Mary Neely

Mary Connor Neely was born on April 10, 1991, in Los Angeles, California, to Mark Neely, an actor, and Mary Neely (née Johnson), a commercial producer. Her parents divorced when she was young and she was raised equally between them. Neely is an only child. Her paternal grandmother is a survivor of the Holocaust.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Neely has described it as both “really interesting” and “odd”.

“My dad was a taxi driver in LA in the 70s, so growing up he would drive me around, he knew the city like the back of his hand. He would tell me stories from when he was a cab driver and it colored the city for me.”

Though both of her parents exited entertainment when Neely was in elementary school, a lot of their friends were “crew people” which led Neely to grow up in the industry but as she described, “it wasn’t glamorous.”

Neely lived in 13 different houses by the time she was 18 years old in the Glendale, Altadena, Pasadena, South Pasadena, Santa Monica, and West LA neighborhoods of Los Angeles. She cites the exposure to so many different kinds of people and places as a catalyst for her interest in performing.

Neely started acting in community theater productions at age eight, saying her love for musicals was akin to a religion.

During summers in high school, Neely attended drama programs at UCLA and Carnegie Mellon. Neely graduated from The Archer School for Girls in 2009 [1] before studying acting at UCLA's School of Theater Film and Television on scholarship.During her junior year at UCLA, Neely was scouted by a commercial casting director at a barbecue and began auditioning while still enrolled in school. In 2012 Neely was cast as "Kitty" in Eli Russell Linnetz' Afterglow, a short film also starring Sawyer Spielberg and Paul Sand. She graduated from UCLA in 2013 with a major in Theater and a minor in Scandinavian culture. Upon completing her degree, the faculty of the theater school awarded her the Judith and Milton R. Stark scholarship, given based on artistic merit.

Neely has been cast in over twenty national commercials, most notably as goth daughter Debbie in Pepcid's The Burns Family campaign alongside Richard Riehle and as the bubbly Tide Pods Waitress, which ran in the U.S. and Canada from 2015 to 2019.

Frustrated by the lack of nuance written into female TV and film roles, Neely began creating her own projects, learning how to edit using YouTube tutorials. Neely's first short film, The Dresser, was nominated for the Golden Egg award at the Reykjavík International Film Festival. A comedy about Sofia, a young actress grappling with her control issues by trying and failing to hook up with a co-star, Neely wrote, directed, edited, produced, and starred.

She then made Wacko Smacko, an eight-episode web series based on The Dresser that follows Sofia as she fumbles through ordeals with dating, friendships, and family while trying to develop an acting career in Los Angeles. Neely again wrote, directed, produced, and starred. The series was licensed to the YouTube channel Snarled and was well-received, with over 500,000 views. One critic said of Wacko Smacko, “Neely’s storytelling is raw and real, and her character Sofia is, thankfully, imperfect and nuanced, a person with aspirations who also occasionally shoots herself in the foot, and is by no means a one-dimensional female stereotype.”

In 2017 Neely was hired to direct and edit Pink Trailer, a short film that follows two young women, Julie and Lucy, as they housesit for Lucy's grandmother [2] but keep getting visited by a foreboding neighbor. Neely blended comedy with hints of horror to accentuate serious discussions about mental health and growing up. The film premiered at the South by Southwest film festival and opened Palm Springs ShortFest to positive reviews, Refinery29 comparing it to Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird. In 2019 Pink Trailer played as a pre-feature short before Olivia Wilde's Booksmart at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee.

In 2018 Neely directed and edited her first music video, Margaret, for LA band Pinky Pinky. Deemed a “masterpiece” by Paper Magazine, the video stars Teresa Ganzel as a lonely, pill-popping, Chardonnay-drinking mother of a teenage girl. Neely described it as a “dark version” of the 2003 Fountains of Wayne music video for Stacy's Mom.

In 2020 Neely appeared in MGM's remake of Valley Girl, was chosen as one of Adweek's Creative 100 and named a New Face at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal.

Neely had supporting roles in Sony's live-action/animated musical fantasy comedy film Lyle Lyle Crocodile and Netflix's romantic comedy film Happiness for Beginners, in 2022 and 2023 respectively. In 2024 Neely was cast in The Room Returns! starring Bob Odenkirk as well as the 20th Century Studios feature Swiped starring Lily James, the latter of which is set to premiere in 2025.

Or Something, a feature film co-starring and co-written by Neely and Kareem Rahma, premiered at Roxy Cinema in Tribeca in October of 2024. Following two strangers who show up to the same Brooklyn apartment looking to collect cash they are both owed, the dialogue heavy film has been likened to an East Coast version of a Duplass Brothers Mumblecore movie.