In Conversation With Wally Baram

Welcome To Wally’s World

Overcompensating breakout star Wally Baram has made a name for herself in the “Wild West” of our modern media moment.

Published on February 2, 2026

by Maggie McPhee

Cover design by Alex Kidd

Wally Baram had a dream. A dream to become a cowgirl. At 14 she set out from her New Jersey home for a ranching high school in central California to learn how to ride horses, lasso horses, and herd horses. Like all of her classmates, she was given her very own horse. If she didn’t feed it in time, it could develop colic. If she neglected the horse, it could die. “It was a pretty committed environment to discover that I was not committed to becoming a cowgirl,” she shared with RANGE. “They should not let eighth graders decide what they want to do.”

Wally Baram had a backup dream. A dream to become a comedian. That dream stuck, and didn’t take long to materialize. She performed her first stand-up show in her late teens — taking precious and very high stakes time away from her horse — and has been working in the biz practically ever since, cutting her teeth in writing for shows like What We Do in the Shadows, Shrinking, and Betty.

Coming of age in the early 2010s, Baram was surrounded by role models in the comedy world who were doing it all. Multi-hyphenates like Mindy Kaling, Ally Wong, and Seth Rogen presented the prototype for creatives who wore many hats. “People always say, ‘oh, I didn’t know you could do that as a job,’ but I grew up one of the first generations to really know, ‘you could do that as a job, you could be a multi-hyphenate,’” says Baram. Comedian, writer, producer… But it wasn’t until she landed in the writing room for Amazon Prime Video’s new series Overcompensating that unforeseen circumstances stamped ‘actor’ onto that growing list of adjectives.

Overcompensating, Benito Skinner’s semi-autobiographical dramedy, follows closeted freshman Benny (played by Skinner) and bestie Carmen (Baram) as they blunder their way through college, desperate to fit in even when fitting in requires a deeply uncomfortable contortion into a teeny tiny metaphorical box. It was in the development phase of the show that Skinner suggested Baram actually play Carmen. The more they fleshed out the character the more undeniable it became that she’d be the perfect fit for the role. ”So now here we are, doing all the things, knock on wood,” she says with a touch of her signature half-sarcastic half-sincere tone. “It is a blessed run at this time.”

Baram shines on screen. She imbues the naive, endearing, and eager Carmen with such relatable awkwardness it’s almost hard to watch. For those rare few of us who struggle with social anxiety, seeing her fumble through stressful scenarios with the grace of someone choking on food in public hoping no one notices is pure cringe comedy torture.

“Acting is an exploration of what it means to be present,” shares Baram. ”The best acting comes from when you’re most connected to the truth, and you’re most connected to the truth of a scene or emotion or a character when you are most present with what you’re trying to communicate.”

Even though Overcompensating marks Baram’s acting debut, she arrived at the task with a decade of preparation, toiling away at her craft as a stand-up comedian and TV writer — pursuits that are both, in distinct ways, exercises in connecting to the truth. For Baram, stand-up is very personal. “It feels like a diary,” she says, about “my everyday trials and tribulations.” Script writing, on the other hand, allows her to look at the bigger picture. “I get to talk about things that are more existential and dive deeper, explore characters that feel more dimensional than just myself, and explore themes from multiple different angles.”

RANGE caught up with Baram from her Brooklyn apartment during one of city’s historic polar vortex, where she was sheltering in place with her dog Chavo and her baby boa constrictor Wawa, named after the New Jersey convenience store. “She’s just a lot of fun. She wiggles around. She’s got no arms and legs. It’s crazy,” she gushes. “I feel like everyone else got over the no arms and legs bit a lot faster than I did.” Even Baram’s mother made a brief appearance. “Oh good,” she paused mid-sentence to look at her phone. “My mom just texted me: ‘I miss when you were a baby.’ These are normal things that you get when you have a Latina mother.”

The unprecedented cold transformed New York City into a frozen landscape, but even with the added stress, a strong collective impulse prevailed. Most notably, according to Baram, on the Fort Greene slopes. “It was fun to see the social dynamics that evolve when there’s just a bunch of people from the public out sledding. People were so generous with each other, trying to have a good time, pushing each other down the hill, lending each other their slides. It was a great vibe.” Yet the extreme weather wasn’t all snow angels and rosy cheeks. “We’re definitely in a crisis,” concludes Baram. “There are a lot of crises on this side of the border.”

Making art and having a platform to share that art with the world feels as critical as ever. Creativity is one of the first luxuries to be left behind in a crisis, but one of the most important tools to counter one. But Baram feels uniquely positioned to shoulder these new pressures, to keep her fire aflame in the storm.

“I’m Mexican and I’m Syrian, I come from lines of immigrants, and I’m a woman, and I’m queer, and so there are so many ways in which my existence feels like it’s already loud, so I’m naturally predisposed to be a little bit less afraid. Speaking my truth has always felt like a little bit of a resistance and makes me more open to lean in that direction,” she shares. “What’s going on in the world informs the things I want to talk about and how I want to use my voice. I want to lend my voice to things I’m passionate about and help mobilize messages that are important to me.”

Baram got her start during a turning point in cinematic and television history. For a brief window in the late aughts and early 2010s, right before legacy media institutions collapsed, both corporations and consumers aligned in their desire for better representation in front of and behind the camera. As those multi-hyphenates were multi-hyphenating, shows like The Mindy Project and Ugly Betty inspired young people like Baram to feel entitled to take up space and add their voice to the conversation.

“I loved how Mindy Kaling [in The Mindy Project] cast really attractive men as her opposite. It made me, in life, have higher standards for myself. Same with Jane the Virgin. I was so used to watching television where there’s these schlubby male comedians with the hottest women I’ve ever seen. You see the math I’m doing? There’s so little representation that seeing someone like Mindy Kaling felt like it was speaking to me, a quippy brown girl. I resonated with [her and Jane], who didn’t look exactly like all the other comedic heroines, who weren’t bone thin and white,” shares Baram. “It made me be like, I can exist here, too.”

Since then, however, the modern media landscape has transformed into a lawless terrain. Baram, against the odds, has succeeded in a precarious profession during one of its most precarious eras. “I get the sense that we are – even more so than when I first started out – in the Wild West, in the sense that things can be made in so many different ways and some of those ways feel more democratic than ever and some of them feel less democratic than ever. It feels treacherous but also inspiring and motivating,” reflects Baram. “I see people making things that are willing to go against the grain of the really safe things that we should be talking about, but at the same time, it feels like a lot of the things that are being made are aimed towards being safe.”

At the young age of 28, Baram has learned to be fearless in the face of non-stop upheaval, to take risks even as the state of things feels more and more threatening, to be honest with herself about herself and the world around her, and to be funny, just, like, all the time. She’s a baddie in the badlands. Perhaps the cowgirl training came in handy after all.

Wally Baram will be performing a stand-up set at Just For Laughs VANCOUVER on Friday, Feb. 13 at the York Theatre

TICKETS & INFO