Meet Mallory Everton | Writer, Director, Actor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Mallory Everton and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Mallory, how has your work-life balance changed over time?
Balance is something I didn’t learn until my body and soul demanded it. In 2022, I was 32, and I had burnt out completely. I had worked through my 20s like I was being chased by the Babadook. Right out of college, I spent six intense years helping to build a sketch comedy show at a small network in Utah. The hours were crazy but I was working with my best friends, so who needed a social life? Then we left the sketch show to start a web series company. I was the show runner for two shows at the same time. Cut episodes all night in my hotel room while we were on an NBC reality show during the day. The pandemic hit. Kept working. Made a feature in three months in 2020. It got into SXSW. I thought I’d arrived. I hadn’t. The film finally got me management in LA, but they just wanted to know what I was was writing next. And the truth was that I didn’t have a single word left in me. I had succumbed to the Babadook (read: earth-shattering burnout).

I heard once that the definition of burnout is when you realize that the tools that got you here cannot get you where you’re going next. I felt like I’d been sprinting up a mountain for 10 years, assuming I’d get to rest when I got to the summit. But when I got there, it wasn’t the summit at all, just a false peak, and everyone there was screaming at me to run faster. I essentially ended up having to spend an entire year learning how to be a person again. Learning how to talk about things other than work when people asked me what I was up to. Learning how to go on dates with men instead of just flirting on set. Learning how to meditate. How to bake. How to throw a party and see it as a work of art. How to write just because I like it, not because someone was paying me. How to do nothing. How to disappear from people’s timelines. How to be okay.

As I slowly eased back into work again, I realized something small but mighty had reordered itself in my brain. In terms of my to-do list each day, I used to think that work-related tasks always needed to be done first. But now the work email or the writing deadline feels equally weighted to a trip to the grocery store or calling a friend. They’re all just different ways to spend my time, no value judgments. Just options. You’re not going to die slowly of regret if you pick wrong. Life can be beautiful either way.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Listen. My path has been strange. I don’t even know how to describe it to people in LA sometimes. I grew up Mormon (and I’d still identify that way most days) so naturally, I went to Brigham Young University in Utah. I planned to study medicine, but two weeks into my freshman year I found out that BYU had a sketch comedy group and it was all over. I ended up devoting almost all my time to that group and changing my major to film. This sketch group (cleverly named Divine Comedy on a religious campus) was building in momentum when I joined, and over the course of my college career, BYUtv (the network connected to the university) took an interest in us.

By the time I was in my last semester, I’d leave class and run across campus to BYU Broadcasting to act and write (and sometimes direct) for what was essentially a family-friendly Saturday Night Live called Studio C. Over the course of the 6 years (9 seasons) that I worked on the show, it got incredibly popular in Utah and amidst the Mormon community in general, so my college friends and I are what some might call “Mormon famous” (cringe: forgive me). In LA, this is largely useless. In my experience, nobody cares if you made 100 seasons of anything if you made it at BYUtv, the network where they used to read a bible around a table and call it a TV show.

After my friends and I left Studio C, we started a web series company and I was the show runner for a mock-vlog series called Loving Lyfe and a zany sitcom called Freelancers. Our resources were scant, but hot damn–we had fun making those shows!

Then a pandemic happened and I got antsy and my childhood best friend Whitney and her husband Stephen and I made our first feature (a Covid-era roadtrip comedy called Stop and Go) during the summer of 2020. We wrote it in two weeks, we pre-produced in two weeks (shoutout to Babetta Kelly, our good friend and producer), we shot it in two weeks, and I got a first cut out in 2 weeks. And we did this because… we’re insane? It seems like a creative fever dream to me now, making a movie so fast in a total vacuum, with an 8-person crew because we all literally had nothing else to do with our time. I’ll never be able to replicate those conditions again (hopefully, please God). Stop and Go ended up getting into SXSW in 2021. The festival was all digital, which was a bummer, but thematically fitting for a our little Covid comedy.

Since 2021, I’ve been lucky enough to make another season of Freelancers and act in several independent features with some good friends, including Villains Inc. a supervillain comedy which I co-starred in with Colin Mochrie (whom I begged to adopt me multiple times because he is an international treasure and a wonderful man), a western comedy called Go West, and more recently I See the Demon, a psychological horror film that is premiering at the Cinequest Film Festival this year.

