Jessica produced and stars in the award-winning series, Scratch This, WINNER Best Web-Series Garden State Film Festival, Best Ensemble Cast Bilbao Seriesland & NJ Webfest. Jessica’s dark comedy short, Wicked Image, screened at Lighthouse Film Festival, WINNER Best Short Short Comedy at Cutting Room International Film Festival and Best Screenplay Hang Onto Your Shorts. She acts and co-produced, We are the Prototypes, World Premiere at Dances with Films, Dragon-Con (Audience Choice Award), and Garden State Film Festival. Returned to Dances with Films with another short Dance Till Dawn.
Jessica is the actress / writer of the acclaimed one-woman show, BETTE DAVIS AIN'T FOR SISSIES directed by Drama Desk Award Winning Karen Carpenter. She had her international debut at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and had two successful 4-week runs in Chicago. Jessica has performed the show over 350 times in 15 states and 3 countries.
Jessica feature film script, BETTE, based off her solo show, was a finalist for ScreenCraft, Top 10% Nicholls Fellowship, Finalist for Scriptapalooza 2020.
Jessica studies with Geoffrey Blake at The Working Actors Studio and has studied improv at UCB and The PIT. Jessica is a certified personal trainer and holds her Real Estate License. Jessica is a dog mom to Wynnie the Wheaten Terrier. When not acting you can find Jessica at the beach surfing.
Alan Mercer: Jessica, you’ve been a working actress for a minute, and you have played a lot of different roles. Do you have a favorite?
Jessica Sherr: I had a fun opportunity to audition for a TV show, but I got the audition late, so I had other auditions to do, and I didn’t get to the self-tape until midnight, and I was so tired. We did a self-tape because I was in New York and the show was in New Orleans. I only taped it once and I ended up getting the role for a show called ‘Claws’ so I was flown down there to do the show. It’s funny to me to see how tired I was in my self-tape, but it was a great experience, so that’s a favorite.
AM: Is it easy to get neurotic about an audition tape?
JS: Yes, you can get too picky about it. Sometimes you get the best results when you just let go. They always say you start booking work when you stop acting.
AM: What made you want to start self-producing?
JS: I started self-producing because I wanted to do my own work. In 2019 I ended up raising money with two other women. We raised enough money to do a web series. We filmed in the Hamptons in 2019 and edited through 2020. We just started doing the festival circuit and it’s so exciting to see a project you have started from the very beginning to now. We just won a few awards for it, which makes us feel better. We got an award at the Garden State Film Festival for the Best Web Series.
AM: Let’s talk about your incredible stage show, ‘Bette Davis Ain’t For Sissies’ and how that was born.
JS: I wasn’t a Bette Davis fan at all. I knew so little about her that it’s uncanny I’m doing this now. It doesn’t make sense to me. I was in New York in 2008, and someone dared me to write a solo show and I was like whatever. This dare was serious. I was told if I really wanted to be something in New York I had to do a solo show. I decided I would take on the challenge and it just so happened that people were constantly stopping me in the subway and telling me I looked like a young Bette Davis. I wondered who this Bette person was. I didn’t even know to any extent who she was.
AM: That is so wild.
JS: Then I looked at photos of her and I thought I looked like her a little bit. I guess it was the eyes. It kept happening that people would comment on it so I thought I would look her up and get a better sense of who she was. When I did look her up, I was so impressed by Bette. Her life was so interesting. I put her in the back of my mind as someone very cool.
AM: How did she make it to the front of your mind?
JS: I was taking a class where I had to imitate a famous person and I was going to do Lucile Ball since I am a funny redhead, but then this Bette thing was bubbling in my mind. I read her book and I became fascinated by how smart she was and what a trailblazer she was, so I decided to do this Bette person as an exercise. The person running the class decided they were all good and wanted to turn them into solo shows that will run off off off Broadway. Oh my gosh, here’s the solo show I was dared to do. The guy that dared me came to see it and it just kept going.
AM: This is such a cool story.
JS: This uncanny dare had turned into the excitement of creating a character and learning more about the excitement of Bette’s life is really why I keep doing it. I kept learning more about her and the world keeps changing and things that she said years ago are making sense again and more than they have ever made sense. In a way, I’ve grown with the show and the show has grown with the times. I won’t give up like Bette Davis won’t. Every time I think of giving up an amazing booking or something crazy will happen. It feels like Bette is giving me breadcrumbs that I am following.
