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Overcompensating star Holmes is getting flooded with DMs from 'mostly gay men'
Holmes on Overcompensating.
And yes, sometimes they watch your fancams, too.
Holmes wasn't initially meant to play Hailee in the wildly popular Prime Video show, Overcompensating. She originally auditioned to play Carmen, a freshman who forms a quick bond with the show's main protagonist, Benny, played by the creator and star, Benito Skinner. The role of Carmen ultimately went to Wally Baram, but the team loved Holmes, who uses she/they pronouns, and asked her to read for Carmen's self-assured, high-femme, supportive roommate, Hailee.
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The role is a departure from their usual look, which typically consists of men's clothing, and it's not a character they are often asked to read for. "I don't know if it's that my queerness has not let me be able to be in the femme spaces as much, or if it's the fatphobia of this industry, but I was really excited."
For the self-tape, Holmes put on a push-up bra, learned how to do makeup, contoured her face, and just had a blast, which perfectly captures the essence of who Hailee is in the show. She watched the tape back and made sure it made her laugh before sending it in, and it was a hit. The casting team loved Holmes's first tape, and after doing a few chemistry reads, she knew the part was hers because during the audition process, she noticed that Skinner was "so bad at hiding his face, and he was laughing so hard."
Shortly after the show aired, Hailee (and the Overcompensating show) was a hit across social media platforms. Less than a week after the season premiered on Prime Video, it became the number 1 show on the platform in the United States and Canada. Her quotable one-liners were clipped for fan edits that were set to a Charli XCX song, a popular K-pop song, or any other popular song gaining momentum on TikTok at the time. The videos are garnering hundreds of thousands of likes on TikTok and spreading like wildfire across X.
There were multiple posts across social media that had captioned the videos, saying, "I wish she was my roommate."
Coming from the improv world and cutting their teeth in Chicago, Holmes was given room to improvise a lot on the show. "Hailee was already written as the comedic relief in the show, so for Benny to be like 'You can improvise and make her more elevated,' was just really cool."
She says that family, friends, and fans have sent her jokes that were made in the show, which people think she improvised. Like the moment when she says Carmen's brother's death "pisses [her] off," but makes sure to credit Skinner for that joke. But she did improvise the moment where she says, "Hailee Marie Matthews, also known as 'hmm.'" The joke she's most proud of is when she was fake orgasming on an actor's lap and said, "That's how easy it is to fake it." Skinner and the cast burst out laughing immediately after the camera cut, Holmes recalls, because they didn't know she was going to do that.
The whole experience of playing Hailee has been very special to Holmes, and they feel very lucky. "I feel very grateful that the audience is like gays and girls," she says. "My DMs right now, mostly gay men," which she says is shocking because they're "a really picky crowd, I say as someone who a lot of my best friends are gay men, so it means the world that I made them proud." But with all this newfound attention, she's trying to stay humble and live by some sage wisdom her friend imparted to her: "Never let your best set mean too much or your worst set mean too much."
The show has yet to be renewed for season 2, but the experience of playing Hailee is something they'll never forget. "I think I'll never get to play a part like that again in my career, unless we get a second season, but I'm forever grateful to Benny and Scott King (the showrunner) for seeing me as an actor," Holmes says. "I'm just really grateful it's helped show my range, because all I want to do is be able to act, so badly."
When asked what Holmes hopes for Hailee in season 2, they say that audiences may have picked up on clues about what could be explored, saying, "I gave some hints to it throughout the season, maybe when she's drunk, that Hailee doesn't know everything about her sexuality yet."
Overcompensating is now streaming on Prime Video.
Moises Mendez II is a culture journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He covers internet culture and entertainment including television, movies, music, and more. For the last two years, he was a Culture Reporter at TIME Magazine. Before that, he was a freelance journalist and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, and more. Moises holds a master's degree in Arts and Culture journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Moises Mendez II is a culture journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He covers internet culture and entertainment including television, movies, music, and more. For the last two years, he was a Culture Reporter at TIME Magazine. Before that, he was a freelance journalist and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, and more. Moises holds a master's degree in Arts and Culture journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
