FALMOUTH — In a full face of makeup, a flannel shirt, pajama pants and slippers, Sam Ramsdell sits in the corner of her couch with a blanket on her lap and a camera pointed toward her — a setup not so different from that of many remote workers, except she’s not on a Zoom call.
Ramsdell, 36, is filming an ad for FlavCity instant lattes for her Instagram account, where she has more than 580,000 followers. It’s one of four videos the company commissioned her to make.
“Oh, Jaaaaaames!” she pretends to call out to another room, holding her mouth open wide to show off the record-setting gape that helped propel her career as a social media influencer.
It’s something of a catchphrase for Ramsdell, whose videos frequently feature her partner of 12 years, James Riemer. His expressionless presence in the background serves as a foil to her over-the-top personality and zany antics, often incorporating risqué clothing and suggestive dancing.
In real life, Riemer is a chatty Midwesterner and doting dog dad. Ramsdell, though, is much the same as her online persona, outgoing and funny, if a tad toned down when the camera’s not rolling. She’s been performing since she was a kid growing up in Scarborough.
“Every family video that we ever had is just me putting on shows,” she says.
Back then, having an exceptionally large mouth was a source of insecurity and fodder for bullies, who likened her to a frog and a largemouth bass. Today, that mouth is the basis for much of Ramsdell’s physical comedy.
After her videos making funny faces and eating large food items in a single bite started going viral early in the pandemic, it got the attention of Guinness World Records.
“It was kind of taking my power back a little bit,” she says.
@samramsdell5 Weirdest and best foods at the Big E! #bige #statefair
♬ original sound – Sam Ramsdell
Ramsdell now has nearly 4 million followers on TikTok (mostly millennial women, she says) and makes enough money from social media platforms and collaborations with companies that pay her to post about their products that she was able to quit her sales job with Idexx Laboratories, covering western Connecticut, and go to work as an influencer full time.
With her career tied only to her cellphone, she asked her relatives in real estate to keep an eye out for a house for her in Maine so that she, Riemer, their four cats and two dogs could have more space and be closer to family. In September, they moved to an old farmhouse in Falmouth.
The house has provided a well of new content for Ramsdell as they discover its architectural oddities, record creepy sounds coming from the basement and observe the wildlife in their yard from a trail camera.
“I love that we’re finally back in Maine, and we can play around with more animal content,” Ramsdell says.
They want to expand their brood — get chickens, goats and a donkey. With fruit trees planted around the property, Ramsdell plans to riff off the contemporary demand for homesteading content, in her signature, irreverent way (see the not-safe-for-work running commentary on a video of her churning butter).
“You can do some elements of it, but still go to McDonald’s and have your seed oils,” she jokes.
FINDING HER PLATFORM
Even though comedy came naturally to her, Ramsdell didn’t see it as a potential career. She originally aspired to be on Broadway. Growing up in Maine, she sang at church and with the Musica de Filia girls choir and performed with Portland Players and in shows at Lyric Music Theater in South Portland (occasionally crossing paths with actress Anna Kendrick).
Moving to Connecticut for the sales job with Idexx allowed her to keep pursuing her dream, going into New York City for auditions before work, while also trying her hand at improv and standup. When the pandemic hit, Ramsdell worried it would kill the momentum she had going. In fact, it presented her with a big opportunity.
Ramsdell had been posting videos on TikTok of her making silly faces, singing and re-creating trends and, in the spring of 2020, she started to go viral, with people asking to see what she could fit inside her mouth, like a whole croissant or a wine glass. By the end of the year, she had over 1 million followers.
“It just kind of blew up,” she says.
People wondered in the comments whether her mouth was the biggest around. After she made a video measuring it, Guinness reached out. The process of determining if she was a record holder involved submitting proof that she hadn’t had mouth-altering surgery and getting an official measurement by a dentist. Although hers wasn’t bigger than the then-record holder (a teenage boy from Minnesota), Guinness decided to split the category by gender. A woman from Alaska has since taken the title of largest overall; Ramsdell still holds the record for widest female mouth gape.
The floodgates opened from there, with “Italia’s Got Talent” and others paying for her to fly around the world to participate in competitions that showcased both her singing voice and the size of her yapper. Meanwhile, Ramsdell was making money from TikTok, which was paying $3,000 for any video that hit a million views. She says the rate has since gone down.
Now, the bulk of her income is from partnerships like the one with FlavCity, which paid her $10,000 for four videos that she filmed and edited in less than a day. After the percentage that goes to her agent and taxes get taken out, Ramsdell will probably only be paid about half of that. She tries to do one or two of those a week, with the commission rates ranging from $3,000 for a small company to $25,000 for big chains — like KFC, which had her review its fried chicken sandwiches.
Ramsdell does standup shows all over the country, too, and has a podcast with Riemer, who works remotely in digital sales and does cameos in his spare time. In the FlavCity ad, he happily plays the part of deadpan barista, offering up suggestions for his lines and staging.
“I’d love to get you in an apron,” Ramsdell says during the taping, and Riemer takes off through the house in search of one.
“It’s fun,” Riemer says. “People enjoy it, and that’s what it’s all about.”
They’ve both been recognized locally since moving — he at a gas station in Kittery and she at Walmart, where someone asked Ramsdell what “the mouth girl from TikTok” was doing in Maine.
Even though Ramsdell treats it like a regular job, putting in full-time hours to consistently post reels and stories and keeping a close eye on her numbers to make sure her online following is continuing to grow, she acknowledges it doesn’t always feel like work.
“I would be doing this if I wasn’t getting paid for it,” she says.
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