Taryn Delanie Smith can wear different hats. As an actor, writer and content creator, the 29-year-old social media star has played iconic characters on her own platform, like Denise, the “heaven receptionist.” But her latest portrayal will certainly raise eyebrows. Taryn plays the diva cockroach “Filthina” for her partnership with Raid and the brand’s reality TV-inspired series, The Other Tenants, which she spoke about during an exclusive interview with News47.us.
“I had just a lot of fun bringing [Filthina] to life,” she told News47.us, while pointing out that her character was a stop-motion creation, rather than an AI production. “I think what got me was finally getting to do this as an actor. I really love voice acting, and this gave me another opportunity.”
Since Filthina is a creepy, crawly roach, though, Taryn pointed out that the character is not the type of roommate she’d ever want — nor are the other anthropomorphized bugs featured in Raid’s four-episode series.
“[When] we were creating the character of Filthina, we were joking about our favorite cockroach stories,” the comedian recalled. “Everyone in the room who had lived in New York had a great cockroach story, and mine was that I was living in this horrible apartment on the Upper East Side that has since been torn down. … A picture frame came crashing down, and I looked up, and it was a cockroach that had climbed on top of it. The weight of the cockroach knocked the picture frame off the mantle. It was insane, it was the biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen, and I will say out of every gross thing that I’ve come across in this house, centipedes, stink bugs, beetles, there’s still nothing worse than a cockroach.”
Moving to New York’s Hudson Valley was no easy feat either. Taryn noted that she and her husband, Alec Castillo, “had no idea that there would be a colony of bats living in the attic and that it would be so expensive” to manage.
