By: Jaxon Lee

It’s hard to keep track of Camille Solari’s exact location. The day we talked, she’d just landed from New Zealand, though her shoes were still dusty from a film set in Los Angeles—and somewhere in between, she’d been performing stand-up in Sri Lanka, the first woman ever to headline there, to boot.

There’s no itinerary taped to her fridge—she doesn’t even have a fridge in one permanent place. Instead, there’s this rolling momentum, like she’s chasing a story that’s always moving faster than she can type it.

“You can’t live life like a checklist,” she says. “It’s more like improv. You listen, you react, you see where it goes—and then sometimes you step in dog****.”

That philosophy runs through her work. Call her a comedian, and you’re not wrong, but it’s a label that barely covers the spread. She writes and directs children’s television. She’s acted in indie films and thrillers and plays the comedic mom in her own series. She composes songs. She’s toured 35 countries. Oh, and at one point, her face was plastered across 20,000 billboards for a jeans campaign—a sentence she drops like it’s no big deal.

“It was weird,” she admits. “I’d be in some random city and—boom—there’s my butt three stories high. And now I’m like, wow, my butt is possibly that fat now.”

The Accidental Comedian

Her career in comedy didn’t come with a big “this is the moment” sign. She was blogging, making fun of high fashion’s absurdity with her site Glam Tip for Broke Ass Chicks, when a few friends dared her to try stand-up. She didn’t start small. She walked onto The Arsenio Hall Show visibly eight months pregnant. The crowd roared—not just at the jokes, but at the sheer audacity.

That appearance cracked something open. Suddenly she was on tour, performing in places where no woman had ever headlined before. In one venue, someone in the audience gifted her a strange fruit she still can’t name—but gladly ate. In another, she ended up on a morning radio show trying to explain why she told a joke about bathroom plumbing in front of a prime minister’s cousin—and of course getting heckled by a stray cat during a sold-out show in the Philippines.

“I also headlined in Jordan,” she adds. “I was the first woman ever to headline there, as well as Sri Lanka.”

“That’s the thing,” she says. “You can’t plan the weirdest moments—they just find you. The most golden moments have been performing for remote audiences who have never experienced live comedy, from Jordan to Cebu.”

Family on Camera

Then there’s Charlie TV, which started as a family project and morphed into a Guinness-worthy phenomenon. Her daughter Charlie Dean plays herself; the show’s been running since 2015, meaning viewers literally watched her grow up season by season. Her younger daughter, Blade, joined later, along with their Boston Terrier—aka Rocky Balboa—who apparently steals more scenes than any human cast member.

To this day, Charlie and Blade hold the legendary title of being the youngest actresses in television history to star in their own series—with ten seasons to prove it.

It’s funny, but it’s not just funny. There’s music—songs Camille co-writes and records. One, Don’t Pop My Bubble, won a stack of international awards. She didn’t write it chasing accolades; she wrote it with Charlie, as a way to lift her spirits after bullying, so she’d have something cheerful to sing in the mornings.

Her husband makes cameo appearances too, usually without warning. “He’s a mathematician, so half the time I think he’s just wandering through the set thinking about algorithms,” she jokes. (Fun fact: he’s also a legendary Catan World Champion.)

The Patchwork of a Career

In the past decade, she’s zigzagged between platforms and genres: Amazon Prime. Netflix. Apple TV. Independent films. Stage productions. A gritty short film one month, a bright children’s series the next. The common thread? An edge, a burst of color, and a love of retro production design.

There’s no clean, vertical climb—more like a spiral staircase with unexpected landings.

“I get itchy if I stay in one lane,” she says. “Comedy keeps me sharp. Drama keeps me honest. And dark comedy leaning toward thriller—that’s my happy place. Then there’s the musical aspect of my productions. That’s when I truly lose myself—creating music, choosing tracks. That keeps me playful. And travel—well, that just keeps me awake.”

She recalls the humid backstage of a theatre in Manila, the faded curtain cords in an Amman comedy club, the way the air felt before a storm rolled over Auckland. She remembers the smell of coffee in a greenroom in Colombo more vividly than the script she performed that night, and the spirit of the city in Jordan.

She’s fluent in French, holds citizenship in both the U.S. and Canada, and says living in New Zealand part-time changes her brain “like adjusting the lens on a camera you didn’t realize was out of focus.”

The Biopic

What Solari is doing now feels like the culmination of everything that came before. After writing and directing the experimental feature Double Blade—shot entirely in New Zealand and honored with awards at the Sicilian Film Festival and beyond—she found herself ready for the ultimate project. Double Blade, which she filmed largely on her own, became both a proving ground and a launchpad. “That film taught me I could trust my instincts completely,” she says.

Now, Solari is channeling that creative momentum into her most ambitious work yet: a major feature biopic about Stacey Lannert, based on her critically acclaimed and award-winning memoir Redemption. The film isn’t just a biopic—it’s a musical, pulling together Solari’s longstanding love of storytelling through both film and music. With dozens of awards already for her music videos, and a career of writing and producing television that often folds in musical elements, the project feels not only daring, but inevitable.

There’s no manufactured myth to her trajectory—no sleekly engineered narrative. “Every job leads to something else, even if I can’t see how yet,” Solari reflects. “Sometimes it’s a straight line, sometimes it’s just a funny story.” Her work carries that same uncalculated quality—surprising not because it’s forced, but because it feels alive, evolving, and deeply authentic.

And when she talks about the future, she lights up. “I love filming in New Zealand,” she says, recalling projects from her stand-up special Hello New Zealand, My Life in Pink (Comedy Dynamics) to the television special Kiwis Coming Home for ThreeNow. She’s just as at home in Canada, where she shot the comedy series Lost in Regina, about a pregnant Los Angeles comedian who finds herself stranded after an emergency landing. “I love filming in both of those countries—they share a similar spirit, and both feel like home to me.”

Whatever she takes on next, one thing is certain: with Camille Solari, it will never be boring.

From the set of Hello New Zealand, My Life in Pink, Camille Solari leans fully into her trademark boldness. Draped in layers of feathered pink with a vintage microphone in hand, she embodies the playful, extravagant aesthetic that runs through the special. Produced with Comedy Dynamics, the show blends sharp stand-up with a theatrical flair—part comedy, part spectacle—true to Solari’s style of turning performance into a living work of art.