AM: I love that! You’ve done this show in some really cool places.
JS: I had the opportunity to go to Scotland to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, so I sent my script to the Bette Davis Estate. A lady named Kathryn Sermak called me on a Sunday and told me they liked the script. She said she could tell I worked very hard on it. She invited me to come over if I ever had any questions, so I did go to Los Angeles and I sat with her. She was Bette Davis’s assistant for the last ten years of her life.
AM: That was someone important to meet and get approval from.
JS: At the end of that meeting she gave me a pair of Bette’s gloves, handkerchief, and scarf to wear in the show. Now I can’t give up. So, I took the show to Scotland and that was the first time I performed the show in front of not friends. I did 25 shows back-to-back, and it was exhausting, but I was getting my stride. People were coming to the show, and they were loving it. I could tell the show had something. People were coming back and staying after and talking to me. Two days before the festival ended an audience member said they knew someone at the St. James Theater in London and were calling them and that I should go to London, and I did. They brought me to London as a special engagement and I did the show there before I came back to America.
AM: I did already watch the show on Broadway on Demand and it was awesome!
JS: Did you see it on demand? Oh my gosh! Thank you.
AM: Did I notice you make Bette more intense and extreme as the show progresses?
JS: Yes, I did that purposefully because I originally wrote the show for 60 minutes. I didn’t have the remaining part that you saw online. Over time, I realized I was missing that. I had to show why she turned into that. She was young and plucky when she went to Hollywood, but Hollywood changed her. She got saucy and drank more and smoked more. I think if she had stayed in the theater world, she would have been a completely different person. I do that to show the audience that she was a great actress, but it came at a cost.
AM: You did an amazing job writing the show chronologically.
JS: Everything is pretty much how it went. There were a few things we had to push together so it would make more dramatic sense. I had to choose what not to include. There are so many moments in her life.
AM: Do people ask you to imitate her now?
JS: Yes. People don’t believe I do a show about her until I go ‘into Bette’ and they see the difference. My personality as Jessica is different than Bette, of course. The biggest thing I have to play against is that I don’t play Bette as a drunk drag queen. There are people who expect me to do that version and I tell them, “This is high art.” I’m in a theater doing my show. This is a piece where you go on a journey.
AM: What did Kathryn Sermak think?
JS: Kathryn told me something so poignant when I met her in Los Angeles, and it really helped me understand something. She told me, “Fans get mixed up. Most of Bette’s roles were these terrible murderous characters. The real Bette was so kind, and she was such a nice person. If you went to her home, she would be gracious and she loved giving gifts. Make sure you don’t just see one side of Bette.”
AM: That was sage advice.
JK: For a while, like when I went to Edinburgh, the show was all about the star, Bette Davis, but at the talkbacks after the shows, people were asking about the other part of her life, and I thought that would be interesting. I must add that. She became a fully realized character. She becomes older in the show. You see the four failed marriages and all of that happening on stage.
AM: It’s amazing that you didn’t know much or anything about Bette Davis and now you wrote and perform an award-winning show about her. Do you like her now?
JS: Yes! I very much admire her for how strong she was and how she was able to stand up for what she believed in, truthfully and honestly.
AM: Do you apply some of her strength to your life now?
JS: Yes, it’s interesting now in my own life, I’ve started to take a larger step for the kinds of roles I want to play. I have the ability to self-produce and I’m good at it, so I can produce films myself. I have a film called ‘Wicked Image’ where I play Satine, AKA Satan. It’s a female version of Satan and she is a woman of power who is making certain choices. She’s not a dinky character. I deliberately wanted to produce a film with strong female characters, and I hired friends of mine to be part of it. Yes, I am definitely adding because I don’t put up with bullshit either. All actors have to find where you can bend but remain strongly confident. That’s what Bette has taught me. I would not be who I am today if it wasn’t for her own confidence and being as badass as she is. I learned that from her. She spoke up for herself. She had a career.
AM: She became a legend.
JS: Literally, a legend.
