Liza Koshy began her acting career nearly a decade ago, debuting in Boo! A Madea Halloween before appearing in the dance flick Work It, the thriller Cat Person, and the nostalgic comedy Good Burger 2. This year alone, she’s in three films: the Hulu comedy Summer of 69, a voice role in Netflix’s hit KPop Demon Hunters, and the latest Naked Gun movie. So, will people finally see Koshy as an actor rather than a YouTuber?
She’s done worrying about that.
On the latest episode of the Marie Claire podcast “Nice Talk”, Koshy opens up to editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike about her acting career and the imposter syndrome she battled when transitioning from social media sensation to film and TV star.
“I can't depend on somebody else's perception to be my definition of myself,” Koshy says. “And at one point, I allowed that perception to be my definition, and that perception was ‘just an influencer.’”
Now 29, Koshy feels “the world is catching up” to the fact that she’s an actor, not a YouTuber—a platform she stopped posting to four years ago, leaving 16.7 million followers to process her pivot. While audiences have been getting to know her in a new light, she’s had to adjust her own view of herself, too.
“Although I've been acting since 2015, since Tyler Perry gave me my first role in Boo! A Madea Halloween. Although I've been acting consistently since, and I've had movies like Family Affair and Work It—which was my utmost pride and joy with Sabrina Carpenter in a dance movie, like, that was summer camp for me—in my soul, there is a neutral feeling in my gut when I say ‘I'm an actor.’ And I feel so proud to be able to own that now fully.”
Liza Koshy at the New York premiere of The Naked Gun in July 2025.
That confidence came slowly, and not without some stinging moments.
“I totally had imposter syndrome in the very beginning, and that was due to some actors being like, ‘You're only here for marketing reasons,’” Koshy says. “I had, unfortunately, someone that I was in a deep relationship with tell me that ‘you're only getting hired because you're ethnically ambiguous. You're getting hired because you're a brown woman and Cardi B is working, so you kind of look like her, and you're gonna work, too’ … It just hurt, and it makes you feel like, oh, my value’s only in what I look like.”
Koshy says she no longer gives comments like that “power.” Time, experience, and relentless auditioning helped her build self-assurance.
“I think auditioning, hearing ‘no, no, no, no, no, no’ and just hearing instead, ‘go, go, go, go, keep going, girl’ …. and you just keep going,” she explains. “You do the jobs that excite you, and then you meet people that are excited by you. And then you continue to foster a creative community that taps into each other.”
For more from Koshy—including how she started her content creation career as a teen, why she decided to quit YouTube, and why she has an email account for a fake assistant—check out this week's installment of "Nice Talk". The episode is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.