“I’m one of those mentally ill people that performs for their family, you know what I’m saying?” Andi Marie Tillman tells the Scene from her home in East Nashville on a recent Friday afternoon. “At 4 years old, I put on an entire one-woman Passion Play for my family. I did. I was Mary, the Roman soldier, Jesus, Pontius Pilate, the angel that announced the resurrection — I was all the characters. So I always had ‘big dreams’ for myself, ever since I was little.”
Tillman’s East Tennessee drawl gives her away as a daughter of Appalachia. She’s a native of Scott County — one of those rural Tennessee communities so small that “you’ve got to pick the closest city, and then, like, say how far it is from there” — who moved to Nashville not long after graduating college. Tillman in large part moved to Music City to pursue her goal of being a songwriter, but it isn’t her music that’s gained her so much recent public notice.
Roughly two-and-a-half years ago, the actor and comedian began posting clips to social media in the guise of various original characters — and they quickly became a hit. Tillman has amassed roughly 573,000 followers on TikTok and 469,000 on Instagram thanks to characters like Papaw (an ornery, overalls-clad Appalachian), Pam (your Southern aunt who’s prone to oversharing) and my personal favorite, Nashveratu — a count-ry musician and vampire “trying to fit into the Nashville music scene but having a rough go.” Much of Tillman’s comedy is inspired by her Southern upbringing. And as it turns out, her kinfolk see the resemblance.
Andi Marie Tillman
“My family takes bets on who’s who,” Tillman says of her characters. “So all of them think they’re everybody, and I think they like the down-home kind of stuff. … [Nashveratu is] just too weird for them. They’re like, ‘Now, I don’t get the vampire stuff. And you’d probably do better if you did more Papaw. That’d probably launch you somewhere else.’ I’m like, ‘OK, don’t need the notes, but I’m gonna get them.’ You know, I’m loitering over a turkey here, and I’m getting, ‘Cut the goth shit,’ is basically what they’re saying.”
Like many comedy fans, Tillman grew up watching Saturday Night Live on the “boobtube,” thinking of a sketch comedy show as “the paramount place to get to.” It was of course impossible in those days to envision a path to success via then-nonexistent social media. “But now I feel like I’m producing my own sketch comedy show,” she says. And when the Scene points out that she’s kind of like her own Lorne Michaels? “I am! Just a different accent, and also I’m much more cruel to my cast members. I’m cutting sketches left and right, sweetie.”
Tillman notes that she manages to cobble together a living from income generated by social streams as well as various acting gigs. But she knows, particularly given recent developments with TikTok, social media is in a precarious state.
“But I’m a little cockroach,” she says of the possibility of TikTok being permanently banned in the U.S., “and I’ll just crawl into some other corner and multiply there. You know, I will keep germinating, or whatever I have to do. … I was frustrated when TikTok was going to shut down, because you get substantial pay from that. You get a good little supplemental income from that, from just streams on there. So that was frustrating to me. But I thought, ‘Hell, those people got to go somewhere,’ you know, and I’ll just — I gotta be versatile.”
For now, Tillman is keeping plenty of irons in the fire. She acted in a feature that will likely be released this year, and she has plans to produce a feature-length special with some “Dada, Andy Kaufman moments in there.” She’s also doing more live performances, like a recent appearance on the podcast Devalued at Vinyl Tap and a musical performance at East Nashville’s Bowery Vault. But even with all the successes, and all the followers, she still has a hard time convincing herself it’s all really happening.
“I think when checks started coming in and I was able to quit cleaning houses the 30 hours a week that I was having to do that to make ends meet, then I thought, ‘All right, well, maybe this social media thing isn’t so bad,’” she says. “There’s something about getting a check, honest to God, that just makes everything — you’ll put your soul on the line for that money.”
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