I’m an indie film girl at heart. If I could make a living writing, directing, and acting in indies only, that would be all I’d do. But unfortunately, it turns out indie film doesn’t often lead to piles of money (surprise, surprise). So while I’m always pitching and developing my next dream project, I’m gigging my way through that non-union writer/actor/director life to pay my bills– podcasting, writing and acting in ads for small companies, doing Cameos for the kids who are still watching Studio C, writing comedic PSAs urging women to get mammograms… It’s a patchwork life, but isn’t everyone’s in this industry?

I’ve started seeing it all as practice, seeing each gig as an opportunity to exercise my creative muscles, to take each potentially mundane job and find a way to make it fascinating to me so that the work will feel more honest and human. Some early insight I got from a friend when I moved to LA was that “trying to make it in the film industry is like going into a casino and treating it like a business plan.” I’m very aware that this is a casino. Everything is a gamble. So the real question becomes, how can you make that casino bearable so you can hang out and pull slots for as long as possible? My answer to that would be good friends, healthy habits, lots of dancing, great food, as much live music as possible, and a creative posture that will make you ready for whatever is in your inbox tomorrow. Big or small, give it all of you, all of the time. Then if you every get the jackpot, you’ll be in the habit of holding nothing back.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
You need to eat pasta at Mozza Osteria, you need to go to Home Restaurant in Los Feliz and get the chilaquiles, and you need to eat at least a dozen Randy’s donuts, followed by a dozen Sidecar donuts, chased with an Uncle Tetsu’s Japanese cheesecake. You need to window shop in Larchmont Village. You need to hike up to the Hollywood sign and have a good cry if you need one, then go on a long walk with a good friend around Lake Hollywood. You need to go dancing at Akbar in Silverlake. It’s imperative that you dance so hard that you get disgustingly sweaty. You need to go to a show at the Griffith Observatory–I know it’s touristy, but it’s actually so magical. You need to drive down the PCH and listen to Joni Mitchell. You need to go to the Last Bookstore downtown and hit Grand Central Market while you’re at it. You need to go to Huntington Gardens, do the afternoon tea, and THIS IS CRUCIAL: do NOT skip the gift shop. That place is a treasure trove. If I could live in any place of business it would be the Huntington Gardens gift shop. Or any Pizza Hut, but that’s more of a nostalgia thing and maybe I have an eating problem. And lastly, don’t forget to go thrift shopping (I recommend Trove in Westwood). LA’s a city full of chic dressers, and rich people are getting rid of basically brand new gorgeous clothes literally every day. Plus sustainable fashion, baby!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Okay, this list might be obnoxious, but I’m shouting out my friends and cast mates from Studio C and JK Studios (our web series company)– Adam Berg, Whitney Call, Jason Gray, Stacey Harkey, Natalie Madsen, Stephen Meek, Matt Meese, James Perry, and Jeremy Warner. I’ve been collaborating with and learning from these guys since college. We’ve been through thick and thin over and over again, and I feel privileged to have been cooked in the same bizarre water as them. This is a special group of writers and creators who taught me by example to lose my ego and put the work and the audience first, and that there was no point in doing the work at all if you weren’t having fun. Sometimes I wish I could just turn myself into an ambition monster who only cared about bottom lines and awards because I’m sure I’d make more money, but working with these gems so early on in my career really spoiled me and taught me how amazing the work can be when you truly love the people with whom you’re creating. I know it’s an indie filmmaker cliche, but I’m proud to wave that banner: hell or high water, I just want to make cool shit with my friends ’til the day I die.

Instagram: @remallory

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IJR7UsHdwk&t=93s

Other: Check out Stop and Go: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/stop-and-go/umc.cmc.5sw94de0qk8wsl91lvhvlhq88
Freelancers on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IJR7UsHdwk&t=93s
Loving Lyfe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAs0_ZaYV6Y
Studio C on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVnIcxDZoVY

Image Credits
Justin Hackworth
Brenna Empey
Wes Johnson