With her new Daily Show gig, an NBC sitcom, and a book, Suck It, Wonder Woman!, Olivia Munn's carefully-crafted image as geek sex symbol is about to get a bigger audience than ever. Will she win over the ladies too?
In new interviews with The Daily Beast and EW.com, Munn comes off as a potty-mouthed provocateur whose appeal seems targeted to what she thinks men want. She already has a massive following on the Internet based on her hosting of Attack Of The Show on G4. Here's what she says about her Internet fame:
"At first it was like an old man luring in little girls with candy... You go in and it's like, ‘Oh, candy! They're saying nice things! And then it's like, ‘Oh, God! Anally raped. That's not what I wanted. I just wanted the candy. And I got candy, but oh, it's not worth it."
That said, she's grateful to her fans:
"You know what hit me yesterday?" she asked rhetorically. "I've never in my life had anyone say that they would stand up for me and defend me. My mother is the best now but my ex-stepfather was terrible. We lived in hell growing up and my mom was in her own kind of hell, so it was hard for her… but she couldn't stand up for me. I moved around a lot so I never had that one best friend that would stand up either. The first time in my life I've felt true support is from my fans and I would never betray them."
The sense that her looks may have given her a pass to "cut the line" when it comes to say, gaming or comedy, is obliquely addressed here:
Jon Pollack, an executive producer on Perfect Couples, said Munn's name was given to him by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, with whom he had worked as a consulting producer on 30 Rock. "What's great about Olivia's comedy is that she really understands herself and she just goes for it. She's not self-conscious or afraid of being goofy, even though she's obviously beautiful. She probably doesn't even need to work as hard because of that and yet there's no one more driven."
A Daily Show producer says he didn't know she was on the cover of Playboy:
"We're stuck in a hard news cycle and we're nerdy," Albanese said. "If she was on the cover of The Economist, we would have been like, 'Yes! Of course!'"
But judging from our readers' response to the announcement last week, there are plenty of fellow geek girls that are less enthused. A sampling of several different comments:
I've always felt like she's basically like a girl who tells horribly sexist jokes around guys to make them like her because she's totally like them, not like all those other women that they have troubles with!
Her skits on AotS are almost always about her looks, her being stupid, or her doing something like suggestively stuffing hot dogs in her mouth. She does degrading things voluntarily because it makes her popular.
...
She has made a name for herself by being that girl that says, "I'm a girl and I think it's funny" whenever one of her colleagues on Attack of the Show says something ridiculously misogynistic.
...
Entertainment world, please stop trying to convince me that Olivia Munn is funny/awesome/Queen of the Nerds.
Munn does seem to want to enable, or even encourage, a certain sort of humor. She tells The Daily Beast,
"In the first 10 minutes of my meeting with Jon, I made some kind of Holocaust joke-and by the way? It's always too soon-and he died laughing. He was like, ‘Wow, you open up with the Holocaust?'" Munn recalled. "I said, ‘No, no, it's cool. I dated a Jewish guy!'" (That would be actor Bryan Greenberg of HBO's How to Make It in America.)
"See I date different guys of different religions and races so I can always make the joke," she continued. "I date the blacks, I date the Mexicans. I date 'em all for comedy. You can't buy that kind of gold. Having sex with a guy once is worth it."
And then there's this video of Munn in a French maid costume, jumping into a giant whipped cream pie.
Video Game - E3 2010 - Comedy
By the way, she's generally Team Pie, it seems.
Olivia Munn Talks About Her New Daily Show Gig [EW]
Olivia Munn: From Playboy Pinup To The Daily Show [Daily Beast]