On the Dot

Valorie Curry didn’t grow up watching Saturday- morning cartoons or losing herself in the pages of comic books. So she describes herself as “the black sheep” of Amazon’s reboot of the offbeat superhero saga, The Tick, which debuts August 25.

“I didn’t have a great familiarity with the story,” she says. “In a way, that was a blessing because I didn’t have a reference point for the character. So she got to be new and fresh.”

A meeting with creator–executive producer Ben Edlund convinced her to take the part of Dot, sister of the Tick’s sidekick, Arthur. “Ben has great care for every person in this world. I walked away from that meeting going, ‘I don’t know what this is, but I’ll do anything with him.’”

Curry grew up in Orange County, California, the youngest of three kids. Her mom, who majored in playwriting and costuming at college while raising the family, would often bring her daughter along to rehearsals instead of taking her to daycare. That early exposure to The Crucible led to Halloween trick-or-treating as a witch — not just any witch, mind you, but a Puritan witch from Salem, Massachusetts.

Her parents had one rule: she couldn’t pursue television or film until she turned 18. As a sophomore at California State University at Fullerton, she landed the part of Jane on Veronica Mars.

“I had never been on a set before,” she recalls. “I was terrified every minute that I was going to do something wrong. I remember a lot of smiling through terror.” Her arc on the series ended in 2006, and Curry subsequently graduated with a degree in theater. After college, she formed the Coeurage Theatre Company in Los Angeles with other Fullerton grads.

Her first film credit came on The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2, while back on TV she appeared as the villainous Emma on Fox’s The Following. She had an arc on Showtime’s House of Lies and returned to the big screen last year in American Pastoral.

In addition to wrapping up the first season of The Tick, she’s busy with New York’s Fundamental Theater Project, where her husband, actor Sam Underwood, is artistic director. “Growing up with a theater background really informed me as an actor. You appreciate what everyone does,” she says. “Every aspect is equally important.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 7, 2017