Jess Weixler won one of the strangest special honors Sundance gives out for one of the strangest premises in modern horror comedy, and it launched a career that has quietly outlasted the film that started it.
Louisville Roots and Juilliard
Weixler was born in Louisville in 1981 and attended Westport Middle School before graduating from Atherton High School in 1999, the same school that later produced rapper Jack Harlow. As a student she trained at Louisville’s Walden Theatre Conservatory Program and performed with the River City Players acting group and a local choral group, a serious theater education for a teenager.
She went on to Juilliard, graduating in 2003 with a degree in theater arts. Her classmates there included future Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain, part of a Juilliard cohort that would go on to reshape American film and television over the following decade.
Teeth and the Sundance Jury Prize
Weixler’s breakout role came in 2007’s Teeth, a horror comedy about a teenage girl who discovers she has vagina dentata, in which she played the lead, Dawn O’Keefe. The premise sounds like a stunt, but Weixler’s performance was taken seriously by critics and by Sundance itself, which gave her its Special Jury Prize that year.
The role also earned her a Breakthrough Award nomination at the Gotham Awards and a spot on New York magazine’s list of New Yorkers to watch, unusually broad recognition for a film built around body horror. It also demonstrated a comfort with difficult, physically demanding material that would define much of her later career, including horror and thriller work that traded on the same fearlessness.
For a juicy and jaw-dropping performance.
— Sundance Film Festival, on Weixler’s Special Jury Prize citation for Teeth
Television and Beyond
Weixler made her network television debut in 2003 on the CBS crime series Hack, alongside David Morse and Andre Braugher, and has since built a long résumé of television work, including a run as investigator Robyn Burdine on The Good Wife starting in 2013. She has also worked steadily in independent film, taking on roles that favor psychological complexity over easy likability.
She has continued splitting her time between film and television in the years since, carrying the same serious theater training from her Louisville childhood into every role, whatever the genre. Unlike some actors who treat an early breakout as a ceiling, Weixler has used Teeth as a floor, building steadily upward from a role that could easily have typecast her for life.