More recently, she’s acquired International GIF Fame thanks to her scenery-chewing performance as one of the messy Monterey Five on “Big Little Lies”: the aspirational “I will not not be rich” Renata Klein.
She is beloved for a vast filmography that includes parts in, of course, “Jurassic Park,” “Twin Peaks,” HBO’s gone-too-soon “Enlightened,” and on DeGeneres’s sitcom “Ellen,” where she portrayed DeGeneres’s out lesbian love interest, Susan. Once, I even read a tweet that asked us to imagine what the gay world would be like if gay men treated other gay men like they treat Laura Dern. Every big and little thing Dern does – a new pair of glasses! Baby Yoda! – is met with great, dramatic exaltation from queer Dern-heads on Twitter. #GayTwitter icon Laura Dern’s queer cultural contributions – being the first to hug Ellen DeGeneres after she came out publicly, the Renata Klein memes, the belted khaki shorts in “Jurassic Park” – are bountiful fodder for social media hyperbole.
