Aya Cash

Aya Cash is an American actress born on July 13, 1982, in San Francisco, California. Her mother is poet and novelist Kim Addonizio, and her father is Buddhist teacher Eugene Cash. On her mother's side, Cash is the granddaughter of tennis champion Pauline Betz and sportswriter Bob Addie. Her father's family is Jewish and her mother is Catholic; Cash has described herself as Jewish and has noted that the family surname was originally a different name. She attended the San Francisco School of the Arts before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Minnesota in 2004 through a partnership with the Guthrie Theater Actor Training Program. After graduating, she relocated to New York City to pursue acting, supporting herself for a period by working as a full-time waitress.

Cash built her early television career through appearances on Brotherhood, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Mercy, and The Newsroom. She was a series regular on the Fox comedy Traffic Light in 2011, which ran for one season. Her most prominent television role came with the FX/FXX dark comedy series You're the Worst, in which she starred as Gretchen Cutler from 2014 to 2019. The performance earned her a nomination for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Series and a TCA Award nomination for Individual Achievement in Comedy. In 2020, she joined the Amazon Prime Video series The Boys as Stormfront, a role she continued through 2022. She subsequently played local newspaper reporter Cheryl Peterson in the Fox sitcom Welcome to Flatch, which premiered in 2022, and most recently appeared as Anita in the HBO series The Franchise.

Her film work includes The Oranges (2011), Sleepwalk with Me (2012), Begin Again (2013), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), in which she played Janet, the assistant to Jordan Belfort, Mary Goes Round (2017), Game Over, Man! (2018), and Scare Me (2020).

Cash has also worked in theater. In 2014, she starred in the world premiere of Zoe Kazan's play Trudy and Max in Love Off-Broadway. In 2025, she appeared in London's West End as Jessie Stone in Mark Rosenblatt's play Giant. The following year, in 2026, she brought that production to Broadway, appearing in Giant.

In her personal life, Cash met writer and producer Josh Alexander while she was working as his waitress. The two dated for seven years before marrying in 2012 and continue to reside in New York City. Cash has noted that although she was raised Jewish and had a Bat Mitzvah, she chose not to continue practicing the religion afterward. She serves as a celebrity ambassador for INARA, a nonprofit organization that assists war-wounded refugee children from Syria in obtaining medical care.