Herb Sundays 106: Veronika Slowikowska
"Music rules and I LOVE IT!" says the rising actor/comedian
Herb Sundays 106: Veronika Slowikowska (Apple, Spotify).
Art by Michael Cina
“I’m all about guilt free listening. Whatever makes you move, physically and emotionally. I listen when I’m in motion, cleaning my room, on the train, in the car. Music rules and I LOVE IT!” - Veronika Slowikowska
Here’s Veronika’s bio minorly edited bio , I’m not gonna try and mess with it:
Veronika Slowikowska is a Canadian actor and comedian currently based in New York City. Since graduating from the Canadian Film Centre’s Actors Conservatory in 2020 she has found credits, including a recurring role on FX’s What We Do In The Shadows, CBC’s Homeschooled, Entertainment One’s Nurses, and has her first lead role in the Hulu comedy series Davey and Jonsie’s Locker which debuts this March. Veronika performs live around New York City and posts to her hundreds of thousands of fans on her TikTok and IG accounts, @veronika_iscool.
As I’ve gotten older, nearly all professions have become more impressive to me. You realize that skill alone isn't enough to do most things and that tenacity is the differentiator.
Film was a big deal to me growing up, but they were just what I thought of as “movies” then. My parents took my sister and me to what seemed like a good number of them, and part of the experience was talking about them on the drive home or dinner afterward. We talked about whether or not the characters were believable, if the ending was good, our favorite “shots,” and other stuff that made me understand that film was an organization of component parts, not just one machine.
Going to a big suburban movie theater held (and holds) a powerful thrill for me. This is obviously pre-internet / streaming, so I’m sure the scarcity effect was a big part of it, but as a kid, I was obsessed with looking at the big one-sheet movie posters, still creased from the box at the local cinema. I didn't know what “design” was or that most of the best ones were paintings in the ‘80s, but I told myself I wanted to make those posters or be a movie director when I got older.
I started looking at movie reviews and scouring box office totals at around 10 years old, thanks to an Entertainment Weekly family print subscription and would watch Entertainment Tonight (7 or 7:30 PM before the sitcoms started, I think) and loved the behind-the-scenes hype they would throw on forthcoming films. The big-budget auteur era of Spielberg and Tim Burton was seductive even though I didn’t totally get what they did, but I loved the idea of the choices they had to make (picking Prince for Batman (1989)? genius!) and how the fonts in the credits looked. When we took a family trip to California as kids, we tried to scope out movie production sets and marveled at celebrity sightings in an excitable Midwestern way, but studied enough not to interrupt or ruin the mood.
Realizing I wasn’t going to be a director was my “you’re not going to big leagues, kid”’ moment internally. Time had moved on, and I hadn’t done anything about it. Also, I realized how impossibly hard shooting anything was, witnessing the absolute insanity of making film products through friends who shot docs or music videos. I also realized the raw patience and self-belief needed on either side of the camera. It’s probably why I always cry at the Oscars, even though it's sorta inconsequential for me and most of the nominees/winners seem wrong.
All of that to say this, I respect the craft of filmmaking, and especially acting, now more than ever. The closest I get to film is through music licensing. I’ve had music supervisor types like Jocelyn Brown (Herb 003) and Josh Marcy (Herb 31) in Herb Sundays as I marvel at the depth of their taste. I DJ’ed with Marcy at Goldline Bar last year (they demand you play from their vinyl collection) and even in the paint, Marcy sonned me with his deep pulls (he is taller than me, to be fair). I still feel a tingle when my colleagues in music licensing at Ghostly manage to get a song we released into film or TV. To be “locked to picture” is some sort of strange firmament you can only aspire to, this grafting of Art on Art.
I couldn’t call myself a Film Person anymore, though, as the table stakes to do so now are way too high in knowledge and consumption, the raw volume of various film canons too vast for me to ever call myself a deep head. That said, I’m always moved by performance and have wanted to feature an actor in Herb for that reason. I'm also a comedy fan but not a Comedy Person for the same reason above. My comedy format of choice is sketch, and I found a lot of my sensibility for it via MTV’s The State (which did for me what Kids In The Hall did for most people my age). It really switched on a type of humor that was absurd and heartfelt, with just enough Gen X ennui and loopy danger to feel fresh.
So for these reasons, I thought Veronika would be a great Herb. While you can call some of her work “content creation,” to me, it's just a truncated sketch comedy format. The same one I had making shorts with my friends as kids but with socials as the perfect vessel. I also clocked Slowikowska as a Music Person, and then when I saw them in a music video for Hovvdy, a band I like, I decided to reach out. The playlist captures her sensibility, unearths some deeper cuts, and has some prime theater kid moments which is incredibly Herb.
Slowikowska is riding a wave of goodwill and as part of a larger scene including crews like Simple Town, Slowikowska and her gang, namely co-star Kyle Chase and cameraman Michael Rees, whom we hear about but don't really see often, have created a banal comedic universe from their apartments. The trappings of roommate culture, needy digs for self-promotion, and a running romantic gag (that Slowikowska has a crush on Kyle) have turned her channel into its own creative arc which fans call “The Lore” and now has trailers and behind-the-scenes with a fake director (almost an Entourage-like setup) with Veronika and company doing interviews praising their generous co-stars.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Part of the appeal for me is how low stakes it all is. It doesn’t really seek to get to current events other than prevailing moods and norms. These videos also sometimes function as a look into the life of an emerging actor, from musical theater thirst to grown audition hounds. Slowikowska alongside other comedian/actors who ride the line between self-aware pastiche and their own brand of metacringe like Caitlin Reilly or Lisa Gilroy skewer the eagerness and pain of the film/tv business in a way that that is both self-eviscerating and endearing. The TikTok format of micro-vignette suits this sort of character creation well. I’ve watched Gilroy’s send-up of a LA restaurant host more times than I care to admit.
W. David Marx (Herb 53) has talked about how we perceive that content creators are eating the world but how few have actually transferred this velocity to crossover acceptance. I suspect that Slowikowska and her peers may be a cohort that breaks this trend. The volume of work being made creates an intimacy we once thought damaging to stardom but now seems mutually exclusive.
a true meeting of the minds