How Busy Philipps' Instagram made the actress a star

Busy Philipps’s Instagram bio reads simply, “it’s all happening” — and currently it is.

The 39-year-old multi-hyphenate’s first memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little, was released yesterday morning; it is already an Amazon bestseller. Her chat show, Busy Tonight — the name is a gift — will start a week on Sunday on E!, marking her initiation into the small, exclusive coven of women who host talk shows on major US networks (Philipps makes it five).

The show will go out four nights a week. In the past few days she’s been doing her opposition research, appearing on Colbert and Good Morning America, both of which have an average viewership of four million an episode. Philipps has 1.3 million followers on Instagram and 330k on Twitter. Philipps is Busy — this is what you need to know about the woman of the moment.

Radical honesty

Philipps has been in the business since her 20s, when she got the role of Kim Kelly, an archetypal bad-girl-with-hidden-depths, in cult teen drama Freaks and Geeks. She followed this with a long-term role as the tortured Audrey Liddell in Dawson’s Creek (in typical teen-drama style, she played a teen despite being in her early twenties); and then a role as the thirtysomething Laurie Keller in the naughty, knowing Cougar Town.

But Philipps’s best screentime has been on the (very) small screen. It is via Instagram that she has kick-started her career for Hollywood’s new moment — one that is calling out for authentic, unashamed and complicated women. Her Instagram feed is a patchwork of highs and lows: by turns kitsch, glossy, ugly and unstripped. Through the Stories feature she micro-broadcasts her day, be it the scalpels hovering as she undergoes nasal surgery; the red carpet with Kim Kardashian; flyaways plastered to her forehead after a SoulCycle class or smoothing her eye bags with manicured nails.

Memorably, she had a front-row seat (with best mate Michelle Williams) at the Oscars when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly awarded La La Land the Best Picture award; her centre-of-the-storm dispatch was watched by hundreds of thousands.

“With Instagram I get to create content for myself and entertain in a way that I’ve never been able or allowed to do,” she told Porter magazine this month. “It just didn’t occur to me that that was going to be an opportunity.”

Philipps is not the first creative female to show that women contain inconsistencies, that they can be glamorous one minute, grotesque the next (see also Chrissy Teigen or Lena Dunham). But she is an especially open, charismatic archetype of the form, a women who collapses myths about perfection and victimhood, who commands an influential platform that is about to get bigger.

Book club

Aptly, the cover of Philipps’s memoir is Instagram bait: the star wears a Pepto Bismol suit, pussy-bow blouse and gold hoop earrings the size of curtain rings. It is bold, gutsy, pretty, but with an edge — and has nothing on the raw impact of the stories. She recounts her co-star James Franco hitting her on the set of Freaks and Geeks; she recalls the time she met the Pope, at the Vatican, just after having an abortion. She talks about anxiety, postnatal depression, body-shaming and grief. She writes about being raped at 14, a story that she shared in brief on Instagram during the Kavanaugh testimony. “This is me at 14,” she wrote on Instagram alongside a school photo. “The age I was raped. It’s taken me 25 years to say those words. I can’t imagine what Dr Ford is feeling right now.” She spoke about this experience with chat-show host Ellen DeGeneres, broadcasting her trauma into almost four million households in the US.

In the book Philipps explains that encounters with Harvey Weinstein were an experience in toxic male power. “Listening to Harvey Weinstein tell me what model he was currently having a relationship with, obviously not knowing the full extent of his depravity and horribleness. As he would casually objectify whatever woman it was, tell me that he f***ed her, I would nod and mumble, ‘Oh. Cool. She’s beautiful.’ And then I would try to lose him as fast as I could.” She wrote the book in a year and has called it “one of the most challenging years of my life”.

Though true to the tenor of her Instagram posts, there are also anecdotes to make you cackle: from the gawky teen years in Arizona, via her early 20s on the febrile sets of teen dramas and on to motherhood catastrophes.

“Judy Blume meets Karl Ove Knausgaard meets one brave woman from Arizona,” recommends the film-maker Miranda July. “Honest, funny, intimate and well observed by a person who has observed some s**t,” writes her friend, the comedian Tina Fey.

This is 40

Multi-hyphenates are usually in their 20s; Philipps is approaching 40. She is a mother of two — Birdie is 10 and Cricket is five (Philipps’s husband is the screenwriter Marc Silverstein). She has weathered her own tempests but she is not insecure or self-deprecating, she doesn’t apologise, nor does she try to make herself smaller. With age comes calm.

Plus, her honesty has liberated her —unlike a regular multi-hyphenate, grit is rolled into the brand. Her career has been a slow burner: she was always the solid supporting cast member but never the star. It’s taken until her fourth decade to have her breakout moment; this pace mirrors reality, it replicates how real women’s careers move.

She has been candid about not being “Hollywood beautiful” enough to be the centre of any show, about the costume department swooning over her svelte co-star Katie Holmes, and in the same breath talking about how to cover up her body or mask her moles.

“[Photo shoots] weren’t ever a place where I felt supported, or like people wanted to take a great picture of me that looked like me,” she has said. “I always felt like they wanted me to look like Tara Reid.”

Girl gang

Philipps’s best friend is Michelle Williams — the pair have called each other “soulmates”. They met as twenty-somethings on the set of Dawson’s Creek; they have carried each other through relationships, motherhood and career stops and starts.

Philipps has said it was Williams who convinced her to end an emotional affair that was savaging her marriage; Philipps has spoken about the trauma of watching Williams grieve after the death of Heath Ledger, the father of Williams’s daughter Matilda.

Other friends include the actress Lizzie Caplan, who is the godmother of Philipps’s daughter, Birdie, actress Kerry Washington and the comedian Tina Fey. This girl gang has been very present on the book tour — Fey and entrepreneur and cult podcaster Jen Gotch have compered events, while Williams was in the audience at a reading in Brooklyn this week.

Though like many women, sisterhood was something Philipps learned via unpleasant relationships with men. “[I used to want to be] a girl who could take it and hang with the guys, and that usually meant being objectified, occasionally being bullied and having to be the one who is able to laugh off the joke at my own expense,” she has said. “I hit a point maybe four or five years ago after the birth of Cricks where I was like, ‘F*** this, I’m not doing it any more.’”

Now in her 40s, Philipps is determined to surround herself with women: her talk show will employ a cast of women and feature regular female guests. She will use her new platform to give other women one too.

Philipps has quipped, boldly, that she was destined “to be a women in late-night TV”. This is her moment.