If you see someone who maybe kind of looks like Brooke from “The Other Two,” please go up and say hi. No, it’s not annoying — quite on the contrary, the actress who portrays her, Heléne Yorke, promises.
“I wish I did more, which is a very disgusting answer to give you,” she says of getting recognized in New York. “Because I absolutely love it. Probably if I became as big as, like, Taylor Swift it would get very old, but I don’t see that happening for me.”
“The Other Two” follows two siblings in their late 20s/early 30s whose 13-year-old brother becomes an overnight celebrity when a pop song he uploads becomes a viral sensation. (Their mom is played by Molly Shannon, who becomes a central figure of the second season.) The older siblings, Brooke and Cary, are each trying to make it in New York and have had less success, safe to say, than their little brother.
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The first season ran on Comedy Central, but when season two premiered earlier this fall — on HBO Max — suddenly it was everywhere. It’s that I-can’t-believe-people-like-our-show feeling that Yorke feels every time someone comes up to her.
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“Getting recognized for this show just feels so good because it means people are watching it,” she says. “The first season was on Comedy Central, and it felt like we were making something really special. And it was really exciting to be on a show that I really loved, because I do.”
Yorke has just returned to Brooklyn after her honeymoon in Spain, and is slowly catching up to the fact that people are very much watching it.
“I’ve been getting texts from Molly Shannon that are like ‘Do you feel it? You can feel it right? That people are watching it? People are really watching it,’” Yorke says. “And I’m like I wish! For the last three weeks, I dropped off the face of the planet: I got married, I went to Spain, but Molly tells us the people that are talking to her about it and it’s the most insane names that you can imagine.”
Born in Canada, Yorke grew up primarily in Los Angeles. Her father sold computer software and her mom worked at a local bookstore. (They moved to the U.S. due to her father’s job and stayed once her parents fell in love with California.) Growing up, she was decidedly “not cool,” she says, and it wasn’t until “weird drama parties” that she really felt seen. After college, she immediately went to New York to try and make it on the stage.
“I drove straight to Astoria, Queens, and moved into my ex-boyfriend’s new apartment and lived on an air mattress and had no money and rode the N train into Midtown to audition for musicals,” she says. “I think about it now and I’m like ‘Oh my god, I wish I still had those guts.’”
It’s that resilience in herself that first drew her to Brooke as a character.
“I really saw myself in her in a big way. And I think that comes from living in New York for 14 years and being an actress here and carrying three audition outfits in a backpack and changing in a Starbucks bathroom and getting rejected nearly constantly, but getting back up again and having a sense of humor about the whole process, wondering how you’re going to pay for things. I think it’s that resilience and that optimism that I responded to most,” she says. “It’s interesting that people are like ‘Oh she’s this mess’ and I’m like ‘Well, but who isn’t?’”
The battle of working for years to find a role like this one, where she is texting with Shannon and running into fans on the street who connect with her work, is what makes her so believable as Brooke, and so likable both on screen and off.
“I think artists are so benefited by realizing that their voice is their greatest attribute. The idea that you model your career off of someone else, you’re never going to be served by that,” Yorke says. “It’s just so exciting and surprising to see where your own life takes you. If you had told me at 22 that this is what I’d be doing, I think I’d be pretty pumped.”