Danielle Kennedy
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Danielle Kennedy is an American actress born on January 6 in Chicago, Illinois, with a background in competitive figure skating and an extensive career in regional theatre across Los Angeles, Chicago, Idaho, and Maine. She is also a Care Actor, working within an exclusive group of performers engaged by Kaiser Permanente to help medical staff improve patient care techniques.
Her screen credits span comedies, dramas, and genre productions, including Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation, American Horror Story, Grey's Anatomy, Criminal Minds, The Rookie, and The Sex Lives of College Girls. In feature films, she appeared in Day Shift (2022) alongside Jamie Foxx and received a best supporting actress nomination for Two Witches.
In Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), Kennedy portrayed Roller Granny, a veteran carhop waitress on roller skates at Spinners Roller Hop in Summerville. In the film, the character serves Callie Spengler during an evening shift, makes dry remarks about the late Egon Spengler ("the Dirt Farmer"), and glides away with the film's signature "Nope." The audition was posted online on June 26, 2019 under the film's working title Rust City and called for a 70-to-90-year-old actress with roller skating experience described as "dry and funny in a way that makes her seem ambivalent to the customers." Kennedy was on vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho when her manager called; unable to find roller skates, she recorded her audition tape on ice skates at a nearby rink in a single take, running her lines with a child present at the rink. The sides provided to her deliberately concealed the family-centered story of the film. The "Nope" line was among her own additions from the audition video. Crystal Alysia (also credited as Crystal Roseborough) served as Kennedy's skating stunt double for the on-skates sequences at Spinners.