delaney rowe polyester zine polyesterzine delaneyrowe actress thatgirl manic pixie dream girl tiktok impressions video comedy — When, as a child, Delaney Rowe discovered that acting was an actual job that real people could get paid to do, she mainly felt relief.
“I was just like ‘Oh, okay, great. That’s what I want to do.’ There was really no deliberation about any of it,” she tells me, Zooming from her New York City apartment on a sunny late September morning. “I was just kind of like, ‘Why wouldn’t I do the thing that looks the most fun in the world?’ And then on top of it, it looks glamorous and it looks like an adventure. I’d look in the mirror and I'd be like, ‘I have a very insane rubber band face, like, expressive in a way that I don't see in most people around me, and my voice is so goddamn loud.’ I just should be an actress. It feels like the natural thing I should be doing.”

The universe, it seems, would agree. Over the last couple of years, Rowe has become one of internet comedy’s most recognisable performers, and TikTok users will almost certainly know that ‘insane rubber band face’ from her send-ups of romcom and movie tropes, which hover between loving homage and almost painfully well-observed satire. Her first viral video, for example, was captioned “Absolutely insufferable female lead of an indie movie explains why she loves rainy days,” and saw her perfectly capturing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl tone of many a 2000s fave (“I like how it washes everything away…” her character sighs).

Since then, to pretty much the entire internet’s delight, Rowe has run with her ability to pick out what is especially stupid or interesting or familiar about the media millennials and Gen Z have grown up surrounded by, with equal parts admiration and a bit of a side-eye. One recent video, where she’s shrouded in a jauntily placed blue pashmina (“The free-spirited, bohemian mom in every mother/daughter comedy”) feels like a clear pisstake, while others, she explains, are more in the reverent fan category: “I do a series about the highly unlikely male female friendship in romcoms. And when we do those videos, we’re not winking at the camera,” she says. “We are literally just trying to make an awesome scene that feels like one of these movies. And that really feels like a celebration.”

Either way, Rowe’s humour is marked out by a clear-sighted ability to pick out the absurdity of onscreen types - a skill which feels somewhat informed by her own experience of the Hollywood machine as she began to try to carve out an acting career.

“When I was in my early 20s, I was a character actress stuck in an ingenue’s body.”

After a childhood and adolescence spent in Idaho, where she’d obsess over films like Confessions of Teenage Drama Queen (“Every movie at that time was about wanting to fit in. But then in this movie it was like, ‘no, the cool thing is to be the one wearing an I Heart New York shirt with net sleeves, cargo pants, and a weird head wrap’”), and take part annually in the state’s Shakespeare festival (her favourite plays are, naturally, Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew: “I like Shakespeare’s plays with the scrappy female leads, obviously,” she laughs), Rowe moved to LA to study and hoped to make the jump into professional acting.

She found, however, that even she - a slim white woman - didn’t quite fit in with the film industry’s rigid idea of types. “When I was in my early 20s, I was a character actress stuck in an ingenue’s body,” she says. “So I kind of looked right for a lot of these parts. And then I would go in and again, the second my face starts moving, it’s just like, ‘That's a character actor, that's the funny best friend.’ So it was a weird tension that was happening. The solution everyone I worked with was saying at the time was: ‘You’re just going to have to wait until you're a leading lady and that'll be in your 30s. You're going to pull a Kathryn Hahn and a Julianne Moore, and then that's when it's going to happen.’”

Rowe, however, had a point to prove, and wanted to show that she was bigger than the arbitrary box that had been assigned to her. “I couldn't wait,” she says, with the kind of ‘get up and go’ tone that a plucky heroine in one of her videos might use. “So that was kind of how the videos and writing my own things spawned, from really just being like, ‘The roles I’m being put out for aren't letting me show you who I am, so I'm just going to show you in a different way.’”

The result was her venture into TikTok. Her first major online success - the aforementioned “rainy day” video - happened in February 2023, and the hits kept coming from there. I’m curious as to whether she expected any of this success, or where it has brought her to.

“The answer that I'm gonna give is probably not the PR answer that I should be giving – but the answer is like, yeah,” Rowe admits. “I had one video go [viral] and, I was like, ‘I'm putting everything behind this. Because if I can get one, I know I can get a hundred.’ I just knew it. I don't know why. I was like, ‘Okay, boom I'm in the door. Let's go.’ That's how it felt for me. I just believed in myself.”

“I should always just do what I want to do because honestly, you can't compete with somebody who's having a great time. That's an untouchable person.”

Her instinct, of course, was correct, but while her success online has brought with it the financial security she has always hoped for, and famous fans she’d never have anticipated (she mentions Seth Rogen, Julia Fox and Emily Ratajkowski to name a few), it also doesn’t come without its own set of worries and concerns. The first is that some misunderstand her videos, taking the target to be the actors playing the roles she satirises, rather than plain old bad writing.

“I just think it's absurd when I get a comment that's like, ‘these videos are misogynistic,’” Rowe says. “No, they're not. First of all, it's not that deep. It's a TikTok video. Second of all, I'm making fun of the likely male writer who has written this. I'm not making fun of an actress. I'm not making fun of women. I'm making fun of bad writing and Hollywood. I'm setting the record straight right now. Watch the video for what it is. People just want, you know, other women to fail.”

Arguably, though, an active comments section is better than the opposite, and if pushed, Rowe would concur. “What a creator fears most is irrelevancy,” she says, flagging another of the downsides of life as a full time TikToker. “It sounds so sad and pathetic, but it's like, all we have is relevancy. In an internet world that is moving so goddamn fast, you’re constantly like, ‘How can I keep this shit going? Can I? Should I?’ I really have to sit with myself and be like, ‘Okay, what do I want to do today?’ Because if I'm pandering, my audience is going to feel that. I should always just do what I want to do because honestly, you can't compete with somebody who's having a great time. That's an untouchable person.”

As it stands, then, by her own standards, Rowe is indomitable. Between being flown out to Paris Fashion Week, starring in her first feature film, and simply having freedoms she never thought she’d have, life is pretty good. The best part, however, is simply that she now knows that she was right to act against others’ ideas of her, and in doing so has created a career for herself that really reflects who she is.

“The self-esteem that it has given me, being someone who is getting noticed for the things that come from my mind, that doesn't go away,” Rowe reflects. “You know, no matter how much I age or how much my style changes or how many gray hairs I get, or the wrinkles that are coming in fast – receiving accolades for what's in my mind has provided me with a deep, low hum of self-esteem.”

Delaney Rowe on Romcoms, Virality and Being the Funny Best Friend

“When I was in my early 20s, I was a character actress stuck in an ingenue’s body.”

“I should always just do what I want to do because honestly, you can't compete with somebody who's having a great time. That's an untouchable person.”

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