It pays to be a whore in Hollywood, but as Naomi Grossman is quick to point out at the head of the show, she isn’t talking about sex work, but rather the time-honoured Hollywood hustle of whoring yourself out to work and people at any length to get paid.
The petite actress from Colorado makes it very plain throughout the length of this warts and all story of her slow rise to fame that an overnight success can be decades in the making. Spinning yarns from her youth about selling friendship memberships at school, to brief dalliances in almost every type of service industry in California, she’s someone who has a funny story and a self-deprecating joke for every turn.
But what’s most enjoyable about this show is that Grossman is far more than just a lucky break actor who happened to land the role of Pepper, the institutionalised inmate with microcephaly in the TV show American Horror Story. She’s a grafter and a natural storyteller, someone who managed to spin out an entire non-acting career on the basis of a good lie and an impeccable accent.
The show itself is wildly entertaining, but it suffers a little from the unfortunate truth about most people’s lives in that Grossman’s story sort of runs out of steam after a while, pivoting from the search for stardom to an admittedly enthralling but somewhat less stellar story of failed romance and a somewhat toxic relationship. If anything, the issue is that Grossman’s story doesn’t quite round itself off. The tale tails off somewhat towards the end because her life is still ongoing, and while it’s clearly been a great journey so far, it’s also one that is far from finished.