Clea DuVall

Clea DuVall is an American actress, writer, and director known for But I'm a Cheerleader (2000), the cult-classic queer comedy in which she played Graham, a sardonic fellow camper at a conversion-therapy program, as well as The Faculty (1998), Heroes (2006), and Veep (2012), where she played Marjorie, the deadpan partner of Catherine Meyer. Openly lesbian, though intensely private for many years, she made her directorial debut with The Intervention (2016), in which she also starred as one half of a lesbian couple, and then wrote and directed Happiest Season (2020), the lesbian holiday romantic comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis that became one of the most commercially successful explicitly lesbian films Hollywood had produced. DuVall has spoken about writing the film from a deeply personal place — its closeting plot draws on her own experiences — and about the scarcity of queer women's stories at the studio level.