From The Comic's Comic

Renee Gauthier is a stand-up comedian, writer, and producer based in Los Angeles who came out of her hometown Chicago comedy scene in the early 2000s. Her first big break came when NBC cast her to play Victoria Beckham’s personal assistant in the reality series-turned-special, 2007’s Victoria Beckham: Coming To America. Gauthier has performed stand-up on Last Call with Carson Daly as well as Stand-Up In Stillettos, competed on Last Comic Standing and worked the panel on Chelsea Lately. As a writer/producer, she has worked on Ridiculousness, RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Funny Dance Show, Lip Sync Battle, The Masked Singer, and wrote the presenter banter for the 2024 Golden Globes. She also recently released her first full-length stand-up special, High Blood Italian, in 2023 via Four by Three. Renee sat down with me over Zoom to talk about her early experiences dealing with the show business industry, getting to have a hand in iconic performances such as Tom Holland’s choreographed lip-sync to “Singing In The Rain” and “Umbrella,“ and what it looked and felt like behind the scenes during the 2024 Golden Globes. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Here’s Renee going over her script with Kevin Costner in rehearsals for the 2024 Golden Globes where she had him reciting part of America Ferrera’s Barbie monologue next to Ferrera: “Everything you saw that was not Jo Koy, we wrote,” Gauthier said, referring to herself and Agathe Panaretos. “I worked very closely with Kevin Costner, and I love him. I thought he was kind, and he was sweet, and he was honest about what he was worried about,” she said, adding: “The minute we pitched it to him, he liked the idea.”

Flashback to Renee making Victoria Beckham laugh while showing her how to bake a pie in the 2007 NBC docu-comedy, Victoria Beckham: Coming To America. She said the casting agents “discovered” her while she was bartending at a Houston’s. This happened a full two years before she got New Faces at Just For Laughs Montreal.

Renee also helped craft the forever-viral performance of Tom Holland on Lip Sync Battle, which originally aired on MTV in 2017. “Renee also helped craft the forever-viral performance of Tom Holland on Lip Sync Battle, which originally aired on MTV in 2017. “We were in a room, and I said: He played Billy Elliot. He knows how to dance his ass off. We need to, you know, get him to dance,” she recalled. “That’s why we did the mash-up of ‘Singing in the Rain’ so he could tap dance a little bit, and then into Rihanna, ‘Umbrella.’ Which, that was the first time we ever had it rain onstage, and I think a couple of us did cry. It was awesome. It was just so good. It was so good to see it all achieved.”

And here’s a look at her 2023 stand-up special, High Blood Italian: “I should’ve put out an hour a long time ago, and I just didn’t. And so I was like: The time is now.”

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