Aya Cash

Watch what Aya Cash does with a laugh. As Gretchen Cutler in You're the Worst (2014), it arrives a beat too early, before the line has finished, so that it reads as a decision rather than a reaction. She leaves rooms the same way, before anyone can ask her to stay. Stephen Falk's comedy is about two people who insist they are not a couple, and Cash's contribution is to make Gretchen's speed look like confidence for about three episodes and then let us see it is nerves.

She came to it from the stage. Cash trained as an actor at the University of Minnesota, finished in 2004, and spent the next years in off-Broadway work and television guest parts. There was a series regular role in Traffic Light (2011), a Fox sitcom that did not last, and a small part as Janet, Jordan's assistant, in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Then Gretchen, for five series, from 2014 to 2019. Since the show ended she has played Stormfront in The Boys (2020 onwards), and she made her Broadway debut as Jessie Stone in Giant (2026).

Gretchen remains the work to judge her by, and it is the one we have reviewed. Opposite Chris Geere's Jimmy, a novelist whose contempt has become a habit, she talks over him and past him, and the writers, Eva Anderson, Franklin Hardy and Shane Kosakowski among them, give the pair things a real couple might say. When they lie to each other it is funny because we can see them both deciding to be lied to. Then, in the second series, the show does something with Gretchen that we will not describe. Cash plays much of it without speaking, and Falk refuses to let it turn into a lesson. We came for jokes about narcissists and found ourselves sitting still with the remote in our hand, not ready to start the next episode. The comedy carried on in the next room while this happened, and that is what made her stillness land: nobody on screen was asking us to feel anything.

Critics have mostly seen her the way we do, as an actor for acerbic, self-destructive women who use wit as cover, and that is a flattering description of a narrow lane. Stormfront is an antagonist, and villainy is where that manner goes when nobody writes the quiet half. Cash herself has said, of her character, "You fall in love with someone for their worst qualities or what they would think of as their flaws." It is a good account of Gretchen and a warning about the parts that follow her. A stage role in a new play is at least a different room. If you have not met her, start with You're the Worst, and give it past the pilot; she does.