Jayma Mays

The Voice That Escaped the Mines

Jayma Mays has that look straight out of a 1950s cartoon. She was born in Grundy, a mining town in Virginia where the expected path was working at the local radio station. Her father was a miner, and she spent her afternoons at the town's radio station reading the news with a diction that already caught people's attention back then.

But the plan was never to stay in the Appalachian Mountains. She studied performing arts at Radford University and decided that her small frame and disproportionately large eyes were her best working tools.

In 2004, she landed her first television role on the series Joey.

That was the start of a run of supporting roles in which she always played the sweet girl hiding something strange. In Red Eye (2005), she worked under the direction of Wes Craven and held her own in a thriller of constant tension. Because Jayma has always known how to exploit that seeming fragility that throws the audience off.

The Obsessive Order of Emma Pillsbury

Her casting for Glee in 2009 changed the course of her career. Her portrayal of Emma Pillsbury, the school counselor with obsessive-compulsive disorder about cleanliness, put her in millions of homes every week on Fox.

She made a character who could have been an irritating caricature come across as tender and human. And she did it without relying on grand gestures, drawing only on minimal, precise body language.

Her contract with the series ended in 2015.

During those years, she balanced television with big-budget commercial films. In 2011, she starred in The Smurfs, a production that grossed more than $560 million worldwide. Despite the negative reviews of the film, her presence served as the anchor needed so that the interaction with the digital characters did not feel artificial.

Comedy as a Technical Refuge

After the musical phenomenon of Ryan Murphy, she looked for projects that would let her explore drier, less choreographed humor. In 2017, she joined the cast of Trial & Error, a parody of true-crime documentaries that is now considered a small cult gem.

There, she played prosecutor Carol Anne Keane across 23 episodes.

But her talent for physical comedy shone again in 2022 with the release of Disenchanted on Disney+. In this sequel, she played Ruby, one of the villains, sharing the screen with Amy Adams and Maya Rudolph during a shoot that took place mainly in Ireland in 2021.

Mays lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Adam Campbell, whom she met on the set of Epic Movie in 2006. In 2021, she joined the miniseries The Shrink Next Door for Apple TV+, playing Phyllis Shapiro. The estimated production budget for Disenchanted exceeded $60 million.