Chelsea Peretti

Chelsea Vanessa Peretti is a stand-up comedian, television writer and actor who portrayed Gina Linetti on the Brooklyn Nine-Nine television series until Season Six. She was a recurring guest star for the last two seasons of the show.

Biography

She is of Jewish and Italian descent. She is married to actor/comedian Jordan Peele.^[1] They have one child who she was pregnant with during the filming of Season Four of the Brooklyn Nine-Nine television series.^[2] Her brother, Jonah Peretti, founded Buzzfeed and co-founded The Huffington Post.

Chelsea was born and raised in Oakland, California where she attended the same school and classes as co-star Andy Samberg.^[3]^[4]

Chelsea graduated from Barnard College in New York, in 2000.

Prior to Brooklyn Nine-Nine

In 2001, Chelsea and her brother co-created a satire website BlackPeopleLoveUs.com. A picture of Chelsea can be seen at the bottom of the homepage. Chelsea helped form a comedy troupe in New York called Variety SHAC in 2004. Together with Andrea Rosen, Heather Lawless and Shonali Bhowmik, she created monthly short comedy films. ^[5]

She has written for many publications including The Village Voice, Details, Playgirl and The Huffington Post.

In 2008, Chelsea became a commentator on truTV's The World's Dumbest. From there she was cast in many small roles on shows such as Louie and The Sarah Silverman Program.

She is the voice of Lori Williams-Jones in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV.

The same year she was also cast as the voice of multiple characters on the Adult Swim show China, IL, and released a stand-up special for Comedy Central Presents. A year later, she launched a call-in podcast titled Call Chelsea Peretti. In 2013, she began writing and appearing as multiple characters in the Comedy Central sketch show, The Kroll Show.

Getting to Brooklyn Nine-Nine

In 2011, Chelsea was hired by Dan Goor and co-creator Michael Schur as a writer for their previous television show, Parks and Recreation.^[6]Dan Goor has said on multiple occasions that he knew if he was going to create a show, Chelsea would have to be in it. He and Schur found her to be one of the funniest people they've ever met.

The part of Megan,^[7] a cop who was fiery and red-headed,^[8] was the part Mike and Dan originally had her audition for. The casting director noted that Chelsea Peretti didn't fit the Megan character mainly because she didn't seem like a cop.^[9] From there they created the character Gina Linetti, whose name was a rhyming gag on the actress's name. She was the civilian administrator who embodied a trait that Dan Goor picked up on in the Parks and Recreation writer's room. Nobody could put their finger on why she was as hilarious as she was.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Not only was the character Gina Linetti created and named after Chelsea Peretti but she herself influenced the character's personality throughout the show's entirety.

2015 Chelsea Seth Meyers — Chelsea Peretti telling a story on Seth Meyers that parallels Gina Linetti's passion for Rihanna

2016 - 2017 Pregnancy

The show's writers chose to hide the first stages of her pregnancy throughout Season 4 until Episode 21, The Bank Job when she was roughly 6 months pregnant. Her character's pregnancy was written so that it mimicked the timeline of her own which explained her absence in the first ten episodes of Season Five. The fourth season wrapped on March 10, 2017 and her child was born three months later.

Netflix released her stand-up special Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats in 2014. She appeared in Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone's 2016 film, Popstar: Never Stop Stopping