Maude Apatow is an American actress. The daughter of filmmaker Judd Apatow and actress Leslie Mann, she began her career playing the daughter of her mother's characters in her father's films Knocked Up, Funny People, and This Is 40. Apatow gained further recognition for her roles in the films Other People, The House of Tomorrow, Assassination Nation, and The King of Staten Island. She also starred in the HBOdrama seriesEuphoria and the Netflix miniseries Hollywood.
Apatow began acting at the age of seven with a role in her father Judd Apatow's 2005 comedy filmThe 40-Year-Old Virgin, though her scenes ultimately did not make the film's final cut. She then appeared in the 2007 filmKnocked Up, which was also written, produced, and directed by her father. She and her younger sister Iris Apatow played Sadie and Charlotte, respectively, the daughters of their real-life mother Leslie Mann's character. She again appeared alongside her sister as the daughter of Mann's character in her father's 2009 filmFunny People, playing the role of Mable. Apatow reprised her Knocked Up role in the 2012 spin-off sequel This Is 40, starring Mann and Paul Rudd's characters. For her performance in the film as Sadie, Apatow was nominated for the 2012 Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Young Actress and the 2013 Young Artist Award for Best Performance in a Feature Film - Supporting Young Actress. After joining Twitter, Apatow was noted to have a large online following, which helped her become a contributor to Zooey Deschanel's website Hello Giggles as a writer and interviewer. Her work on the site as well as her acting roles earned her a spot on the Forbes30 Under 30 list in 2012. Apatow's Twitter account was named one of the "Best Twitter Feeds of 2013" by Time magazine. In 2015, Apatow played an audience member in the film Pitch Perfect 2. That same year, she also recurred in the fourth season of the HBO comedy series Girls as Cleo. She appeared in three episodes of the series, which was executive produced by her father.
2016–present: Breakthrough
Apatow appeared as Alexandra Mulcahey in the 2016 comedy-drama filmOther People, which was her first large role in a film not involving her father. In 2017, she played the role of Meredith Whitcomb in the film The House of Tomorrow and made her directorial debut with the short filmDon't Mind Alice, which she co-wrote and co-directed alongside Olivia Rosenbloom. The following year in 2018, Apatow starred as Grace in the film Assassination Nation. The film's director, Sam Levinson, subsequently cast Apatow as a series regular in his HBO teen drama series Euphoria, which debuted in 2019. She stars as Lexi Howard in the series, a role that Levinson wrote specifically for Apatow. In 2020, she co-starred in her father's comedy-drama film The King of Staten Island, as the sister of Pete Davidson's character.