Name: Patti Harrison

Age: 28

Hometown: Orient, Ohio

Now lives: In a two-bedroom house in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles that she shares with a roommate.

Claim to fame: Ms. Harrison is an actress, comedy writer and screwball performer who doesn’t take her rising profile in Hollywood too seriously. She appeared in a Vogue video last year, pretending to be named “world’s prettiest woman on earth.” And during a New York Comedy Festival performance, she described herself as a “physically and mentally weak comedian.”

Ms. Harrison, who is transgender, said industry folk don’t always get her sardonic edge. “Cisgender people tend to want trans stories of triumph that are easy to metabolize,” she said. “I want to make things that are subversive and not so entry-level.”