Nicole Alyse Nelson: The Interview - From Unpaid Intern to Oscar Nominee. Emma Thompson, Rose Byrne, Emma Stone. 43 Nickelodeon Episodes—and She Gets PENNIES.

Academy Award nominee Nicole Alyse Nelson joins us in the Pol' Atteu Beverly Hills West Hollywood studio—and she brings her parents all the way from Texas!

From the minute she sits down, this interview goes everywhere: Hollywood dreams, Nickelodeon fame, Oscar night secrets, Emma Thompson, painful Cinderella shoes, an escape-room disaster and, naturally, a bat flying through our bedroom.

Nicole takes us back to Galveston, Texas, and the summer she came to Los Angeles at just 19 for an unpaid internship—and simply never went home. After answering phones, reading scripts and working unpaid production

jobs, she realized she was far more fascinated by the actors than anything

happening behind the camera.

Barely a year later, she landed her first major role on Nickelodeon’s I Am Frankie, filming 43 episodes over two seasons and gaining a global fan base. She also gets candid about the less glamorous side of early success—including the contract that means those reruns aren't exactly delivering glamorous residual checks.

We follow Nicole from I Am Frankie to GLOW and then into the project that changed everything: the Oscar-nominated short Jane Austen’s Period Drama, where she hilariously plays a character named Vagina Talbot. Nicole reveals how Emma Thompson became involved after falling in love with the

film—and why the legendary actress refused a producer credit, instead creating the unforgettable title “Menstrual Executive Advisor.”

Then we go inside Nicole’s surreal road to the Academy Awards: making the long list, cutting down to the final five nominees, attending the Oscars alongside her equally nominated boyfriend Jonah Lees, and wearing a custom Pol’ Atteu gown that had strangers stopping her for photographs.

Nicole dishes on what the Oscar red carpet actually feels like,

Hollywood Boulevard lurking underneath all that glamour, her size 4½

“Cinderella feet,” and the last-minute cobbler rescue that saved her Oscar