In Fly Me to the Moon, the 2024 romantic comedy set around Apollo 11, Scarlett Johansson plays a marketing specialist hired to sell the space program to the American public. Her assistant, Ruby Martin, draws the art for the campaigns and cannot stand Richard Nixon. Ruby is played by Anna Garcia, Groves class of 2013, in her first film.
Anyone who judged Sales at a Michigan tournament in the early 2010s may feel they have seen this before.
A Groves forensics kid
Garcia spent four years on the Groves forensics team. Her event for most of that time was Sales, where a student stands up and makes a room want a real product. As a senior she moved to Storytelling, which is children’s literature performed with a voice, a body and maybe a chair. She was a regional runner-up twice and reached the State final three years in a row, in Sales in 2011 and 2012 and in Storytelling in 2013, while Groves finished in the top four of the Class A team race every season.
So the woman now paid to be the funniest person in the room spent her Saturdays in high school persuading strangers to buy things and doing all the voices in a picture book. It tracks.
She has said the note she hears most from casting directors is a request to do a little less. Anyone who has read an interp ballot knows that note, and knows it is usually written about the most watchable person in the round.
Theater camp at six
Performing started early. Garcia grew up in Beverly Hills, Michigan, and has said an aunt put her in theater camp at six because she had more energy than anyone knew what to do with. She spent her childhood in shows at the Marquis Theatre in Northville. Her grandmother worked in advertising, which meant the occasional audition for a Hungry Howie’s or Beaumont Hospital commercial. That turned out to matter later: by the time she graduated from Groves she was already eligible for the Screen Actors Guild.
At the University of Michigan she majored in what was then Screen Arts and Cultures, minored in performing arts management and joined the improv troupe Midnight Book Club as a freshman. The competing did not stop with MIFA. In February 2016 the troupe won the Chicago Open Regional of the College Improv Tournament and advanced to nationals. She has described those four years of improv as her basic training as an actor, because improv is listening and reacting, and so is acting.
Los Angeles
She graduated in 2017 and moved to Los Angeles on what she calls a last-minute decision. She had planned on New York her whole life until a friend offered her a place to live. Within a few months she booked a national Duracell commercial. Steady work took longer. Her father worked in the auto industry and her mother in education, so there was nobody in the business to call, and what she had instead was other Michigan graduates. One of them, working as a tour guide at Universal Studios, told her about a talent showcase the studio ran. That led to an agent, and by 2019 to television. Her first job was a scene with Danny DeVito on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that turned into two hours of improv. Superstore and Hacks followed. She trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade and was performing on a team there when the pandemic closed the theaters.
So she made TikToks, out of boredom and necessity by her own account. The audience grew past 200,000, and one of the people watching was Sam Reich, who runs the comedy streamer Dropout. She has been a regular there since, on Make Some Noise, Game Changer and Very Important People, an improvised talk show where performers are put into heavy makeup and interviewed as whoever they now appear to be. Her characters so far: a European pop star called Princess Emily, a fourth-grader whom a genie’s wish turned into a creature made of rocks, and the cowboy mayor of a California town. It is hard not to see the Storytelling kid in there.
The last role cast
In 2022 CBS chose her for its annual comedy Showcase. About nine months later came an audition for a film then called Project Artemis. The process ran for months: a tape, notes, another tape, a Zoom with casting director Ellen Lewis, a session with director Greg Berlanti, and finally a chemistry read with Johansson. She got the part and took drawing lessons to play it.
It was only on the second-to-last day of shooting that Johansson told her how it had happened. Ruby was the last role to be cast. The team had run out of options, and Johansson, who was also producing, went back through the submitted tapes, found Garcia’s and argued for her.
The film opened on July 12, 2024. On the red carpet, Channing Tatum told an interviewer that Garcia was the shortest and most talented person he had ever worked with.
Since then she has joined the main cast of Kevin Hart’s Die Hart for its third season on Roku and appeared in the Netflix comedy 72 Hours, released this past July. She keeps her standing dates in Los Angeles, Harold Night at UCB and her own Anna Garcia Variety Hour at the Elysian Theater, and has said she is developing a comedy feature she wrote.
Sales asks a student to stand in front of strangers and make them want something. Garcia has been doing it professionally ever since.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
