On this date in 1983, actress and writer Jennifer Leigh “Jen” Tullock was born in Louisville, Ky., to “fervidly Christian” parents involved in various aspects of the music industry, including education, performance and recording. As of 2025, Tullock had 34 acting credits listed on IMDb and 13 as writer or producer.
Growing up, she and her younger brother sang with their parents’ megachurch congregation. “To me, my mom was like Celine Dion because she was up there on the Jumbotron singing and was very charismatic and funny,” Tullock said. (New York Times, Oct. 9, 2025)
She and her brother also attended recording sessions and live shows, what she called “kind of a cool entryway to being on stage. I learned the value of why people feel connected to a live performance and I realized I wanted to make that a career.” (Towne Post Network, Oct. 19, 2022)
She attended the Christian Academy of Louisville before graduating from a public school and from Millikin University in 2006 with a bachelor of fine arts in acting. Millikin was founded in 1901 by a businessman in Decatur, Ill., and is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church-USA.
By the time she was 18, Tullock had experienced enough religion to know it wasn’t for her. She had developed a crush on her female translator on a Christian missionary trip to Ethiopia. “The leaders of both the megachurch and the evangelical school I went to talked about ‘homosexual sin’ as one might about mass murder,” she told a reporter. “My parents didn’t really want us to have exposure to secular culture. I went to evangelical school, so my formal education was through a biblical perspective. … As you might imagine, I did not do great on the SATs. They were like, ‘Well, she could read.’ ” (Ibid.)
“Even when I came out in the early aughts, it felt so different. I went to a liberal university, and was still told by the school counselor that he could not give me advice as a Christian, because I was gay. I remember hearing that and thinking, ‘This is not great for me.’ I didn’t have the language around why, I just knew that I was other, and because I was other, I was less than, and because I was less than, I needed to be quiet.” (Salon, March 20, 2023)
Tullock moved to New York City in 2007 to write, to perform in plays and improv and one-person shows and do commercials. Her short film “Partners” with Hannah Pearl Utt premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where their feature “Before You Know It” premiered in 2019. Tullock had played all eight characters in Sam Benenati’s viral short film “Red Light” in 2018.
Her TV series roles in the remake of the legal drama “Perry Mason” and the psychological thriller “Severance” brought her critical acclaim and audience exposure, as did her contributing writer columns at the Huffington Post and appearances on the “Funny or Die” original interactive series. In 2020, she created Eggshellworld.com, a satirical collection of social media videos examining the fragility of suburban white women.
She married Marie Ronn, a Swedish creative director at Spotify who is four years her senior, at a New York private social club in 2023. Riley Berris received her ordination from the Universal Life Church to officiate. Ronn’s 9-year-old son Loa and his friend Ocean were the couple’s flower children.
In Tullock’s solo show “You Shall Inherit the Earth!” in 2024, she shared details of what was originally thought to be a transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke) the previous year. It was eerily similar to a scene in “Severance” in which her brother, played by Adam Scott, was felled by a stroke. “But what happened with mine was, after we’d done all of the tests, they figured out that I’d had a thing called a patent foramen ovale, a PFO, which is like a tiny hole between the chambers of your heart. And I also have a blood clotting disorder that I did not know about.” (Parade magazine, Feb. 21, 2025)
In “Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God” (2025), co-written with Frank Winters and performed off-Broadway, Tullock further displayed her versatility by playing all 11 characters, the most notable a writer on a book tour whose experiences with Christianity were inspired by things Tullock encountered.
PHOTO: Tullock at the “Before You Know It” premiere in New York City in 2019; photo by Shutterstock/Ron Adar.
