“Simone Policano, in particular, was luminous. Capturing the intricacies of vulnerability and pain within a boisterous character can prove difficult, and Policano navigated the divide effortlessly. she felt beautifully fragile, painfully alive.” — The Theatre Times
A multi-hyphenate in every sense of the word, Simone Policano is an actor-writer-producer from an Italian-Jewish-Puerto Rican family. So by age nine she was trilingual in English, Spanish, and Yelling. Raised on the Upper Best Side of New York City, she spent her early years sharing the Hunter College High School stage with Lin-Manuel Miranda* and accosting everyone with her Eliza Thornberry impression. She’d show you pictures, but she’s burned them.
(*Same stage, different decades. A girl can dream.)
She graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in American Studies with a concentration in Theatre and Performing Arts. At Yale she performed with the Yale Dramatic Association and wrote and performed with Red Hot Poker, Yale's premier sketch comedy group. She also feels fancy when she uses words like "premier."
Simone has been seen in the Tribeca Film Festival, on Comedy Central, IFC, The New Yorker, and, frequently, the L train. She recurs on Blue Bloods as the long-lost daughter of her beloved mentor and friend Treat Williams, who was better than all of us and will live on forever in her heart. She has also guest starred on New Amsterdam and has three feature films streaming on Prime: sci-fi drama Auggie (opposite Richard Kind); psychological thriller This Is Our Home (which she also produced); and Extra Innings. Up next you can hear her in a narrative audiodrama produced by Audible.
She just returned from starring in Ayad Akhtar's Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced at the Singapore Repertory Theater. Before that she closed cityscrape, written by NYTimes Critic’s Pick playwright Sophie McIntosh, and finished The Play That Goes Wrong Off-Broadway, where she only got trapped in the on-stage grandfather clock once! A win.
Her comedy writing has been published on Lorne Michael's Above Average, and she wrote angsty Thought Catalog pieces back when that was a thing. Nowadays you can most likely find her binge-watching Severance and coming to terms with the fact that no one will ever understand her like her Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.
Last but certainly not least out of left field: during the pandemic she co-founded Invisible Hands, a nonprofit a nonprofit delivering essentials to communities vulnerable to COVID-19. The initiative exploded to 10,000+ volunteers and was featured by Good Morning America, the New York Times, and the Associated Press, among others, and Received awards from the Robin Hood Foundation and Manhattan Institute. Invisible Hands landed Simone alongside Oprah and Dr. Fauci in Town and Country magazine’s 2020 Top Philanthropists list. She’ll let you know when she’s processed literally any of that.
She also thinks writing in third person is bizarre, so she’s going to stop now.
