She Played Tennis Against The World, Then Conquered Marvel: Who IS Susie Abromeit?
Right, ladies, a question for the group chat. What do a Marvel antihero’s long suffering assistant, an Oscar winning tennis biopic, a Malcolm Gladwell protégée and a woman who’s ranked sixth in America at sport all have in common? Trick question. They’re all the same person, and her name is Susie Abromeit, and once you know her story you’ll be furious you didn’t know it sooner.
We came to her via Revamp Magazine’s recent profile, and honestly, we fell down the rabbit hole so hard we bruised. So here’s everything you need to know about the actress, podcaster, filmmaker and general life force that is Susie Abromeit. Consider this your cheat sheet.
First Things First: Where Have You Seen Her?
If you’ve binged Netflix’s Marvel shows (and if you haven’t, what are you even doing this weekend?), you’ll know her as Pam from Jessica Jones, the breakout hit starring Krysten Ritter and Carrie-Anne Moss. That was her splash role, and it opened the floodgates. Since then the CV has gotten seriously silly: recurring parts on Chicago Med, Devious Maids, One Tree Hill and Tyler Perry’s The Haves and the Have Nots, plus guest appearances in Supernatural, NCIS, Code Black, Rake and Legends of Tomorrow. Basically, if your mum watches American telly, she knows this woman.
Film-wise, she joined the cast of King Richard, the Will Smith Oscar winner about Venus and Serena Williams’ father, reporting for Deadline that she’d play a New York Times reporter. She took the villain role in The Forever Purge, which is exactly the energy we want from her, and signed a four-picture deal with GAC Family, starring in four films and executive producing two of them. Executive producing, ladies. Remember that, it matters later.
Oh, and early career highlights include appearing in a GoDaddy Super Bowl commercial and playing a female rapper in the Lionsgate film Know Thy Enemy. She also picked up a Best Actress award from the Beverly Hills Film Festival for an indie drama, and counts Sydney White, Sex Drive, Bruce Willis’s Setup and Battle: Los Angeles among her early credits. The range? Undeniable.
Wait, She Was Nearly A Professional Athlete?
This is the bit that made us spit out our iced coffee. Before any of the acting happened, Susie was a world class athlete. By sixteen, she was ranked number six in the United States as a junior tennis player. SIXTH. IN AMERICA. That earned her a full scholarship to Duke University, where she helped her team reach the number one ranking and win an NCAA title in her freshman year. She then double majored in English and Theater, because apparently being a national champion athlete wasn’t keeping her busy enough.
So the next time someone tells you sports kids can’t be creative kids, or theatre kids can’t be sporty, kindly direct them to Susie’s Wikipedia-adjacent existence. She’s the counterargument in person.
The Podcast Era, And A Very Famous Mentor
Now to what she’s up to now, because this is where it gets really interesting. As Revamp’s Amy Bell explains, Susie fell hard for podcasts back in 2017 as a listener, inspired by the meaningful, thought provoking conversations she heard, and by the accomplished friends in her own circle. Encouraged in part by her mentor, Malcolm Gladwell (yes, THE Malcolm Gladwell), she turned that inspiration into her own show, sitting down with influential figures across film, sport and culture. Her guests have included Spike Lee and Ron Howard. She describes the interviews as opportunities to learn and grow, and the lessons stick: when Olympic gold medallist skier Picabo Street appeared, Susie was struck by the patterns behind winning, the mindset, and just as much wisdom about avoiding the pitfalls of chasing what you want in life.
Reading her, we kept thinking: this is a woman who treats conversation as a competitive sport, and she’s been training her whole life. Or as she’d probably put it, more gracefully.
“Death And Friends”: The Project That Says Everything
And now the part of this story that hit us squarely in the chest. Susie recently directed, co-wrote and stars in a dark comedy short called Death and Friends, and its origin is anything but comedy. When her mother passed away, Susie and her best friend Christie Campo decided to write, act in and produce a semi autobiographical short about the 48 hours after her mother’s death. They went into production just three months after she died.
The story is based on Christie flying up to New York to help Susie through those first 48 hours she would otherwise have faced alone. The point of the film, as she tells Revamp, is that it’s really our friends who help us get through the worst moments of our lives, and that sometimes the worst moments can be turned into our most profound healing, an alchemical experience. Friendship, she says, is so much part of the ethos of how she tells stories and lives her life; she can’t imagine life without her best friends and creative partners, and she’s excited for many more years of building, creating and going through all the aspects of life together.
Grief metabolised into art, with your best friend beside you, inside three months. Ladies, if that isn’t the most Cosmo story we’ve covered this year, we’ll eat our trench coats.
Why We Can’t Stop Thinking About Her
Here at UK Cosmo we spend a lot of time celebrating women who seize the pen rather than waiting to be handed a script, and Susie is the archetypal case study. We said something similar recently when we profiled Vivian Panka, the magnetic young British actress taking on Regina George in Mean Girls: The Musical: whether you’re a Gen Z star claiming a role that looks like the girls watching you, or a multi hyphenate like Susie deciding she’ll direct, write and star rather than wait to be cast, the principle is identical. Take up the space. Write your own material. Executive produce your own life, literally.
From number six in America with a racket, to Marvel, to the director’s chair, to a podcast chatting with Spike Lee, Susie Abromeit has never once waited for permission. Frankly, we find that deeply inspiring, and mildly threatening to our own procrastination habits.
So go forth: queue up Jessica Jones, add Death and Friends to your watchlist, find her podcast, and then come back and thank us. This is your new favourite woman in Hollywood. You heard it here first.
