Sometimes it’s a surprise to learn that a young, up-and-coming performer is the progeny of an established actor — like Hannah Einbinder and Spike Einbinder and their mom, Laraine Newman, or Odessa A’zion and her mom, Pamela Adlon. But with rising star Gus Birney, there is absolutely no confusion whatsoever that she is the daughter of Jewish actress Constance Shulman. (Just look at their shared punim!)
So before Gus completely blows up, here are 18 things to know about her.
1. Gus was born on July 27, 1999.
2. She’s a Leo!
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3. Her full name is Augusta.
4. Gus’ parents are actors Reed Birney and, as previously established, Constance Shulman!
Her father has appeared in “The Menu,” “Gossip Girl,” “The Americans” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actor in a play. Meanwhile, her mother is best known as voicing Patty Mayonnaise in “Doug” and playing Yoga Jones in “Orange Is the New Black,” for which she received three SAG awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.
5. Here’s what Gus has said about growing up with parents who are performers:
“People ask me all the time what it’s like to come from a family of actors. To be perfectly honest the least interesting thing about my parents is the fact that they’re actors,” she wrote on Instagram in 2025. “Anyone whose had the very lucky privilege of meeting them knows that. They are multi-faceted complicated curious hilarious full of life human beings. Who also sometimes yell at me to be less self-involved.”
6. It’s unclear whether Gus identifies as Jewish. However, her mother was raised Jewish and grew up in Johnson City, Tennessee. “Johnson City is a very Appalachia, very hillbilly area,” Constance once said in an interview with the Hartford Courant. “It’s very peculiar being a Jewish girl and being surrounded by mountain people.”
Through her, Gus has Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
7. Gus decided she wanted to be an actor in middle school.
“When I was 16, I got this TV show in Canada and ended up dropping out of high school and got my GED, and my life really shifted. It’s been amazing because I really do feel like I had this idea of what my life was going to look like when I was younger, being like, ‘I’m going to go to college, and I’m going to do this,'” she explained to Glamour. “Maybe I will still go to college someday, but I really feel like the path I’m going down now feels so much more true to who I was as a little girl and what works for me.”
8. She made her film debut in 2018’s “Here and Now,” where she shared the screen with Sarah Jessica Parker.
9. She has also modeled!
10. As Jane Humphreys in “Dickinson,” Gus starred alongside Hailee Steinfeld, Anna Baryshnikov and Sophie Zucker.
11. She’s a singer, too!
12. In 2021, Gus acted in the 10th Annual Jewish Playwriting contest. She starred in Dana Leslie Goldstein’s play “Go Down, Moses.”
13. She made her Broadway debut in “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” alongside Rachel Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac.
“Doing ‘Sidney Brustein’ last year was one of the most transformative experiences of my life, not only as an actor, but as a human being,” Gus recounted to TheaterMania. “Anything after feels almost like, ‘OK, I know I can do this. I just went through something hard, and I have taught my soul how to handle going to a really dark place.'”
14. Gus starred in a 2024 production of Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s play “Our Class.” The narrative of the drama is based upon a true story of Jewish and Catholic students in Jedwabne, a town in Poland, during a pogrom in 1941.
At the time, Gus shared with writer Mark Rifkin that doing the show “is awakening something in me that I didn’t have any background knowledge about. It’s seeping into my blood; it’s awakening this anger and rage and deep sadness. I walked around knowing it existed.”
15. Gus describes herself as “a superstitious person” and “so neurotic.”
16. In Netflix’s horror show “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen,” Gus plays Portia. “She’s fabulous, deeply insecure, neurotic,” Gus said of her character on the red carpet. “When I got the description of the character it was like, ‘Portia thinks she is the star of this show. And she’s not, but she really thinks she is.’ And in my opinion, she is.”
17. “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” isn’t the first role Gus has had in a supernatural or horror project. Previously, Gus starred in “The Mist,” “Shining Vale,” “Black Rabbit” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”
“Truly, I feel like I’ve just stumbled into a lot of thriller-esque horror. That genre’s become a thing for me, and I don’t know if it’s just that I have a weird voice and a weird, interesting look,” Gus said in an interview. “What’s so fun about horror and thriller is that it keeps you on the edge of your seat in a way that more grounded genres don’t. It’s really exciting to live in that world.”
18. Gus has teased that in the future she might do a play with her mom!
