wry observations and cracking the well-timed joke.

And those qualities have served Notaro just fine. The 54-year-old Mississippian entered show business as a comedian, gaining praise for her dry sense of humor and observational absurdity. She rose to prominence with her 2012 concert album Live, which featured material about her cancer diagnosis. Notaro’s humane but offbeat approach to the disease made her a hit, which led to multiple film and television appearances before getting her own show One Mississippi on Prime Video and the documentary Tig on Netflix, both released in 2015.

Notaro made the jump to genre work with the 2014 thriller Catch Hell, where she starred alongside Ryan Phillipe, who wrote and directed the film, and later appeared in Noah Hawley‘s film Lucy in the Sky. But her most significant genre material was in the world of Star Trek, where she played snarky engineer Jett Reno on Discovery, injecting some much-needed low-stakes humor into the show. So great was her performance that she’s reprising her role as Reno for the upcoming Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

Notaro entered Snyder’s orbit in the most unsual way. Snyder originally shot Army of the Dead with comedian Chris D’Elia. Before the film released to Netflix, sexual assault allegations against D’Elia arose, and Snyder promptly removed him from the film and replaced him with Notaro as Marianne Peters. Having no time to do full cast reshoots of the movie before its release on May 14, 2021, Snyder simply shot scenes of Notaro standing alone and delivering dialogue without her other actors, which the director then spliced together into the finished film.

Unideal as the conditions may have been, they apparently worked, as far as Notaro’s concerned. “It was so unexpected,” said Notaro of her sudden popularity. “My phone’s exploding. I’m not walking around going ‘Oh my God,’ you know, ‘check me out.’ I was so confused. So I called Zack, and I said, ‘I’m hearing it from straight men, gay men, gay women, and straight women that they think I’m hot in this movie.'”

At this point, we don’t know what Notaro and Snyder are cooking up together. Given the latter’s filmography, one would assume an action film, which seems ill-suited for Notaro… until one considers recent movie trends. The Bob Odenkirk picture Nobody, Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer trilogy, and last year’s charming June Squibb vehicle Thelma show that there’s a real market for stories about older-than-average and unexpected action stars.

Whatever the genre will be, Notaro knows how to give the people what they want. “We’re in the process of putting the script together,” she said of the project’s current status, before getting right to the point. “Picture this poster: We have the name of the film, and then it says ‘Hot Lesbian Action.’ That’s how I sold him on the Zoom.”

And with those three words, the world is about to get the greatest Zack Snyder hero of them all.