At Neighborhood Playhouse, Stephanie Courtney came to understand she would never give up on the idea of being an actor. “That’s when I also realized that I was going to have a bunch of survival jobs and I would have to get comfortable with being fired a lot,” she wrote for Cosmopolitan. She wasn’t afraid to get down to it. She quickly found a job waiting tables, though it was short-lived. “I am a terrible waitress,” she admitted.
Courtney then made a living working at an Italian grocery store and later answering the phone at a brokerage firm. “From then on, it was lots of temping and lots of catering for many, many years,” she detailed. Courtney later saw that stage acting wasn’t the only way to fulfill her passion. So she turned her focus to comedic work and moved to Los Angeles to pursue it in 1998. To accomplish that new goal, she began starring in commercials.
In 1999, Courtney earned a spot in a Bud Light Super Bowl ad. “I was like, ‘I’ll quit all my day jobs!’ And then that dried up, and then I had to call back to all my day jobs,” she told Cleveland.com in 2009. Commercials continued to help Courtney pursue her dreams, with spots in ads from Skittles and Glade to Toyota. But it was hard. “I would book maybe under one commercial a year, just enough that I would keep auditioning,” she wrote for Cosmopolitan.
