In Good Night, and Good Luck on Broadway, Comedian Ilana Glazer Can Lose Her Signature Chill

Ilana Glazer’s magic trick is fooling you into thinking she’s really the underachieving stoner chick she plays on screen.

Yes, she shares a first name with Ilana Wexler, the chaotic but disarming slacker that put her on the map in Broad City, the coming-of-age comedy series Glazer co-created with Abbi Jacobson. More recently, in Babes—the pregnancy comedy film she also co-wrote, drawing on the comic horrors of her own pregnancy—she’s still messy as hell.

So a political stage drama led by Hollywood mega-star George Clooney might not seem like a natural next step along the path the now-37-year-old Glazer has spent her whole adult life carving. 

“It definitely feels new to others,” Glazer says slowly and deliberately. “To me it feels... correct.”

Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney and Grant Heslov’s stage adaptation of their 2005 film, theatricalizes the story of anchor Edward R. Murrow and the CBS staffers who fought Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-Scare tactics with gold-standard TV journalism. Glazer plays Shirley Wershba, one of the only women in a sea of chain-smoking men.

Director David Cromer recreates the persistent hum of a newsroom with a cast of around 20 people at the 1,600-seat Winter Garden Theatre. “We've been calling ourselves an organism,” says Glazer. “We're mostly all on stage most of the time.” At one time, playing to an audience of 1,600 would have been energetically overwhelming, but Glazer’s 2023-24 stand-up comedy tour—her biggest one to date with 52 shows in 48 cities—drew crowds of up to 3,000 people. “My nervous system would be buzzing uncontrollably if I hadn't had that experience with the tour,” she says. “I went through such a transformation creatively and personally with that project. Once I got the offer for this show, it clicked for me that that tour was leading me to this.”

Like her comedy alter egos, she deploys the word “dude” to soften the edges of a conversation. But where her characters bulldoze, Glazer moves with precision. She speaks precisely, too—the happy side effect of making a living on musical turns of phrase.

“I was beguiled,” Glazer says of the two-day workshop that introduced her to Good Night, and Good Luck back in September 2024. Walking into the scrappy basement theater space, it was Cromer who first captured her imagination: “Immediately his magnetism is pulling me in,” she says, launching into a play-by-play of the charmed meeting. (Her affinity has only grown since then: “He's a literal MacArthur genius. And he's just also casually a genius.”)

Clooney hadn’t yet appeared. She grew increasingly confident that he wouldn’t. “You idiot,” Glazer remembers saying to herself in the manner of a cartoon thought bubble. “You thought George Clooney was going to show up to get doughnuts in this basement in Midtown? L-O-L.”

Then she heard someone call out, “OK, George is about to get here!” The next bubble read something like, “Holy f*cking sh*t.”

Glazer spent the next two days working through Clooney and Heslov’s script (Clooney reading the part of Murrow) while growing more and more enthralled with the vibrations in the room. Afterwards, she says, “I was spilling over and had to write a note to George and Grant.” Her first draft showered them with gratitude and expressed how she couldn’t wait to see the finished product on stage. Her agent, Jessica Kovacevic, pointed out that she could be on stage with it—if she wanted to. “My brain had to form new synapses to imagine doing it,” Glazer says. Then she gently revised the note: “I wrote, ‘I'd be thrilled to be a part of it, but I literally don't care. This was already such an incredible experience.’”

They immediately offered her the role. Aside from a producer credit on the Michael R. Jackson musical A Strange Loop, it would be her Broadway debut. (She credits A Strange Loop with turning her head towards Broadway in the first place: “I found it to be so beautiful and moving and upsetting at times, in a way that's productive,” she said of the show.)

Then came more news: “George Clooney's in the f*cking play!” She learned with the rest of the world that Clooney would be sticking with the part of Murrow when the Broadway production was announced. She kvelled with her husband from her daughter’s play mat: “I'm going to be in a play with George Clooney. That’s crazy.”

“George Clooney” has since become just “George”—not an out-of-reach idea or the picture of blinding celebrity, but someone she's gotten to know and observe. “He is the best of the best,” Glazer says. “I’m watching him from acting, to writing and rewriting, to producing, to leadership. Learning from him is getting a master's in multihyphenate TV, film and play creating.”

Glazer has been building a life as a multihyphenate ever since her college years moonlighting as a comedian and scratching her way into the industry from outside NYU’s eminent theater program (she was an old-fashioned Psychology major). She carved a niche in the YouTube space, first with Broad City (pre-Comedy Central) and then with Chronic Gamer Girl, another weed-infused chill-fest. Any trace of fussiness would kill the buzz—but you don’t make successful creative projects soup to nuts without some fussing.

“The little notes—that is a sport for me,” she says, relishing the particularity in Cromer’s direction. “It's been thrilling to me to hold these ethereal notes and try to make them real on stage tonight; and then slightly new ones the next night.” In her day-to-day, she flags these things as obsessive-compulsive behaviors. ("For most of my life, I'm like, OK, we gotta break that pattern.”) But in her new Broadway gig, she can indulge every finicky impulse—and with the safety of knowing she has only one hat to wear.

“It feels like a privilege to be able to pour all my skills into the one role,” says Glazer. Though this particular material happens to complement her offstage role as an “advocate and activist and organizer." Glazer is the co-founder of Generator Collective, an organization with the goal to “humanize policy” and promote participation in democracy. “It’s often different segments of my life, but to watch George make it all intersect is stunning.”

And then there’s the comparatively new role of mom—the one that suffuses her new Hulu comedy special Human Magic and poses the biggest challenge to working on Broadway. “My daughter has started to really communicate her feelings about it,” says Glazer of her performing schedule—something her almost-four-year-old doesn't care to abide. Glazer chooses her next words with care but honesty. “I can only guide her in making room for her feelings. But it's super painful and not conducive to being a parent.”

And yet, she sees a lot of overlap between the two forces competing for her time and attention. “My role as an artist is similar to my role as a mother,” she says. “The audience—I want to be able to hold them. Come on…,” she mimes, arms outstretched, voice softening. “…Just relax on mommy.”

The influence flows even stronger the other direction. “I'm so grateful for being my child's mother, because if I weren't, I wouldn't know how to practice presence in this process in the same way.” Good Night, and Good Luck’s limited run concludes on June 8—a date she already knows will kick off a mourning period. “I know that there's going to be a deep sense of loss to process after it's over,” Glazer says. “But it just couldn't last forever. It's so much. My heart is so full. It’s kind of crazy, actually. I really look forward to thinking back on it.”

When she does, the thought bubble above her head will surely read, “Holy f*cking sh*t.”