At 39, Monica Wyche was a high school drama teacher in Blythewood, South Carolina. At 40, she was newly married, renting a garden apartment on 75th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, ready to take the acting world by storm.
She had exactly one TV credit on her resume — an episode of Army Wives filmed in Charleston while she was still teaching — but one credit is better than none, right?
“I finished at Blythewood on June 3 or something, and on June 4 we were in a U-Haul coming to New York,” says Wyche, who married playwright Dean Poynor shortly before the big move. “We were both like, ‘Let’s just do it. If we don’t do it now, we’re never going to do it.’”
That was 2010. Fourteen years and another big life change later — “Because it wasn’t
complicated enough
to come up here at 40 with a new husband, two cats and a dog, we decided ‘Let’s also
have a baby!’” — the ’96 theatre, ’99 MFA graduate is updating Carolinian on her career in the lobby at Lincoln Center. The Upper West Side rendezvous is close
to her apartment and her agent’s office, and like any working actor she keeps a busy
schedule.
This morning, for example, she got a callback she can’t discuss because she signed an NDA. This afternoon, she has a rehearsal for a workshop production of The JonBenet Game. In 2020, she had a role in the horror film Unearth. Last year, she spent seven weeks in Pittsburgh doing a production of Steel Magnolias. “I got to play M’Lynn,” she says. “It was the best.”
“I just started saying yes. These little projects where they need someone to play the mom, small independent films, shorts — they’re not all good, but I’ve rarely said no to an audition. Just trying on a different character, even if you don’t book it, at least you’re trying.”
Mostly, though, it’s been TV. You might have seen Wyche as Sandra Leblanc in Five Days at Memorial. She appeared in five episodes of the 2022 Apple+ miniseries about a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. You might have seen her on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. She made her first appearance on that series in 2014 as a juvenile detention center warden; she made her second this spring as the mother of a teenager accused of sexual assault.
She has also landed roles on Hulu’s The Path, ABC’s For Life and CBS’s FBI: Most Wanted.
Pull up Wyche’s IMDB page, though, and you’ll see a couple dozen lesser credits. For an MFA grad who acted on stages in Milwaukee and Chicago before returning to South Carolina to teach, New York presented a range of new opportunities — and she read for almost anything.
“I just started saying yes,” she explains. “These little projects where they need someone to play the mom, small independent films, shorts — they’re not all good, but I’ve rarely said no to an audition. Just trying on a different character, even if you don’t book it, at least you’re trying.”
She doesn’t worry about being typecast, either. The fiftysomething mom has no problem playing the fiftysomething mom. Or the fiftysomething anything.
“I’ve embraced my age,” she says. “I’ve embraced my type. I mean, there was a period there when I got some Botox and thought, ‘I’m gonna do the smooth, shiny forehead thing.’ But that’s just not my brand, you know?”
And her brand is in demand. Post-pandemic, post-writers’ strike, the industry has changed — among other things, actors now record and edit their own auditions, so she travels with a tripod — but she’s reading for better roles, and getting better roles, than at any point in her career.
“When I got here at 40, a lot of actors who moved to New York in their teens or in their 20s, right out of college, were tired,” she says. “And if they haven’t made it or had some level of success by 40, a lot of actors are like, ‘I gotta get a real job!’
“I felt like if I came in older, while people my age were leaving, it might not be a bad thing. And I was right.”