Katie Folger
By Forrest Preece
Katie Folger keeps a blank notebook handy. Considering that she moved six times before she was seven years old and her life has been wildly peripatetic after that, observing things and making notes would be necessary to keep her grounded.
Rewind – Linda and I ran across Katie in First Light, our favorite bookstore, a few months ago. Soon, I found out that we had just met an enormously talented person who was the Austin Actor of the Year in 2024. And yes, she had a notebook handy, and using her precise handwriting, she started jotting down some of the things we discussed.
I have often wondered how an actor can make headway in that brutal profession. Unless you are with a troupe with steady work, the jobs are sporadic, and many people are competing for every role. After a year or two, most people just throw in the towel and seek another way to make a living. In Katie’s case, she’s had the advantage of having a strong writing talent to go along with her acting skills, and that has turned into a one-woman play that she’s been doing around the world. And on that score, she’s been involved in every aspect of the production.
Recently, I met up with her for coffee and we talked at length about her career. Like a lot of performers, she showed an early aptitude for writing and drawing. She was constantly asking her parents for more notebooks. With her best friend, she created another world, which they populated with stories, and they even drew wardrobes for their characters. “It was my way of coping with change – and it still is.”
At Keller High in Dallas, she tried dancing. She had an aptitude for it, but then she became interested in drama and started being cast for plays. It didn’t take long for her to realize that this was what she was meant to do. It wasn’t just the “act of acting” – as she says, it was the process of collaborating in three dimensions, with body, voice, mind, heart, song, dance—all of it. And she found that the people in the theatre community were enjoyable to be around.
Her senior year, her ensemble won the one-act play award in the state tourney’s 5A division for Richard III. Katie was Queen Margaret, and they performed at Bass Concert Hall. She says that was a pivotal moment for her, and it sealed the deal for her career path.
When she enrolled at UT, she was originally majoring in journalism, but she switched to drama and started seeking film roles. Then the universe smiled on her. By chance, she met Robert Redford at a dinner, and he became her mentor. He said that he could see that she was an impressive actor, but he wanted her to establish her voice and do her own writing. She took that advice to heart and started writing scripts while accepting acting jobs.
On the acting track, she landed a part in a nerd film about Dungeons and Dragons called Zero Charisma that won the Audience Award at SXSW in 2013, putting her on the local acting map. The next few years became a golden era in Austin indie film, and she was constantly working.
Then Katie and her friend Juliet Robb put together a comedy duo called The Dynamite Sisters based on their fondness for Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball. The showmanship and glamour of that era’s comedy influenced their work. They started making videos of their pieces, learning as they went. In 2019, she moved to New York and studied at Upright Citizens Brigade, the comedy school Amy Poehler founded. She had contracted with an excellent manager, and things were looking good. “Then the pandemic hit, my manager got laid off, and I came back to Austin – and as it happens, a lot of my friends were doing the same thing.”
By 2021, Katie was becoming fed up with the film industry. It had taken her a decade to get to this point, and now the boulder was rolling back down the hill on her. She decided it was time for a new path, so she enrolled in graduate school, doing coursework for a master’s degree in mental health counseling.
Then, the universe “called her bluff.” People started offering her film roles again, and she wasn’t going to say no to worthwhile jobs. Meanwhile, she was writing all the time, sharing her work with friends. She composed a 30-page short story, which eventually became her one-woman show “Getting in Bed With The Pizza Man.” It was loosely based on encounters in her life and her contemplation about being single and the minefield of forming relationships. Her best friend read it and immediately said that Katie should consider making the work into a one-woman comedy show.
Katie started thinking about that idea, decided to take a flyer, and put together a backyard reading of the play. She says she’d only dreamed about taking this step because of how terrifying and challenging it seemed. To make sure it wasn’t just going to be an echo chamber with sympathetic ears, she invited some strangers, and even the Emmy Award-winning actor, Tom Pelphrey. The result was better than she could have imagined. People laughed all the way through, and afterwards, the consensus was that she had to keep pushing with the project. “It was one of my favorite moments,” Katie says.
That was in November 2021. She notes that this time frame shows how long it takes to get traction on a project. Almost four years later, she has performed the piece around the world. She shot the crowdfunding video in summer 2022, raised $25,000, and premiered it in May 2023 at Crash Box, the Rude Mechs space in East Austin. All seven performances sold out.
Then she started strategizing an initial tour with the help of Kevin Bailey, a nationally known executive producer, director Matrex Kilgore, her publicists Motley Crew Media, and producers Hannah Schon and Christopher Shea. Last year, they took it to Los Angeles in May, Austin in July, and Scotland in August. Katie produced the show and raised the money for the tour herself. She says that people don’t realize that performing is “the cherry on top.” Ninety-five percent of the success of a show is what happens behind the scenes.
This May, she did a performance in Los Angeles, and her manager invited some important names in the entertainment industry to see it. The first show sold out, and she scheduled a second one. More shows will happen later this summer in LA and Austin. Now she is pitching her next project.
She is still working on her master’s degree in mental counseling, too. “I want to be an agent of compassion in the world. And I need to stay grounded, no matter where my career takes me.”
By the way, if you run into Katie, ask her about New Year's Eve last year when she was in a New Orleans club watching an Amy Schumer show -- and how, with no warning, she was persuaded to come up on stage and do ten minutes of “Pizza Man” while the world-famous comedian looked on. Luckily, she had just crafted a ten-minute segment of the show and performed it at The Paramount two weeks before that. She got through five minutes of it and decided to quit while she was ahead. The next morning, she went downstairs to the deserted hotel coffee shop and saw a woman ordering at the register, who cried out “Happy New Year” to her. It was Parker Posey. “Those two events happening that close together – it was a wink from the heavens!”
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