‘Brittany Runs a Marathon’ on Amazon Prime Proves Jillian Bell Needs More Lead Roles

It’s hard to believe, but before Brittany Runs a Marathon—an Amazon Studios film that is now streaming on Prime Video—Jillian Bell has never led a film before. (She did, however, take second billing to Scarlett Johansson in the 2017 ensemble comedy, Rough Night.) That’s a shame, because Jillian Bell is a treasure.

In Brittany Runs a Marathon, which Bell also produced, she stars as Brittany, a 28-year-old millennial feeling stuck in her life. When her doctor tells her that she needs to lose weight to stay healthy, she decides to cut back on the partying, alcohol, drugs and train for the New York City marathon.

If you read that synopsis and decided that’s a “no” from you, I feel you. The film is not perfect, but I will say it very likely handles the body image issues much better than you’re probably expecting. The movie was written and directed by first-time filmmaker Paul Downs Colaizzo, an openly gay man with a background in theater, who—I can only assume based on his script—is very good at listening to women and the fat-activist community. Again, not everything was perfect. As Madison Malone Kircher points out in her essay for Vulture, the very premise of a film about losing weight and then running a marathon—even though the film goes through pains to stress that Brittany’s real goal was never to lose weight—fails to acknowledge the very real existence of fat runners. But ultimately, what made Brittany Runs a Marathon work for me was Bell.

Bell is laugh-out-loud funny, and therefore so is Brittany. The prosthetics and fat suit can be uncomfortable and distracting—and yes, Bell does wear both of those things, which are then removed when she loses weight—but quickly forgotten in the face of Bell’s charm. Some stand-out moments include Bell impersonating Babe (“I am lost in the city, and I cannot find my farm”), Bell pretending to be shocked when her doctor suggests people abuse Adderall (“I’m sorry you have to deal with that,”) and Bell pulling out a flawless Australian accent that, to my disappointment, her friends eventually asked her to stop doing. Time and time again, she’s a delight to watch on screen.

I’ve been waiting for Bell to have a lead role like this since Workaholics—a show that was hilarious, smart, but also suffered from a suffocating case of dude bro-ism. Bell, as “Jillian Belk,” was consistently such a welcome breath of fresh air as the only significant female coworker on a show about three male slackers, she instantly became my favorite character. The way she said, “I will stab a man for tacos,” was so perfectly hilarious, it was my Twitter banner for years.

Three years after Workaholics premiered in 2011, Bell once again proved she was a comedy star in 2014’s 22 Jump Street, the sequel to the first film starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as undercover cops posing as high school students. This time Hill and Tatum went back to college, where they met Bell’s character, an actual college student, who didn’t believe for one second that Hill was 19. Bell stole every single moment of her too-short screen time, and if you haven’t watched the four-minute deleted scene where she improvs gem after gem berating Hill for his age, you just haven’t lived.

Let’s talk about Rough Night, Bell’s other starring role before Brittany Runs a Marathon. Bell shared the spotlight with Johansson, Zoë Kravitz, Kate McKinnon, and Ilana Glazer for that ensemble comedy, and my hopes were perhaps a tad too high for the first big film role for both Bell and Broad City‘s Glazer. Was Rough Night a major disappointment? Yes. But you know who didn’t disappoint? Bell, as Alice the dorky, overly enthusiastic party planner who accidentally kills a stripper. Somehow, despite the weak script, Bell found a note of dramatic sincerity in her character and made Alice infinitely more believable, and therefore funnier, than her colleagues. Now that’s what I call acting!

With Brittany Runs a Marathon, Bell finally landed a lead role in a film that, whatever its flaws, tells the story of a woman who is complicated and whole and so very real. And she absolutely nailed it. Here’s to hoping we see Bell lead many more films in the future. She deserves it.

Watch Brittany Runs a Marathon on Amazon Prime