Sabrina Wu is thirty seconds into most scenes before they have stolen them. They were Deadeye, the deadpan heart of the 2023 film Joy Ride. They were Mx. Cassidy Geoffrey, the substitute teacher on Abbott Elementary, a part they got, the episode’s writer said, simply because Quinta Brunson thinks Wu is funny. They play Pin-Lee on Apple’s Murderbot, which began filming its second season this summer. And in March they shared the Writers Guild Award for limited series as part of the writing staff of Dying for Sex.
Wu uses they/them pronouns, grew up in Ann Arbor, and graduated from Greenhills School in 2016. Before any of the above, they were one of the most decorated performers in Michigan forensics.
Three titles, three events
Wu won the Class B/C/D state championship in Dramatic Interpretation in May 2013, as a freshman. Their coach, Barb Ebeling, called that year’s team one of her finest.
As a junior in 2015 they won the state title in Duo with their partner Siani Woods. As a senior in 2016 they won it in Prose. That is three state championships in three different events in four years, on a Greenhills team that was in the middle of a long run of team state titles.
They have written about it
Wu wrote about forensics in a 2023 essay for the Greenhills alumni magazine. They wrote that they treated the school as one big stage: dancing in the spirit-week walk-off, trying stand-up for the first time at a student-run cancer fundraiser, and performing their forensics piece at an all-school assembly “even though it was so dorky to do.”
They also wrote that as a freshman they cried, more than once, to their coaches Caroline Huntoon and Mrs. Ebeling about how much they loved the forensics program. The essay is full of gratitude to the teachers whose generosity, they say, changed their life.
The other pieces of the act were assembling at the same time. Wu taught themselves to beatbox from online videos to make friends in the cafeteria. They played varsity basketball and once scored sixteen points in a win. And at sixteen, after watching a Gabriel Iglesias special, they decided to try stand-up, debuting at that fundraiser with material that startled the room.
Cambridge to the writers’ room
At Harvard they studied psychology, performed with the improv troupe On Thin Ice, and co-led the Stand-Up Comic Society, which grew from about eight members to two or three dozen. They took a semester off to intern at The Daily Show, won an arts fellowship to work the stages of Brooklyn, and opened for Cameron Esposito.
They graduated in 2020, into a pandemic. By the following summer The New Yorker was noting that, at twenty-three, Wu already had an agent and a seat in a writers’ room, on Disney’s Doogie Kameāloha, M.D. That same year Adele Lim cast them as the fourth lead of her first film. By one count the audition took more than a hundred takes.
Joy Ride premiered at South by Southwest in March 2023, and its four leads won the comedy ensemble award at CinemaCon. Variety put Wu on its list of ten comics to watch, and Vulture on its list of comedians you should know. They did a set on The Tonight Show that included impressions and, yes, beatboxing, and appeared in Netflix’s Verified Stand-Up.
One coincidence worth a smile: the co-creator of Dying for Sex, Elizabeth Meriwether, is a Greenhills graduate too.
What comes next
Besides Murderbot, Wu is developing a half-hour comedy of their own, a semi-autobiographical series about teenagers in Michigan. In their essay they wrote that the film made them jump into a bog, which they considered an upgrade on a sixth-grade stunt involving a school recycling bin, and that what they want from all this is community more than fame.
Dramatic Interpretation, Duo and Prose are three different ways of doing one thing: standing in front of strangers with nothing but a script and making them feel something. Wu learned all three in Ann Arbor and has not stopped since.
On record
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