Natalie Palamides

Natalie Palamides is an American actress, comedian, and television writer. Aspiring to work at Saturday Night Live, she moved to Los Angeles and joined the Upright Citizens Brigade after college, before taking up voice-over and commercial work and studying clown performance at the Idiot Workshop and the Lyric Hyperion. She developed longer-form performance from improvisations in unusual outfits, and took an egg costume from one of her sketches to make her first hour-long show, Laid.

Palamides developed the exaggeratedly masculine character Nate into the hour-long performance Nate - A One Man Show, which features audience participation with consent as a theme. After winning the Total Theatre Award at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it was commissioned by Amy Poehler's production company Paper Kite and released on Netflix on December 1, 2020, to wide critical acclaim. She also starred as Buttercup in the 2016 reboot of The Powerpuff Girls, won Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2017, and plays the character "Mara" in TV commercials for Progressive Insurance.

Palamides co-hosts the Disney-themed podcast Hidden Mickeys alongside Carrie Poppy. She played a horror-movie-style clown, Funzo, in Apocalypse Clown (2023), which won Best Irish Film at the Galway Film Fleadh; Digital Spy's Ian Sandwell praised her "deranged and hilarious" performance. In August 2024, she performed WEER at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a show described as a "one-woman romcom" that received widespread acclaim and came to New York City in 2025.