Despite playing the often monstrously narcissistic Brooke Dubek on the criminally underrated comedy series The Other Two, Heléne Yorke finds herself able to relate to her character more than she would like to admit.
In this bonus episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Yorke previews Season 3 of the show, which returned on HBO Max this week, and reveals how she ended up on one of the funniest shows on TV. She also shares hilarious stories about making the leap from Broadway to the screen on shows like Louie, 30 Rock, and High Maintenance and recalls that time she almost pooped her pants on stage as Glinda in Wicked.
When I tell Yorke how excited I am that her show is finally back for its third season, she replies, “I agree,” before revealing that when she was watching The White Lotus and HBO Max suggested The Other Two as “more like this,” she decided to revisit the early episodes. “I was like, ‘Don’t mind if I do!’” Aside from the Molly Shannon connection, Yorke thinks the two shows share an affinity for “bizarre, pathetic, completely selfish people.”
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The Other Two premiered on Comedy Central in 2019 before ultimately making the move to HBO Max for its subsequent seasons. “I feel like I’ve lived three lifetimes since then,” Yorke says, noting that since Season 2 aired in 2021, she “broke up with one boyfriend, met a new one, married him, and made a full human being.” Her pregnancy actually ended up delaying the start of filming for Season 3 by several months.
“And Brooke, meanwhile, has made absolutely no life leaps,” she jokes of her character. “I’m just kidding. There’s a lot going on.”
Brooke’s “journey” in Season 3 is about trying to find a way to “do good” in the world after she realizes everyone in her life reoriented their priorities during the pandemic—including her fiancé Lance (the ludicrously sincere Josh Segarra)—who gave up being a terrible shoe designer to become a nurse. “He did the full pivot to become the greatest person alive, and I’m like, ‘Goddammit!’”
The Other Two may not be the most popular show on streaming, but among a certain crowd of Hollywood insiders, its return after an extended hiatus is being met with rapturous adoration. “The fact that industry people, insiders, comedians that I respect, writers I respect, really love and respond to the show, I think, is one of the cool things about the show,” Yorke tells me. “It feels like being in this little niche club or something.”
Yorke started out as a musical theater actress before making the leap to TV with small roles on comedies like 30 Rock and Louie, in which she played a character named “Hot Girl.” She calls the move “doing an Andrew Rannells,” after the Book of Mormon star who landed his breakout TV role on HBO’s Girls.
She says it was “really hard to be taken seriously” as someone who could do on-camera work, and it wasn’t until she realized she could relax and essentially be herself on screen that she finally started to get jobs. “Then I look at someone like Jeremy Strong on Succession, who’s doing so much more than just being himself and saying words,” she adds with a laugh.
Given all of the turmoil at what is now called Warner Bros. Discovery over the past several months, the future of The Other Two is anything but certain. “We don’t know. We have no idea,” Yorke says. “Hopefully people will watch the season. I mean, god knows I would love to do a fourth season of this. It’s not often you get a job like this.”
Then, Yorke offers up an industry insider throwaway line that would feel at home on The Other Two: “I heard Zaslav likes our show.”
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to ‘The Last Laugh’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
