Nicole Byer Won’t Rest Until She Gets Her Private Jet

Nicole Byer is tired.

She’s having fun, don’t get her wrong. In fact, the perpetually chipper comic is having the kind of year she used to dream about in the late 2000s, when she was doing improv sets in a leaky basement under a Gristedes supermarket in New York City. Now, she’s nominated for three Emmys: one for writing her Netflix comedy special, Nicole Byer: BBW (Big Beautiful Weirdo), and two for hosting and producing Netflix’s amateur baking competition Nailed It!. On top of that, the 35-year-old New Jersey native is keeping up with her growing slate of podcasts and promoting her standout role in the NBC sitcom Grand Crew, which premiered in December and has already been renewed for a second season.

By the time she hops on our Zoom call on a Thursday morning, her voice is hoarse. She spent the previous night sipping wine at the Los Angeles premiere of the Diane Keaton-led comedy Mack & Rita, and later, she has a doctor’s appointment, a development meeting, and a dinner. I’m taken aback when she holds up her iPhone to reveal her calendar: an anxiety-inducing stack of purple, oblong boxes, each representing another commitment in the never-ending business of being Nicole Byer.

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“June was awful,” she says, scrolling through that month’s list of meetings, appointments, interviews, recordings, and live gigs. “Tons of shit all the time. Just blocks and blocks of shit to do.”

But it’s all by design, she insists.

“It sounds really toxic to say, but I can work on the fumes,” she says. “I’m pretty good at burning the candle on both ends and taking a solid, good vacation where I don’t do anything and [then] get back to the grind. I’m really lucky that I have a job that I love, so it doesn’t feel exhausting.”

Still, the signs of fatigue are there, even if it’s the kind that comes from a stable career in a fickle industry that isn’t flush with opportunities for people like Byer, a plus-size Black woman who’s been outspoken about the pitfalls of not fitting the Hollywood archetype. And yet, she powers through like a professional, even when it’s obvious during the course of our interview that she could probably use these 40 minutes for some extra shut-eye. It’s another reminder of the ephemeral nature of showbiz, where performers are encouraged to strike while the iron is hot.

More optimistically, it’s also just what happens when your dreams finally come true.

Byer rose to popularity in 2013 on MTV’s addictive Guy Code offshoot Girl Code, which featured female comedians and commentators dishing on everything from drinking to makeup to butts. She immediately stood out with her witty and profane takes on modern womanhood, all delivered with the animated facial expressions of a friend who had one too many mimosas at brunch. (“Like, in school you probably shouldn’t have a shit-ton of makeup on. But I say fuck it. You love it? Just wear it,” she asserts in one heavily bleeped-out segment.) It was a breakout gig for Byer, landing her a spot on a nationwide college tour based on the show and, practically overnight, turning her into a legit stand-up comedy act.

“My manager was like, ‘Yeah, figure it out. You do characters and sketch and stuff, so figure out those premises,’” she says of the sudden shift to performing stand-up.

From there, she landed her own show that ran for two seasons on MTV and Facebook Watch, Loosely Exactly Nicole, in which she played a fictionalized version of herself. But commentary is where Byer really thrives, making her a seamless fit for the world of podcasting. The smash success of Why Won’t You Date Me?, now part of Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco network, has helped spawn a slew of other Byer-helmed podcasts, including Best Friends with ex-SNL comedian Sasheer Zamata and 90 Day Bae with TV writer Marcy Jarreau.

Byer’s flair for original, acerbic, and all-too-real observations about life—paired with her incisive and specific lived experience as a Black woman in Los Angeles—is what made Why Won’t You Date Me? such a hit. Over the course of 250 episodes, she’s come to personify the futility and frustration of modern dating, extracting elusive intel from her straight male guests and slamming the dating app Raya and its endless array of Australian DJs. It’s a hilarious listen, even if she admits the show may be hitting a lull after almost five years’ worth of episodes.

“At this point, I’m, like, tired,” she says. “And I can hear it in the episodes. I pivoted from talking about my lack of sex life and dating, ‘cause I’m not really dating anymore. I’m too busy.”

She’s also used her various podcasts to candidly discuss body positivity in the entertainment industry, calling out the way plus-sized people are treated and revealing that she often brings her own clothes to sets because of the lack of wardrobe choices. She’s aware that fatphobia is lurking behind every corner, especially when she tells me that both of her parents, who passed away when she was 16 and 21, died of heart disease, a coincidence that she says doesn’t necessarily stress her out. “I know as a fat person someone will be like, ‘Well you should be [worried], you fucking fatass.’ If I worry about every little thing, then how am I gonna worry about other stuff?”

Besides her (now Emmy-worthy) stand-up comedy and various hosting gigs, Byer’s blunt and confident disposition has also opened doors for her as an actress. Take her NBC sitcom Grand Crew, which centers on a group of Black friends in Los Angeles who trade relationship advice over glasses of full-bodied reds—a concept directly inspired by Byer’s booze-fueled hangouts with series creator Phil Augusta Jackson, who wrote the role of Nicky with her in mind.

“Me, Phil, [Grand Crew co-star] Carl Tart, Echo Kellum, a couple writers like Ify [Nwadiwe] and Lamar [Woods]—we used to all chill at this wine bar on the eastside. We still do,” Byer says. “My character Nicky is deeply based on me. I’d be touring sometimes and be out of town. I’d miss get-togethers and I’d come back and be like, ‘Who’s fucking who? OK, I gotta go.’”

Jackson and Byer met when she was working at the front desk of the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York City back in 2009, and the two were eventually placed on the same improv team at UCB.

“Nicole is so, so fun to perform with as an improviser. Her choices are always so funny and inspired, so it was a blast getting to be on a team with her as an official part of the theater,” Jackson told The Daily Beast in an email, adding that the two have “been friends so long that writing for her definitely feels like second nature at this point.”

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For Byer, it’s nothing short of a dream come true.

“If someone said to me 15 years ago, ‘You’re gonna do a network television show with your good friend,’ I’d be like, ‘Really? OK, that sounds like fun, but I don’t know if I believe it.’ So it feels wild,” she says.

But has she made it? Will she ever be comfortable holding just one gig at a time? Is that even the goal?

“I feel like if people ever made it, they would stop working,” she muses. “Diane Keaton still works. She still puts in the work and she’s a living legend! Who knows?

“I guess I’ll know if I made it if I fly private forever. If I’m on my deathbed and I’m like, ‘No commercial flights for the last 30 years,’” she says in the voice of a lifelong smoker about to take her last breaths, “then I think I’ve made it.”

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