Many professional actresses, when given an attentive audience, dish on swag bags, awards-show outfits or celebrity catfights. But as she crimps her hair for a performance, Lindsay Campbell discusses the “web aesthetic.” “It’s supposed to be low maintenance,” she says. “It’s not the same as the television aesthetic. It’s like being a real person.”
Campbell is host of the video blog Wallstrip. The show is what happens when you mix a hedge-fund manager, an aspiring New York City actress and Web 2.0. Campbell says it’s a “show about a stock at an all-time high, covered from a pop culture perspective,” but it’s probably easier to think of it as CNBC meets The Colbert Report.
Each week, Howard Lindzon, the hedge-fund manager and show’s creator, sends his staff a list of stocks trading at their peaks. The staff—Campbell in front of the camera and six others behind it—then produces four-minute bits on a handful of the companies.
True to the democratic ideals of her medium, Campbell books actors, sets up interviews, and arranges shooting locations, which range from the cement corridors of Wall Street to a dentist’s office. On a show about slot-machine-maker International Game Technology, Campbell donned bug-eye sunglasses and a loud, floral-print sundress to go “undercover” in Atlantic City’s Trump Casino. In another webisode, Campbell rode a muddy pig to demonstrate the financial allure of Premium Standard Farms (ticker symbol: PORK).
Until last year, Campbell’s career trajectory had been standard: acting in high school, majoring in modern dance and English at Stanford, training at a theater conservatory in Colorado. She moved East to take on the rigors of a New York City actor’s life: waiting tables at night, auditioning during the day, and the occasional Volvo or Miller Genuine Draft ad. When Lindzon offered her the Wallstrip job, she was petrified. Compared to her work on commercials and television shows, which might last a day or two, “the idea of committing to something more long-term was just so out of my frame of reference,” she says.
Now, after more than 100 episodes, Campbell has grown comfortable as the voice and face of the show. “The longer that I do Wallstrip,” she says, “the more I just want Wallstrip to succeed as a business and as a show that I’m happy to be a part of.”
Campbell continues to audition for parts and played a small role in two episodes of The Sopranos in the spring. But Wallstrip has changed her ambitions. “I want to be on The Daily Show,” she says. “I love jokey news. I didn’t know that I loved jokey news before Wallstrip, but yeah, that would be an ideal next move.”
BARRETT SHERIDAN is Class of ’06.
Photo: Blanche Mackey (top)
