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You may be used to seeing Brittany Snow belt her heart out in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, but now she’s back on the small screen and giving one of the year’s standout dramatic performances on “Almost Family.” Snow is heartbreaking on the Fox series as Julia Bechley, a woman who discovers her father has illegally used his own genetic material with female patients throughout his career as a fertility doctor. The “Someone Great” and “Hairspray” actor recently sat with Backstage to discuss her career onscreen, to offer advice on how she memorizes scripts, and more.
“Almost Family” has plenty of drama to play with.
“ ‘Almost Family’ is a series that is originally based on the Australian show ‘Sisters,’ but it’s our own rendition, our own take on the story of Julia Bechley, my character, finding out that her father, Leon Bechley, a well-known fertility clinic doctor, used his own material to impregnate many of his patients. And so I find out that I’m related to many people, two of which I become pretty close to, two women, and they are now my sisters. So it’s us navigating what family means to us, nature versus nurture, and trying to formulate bonds while this crazy and tumultuous thing has happened to our lives.”
Snow and her co-stars truly became on-set family.
“I think, in a way, we really had to understand that we were becoming our characters. We were going to have to become sisters. Just like in the show, we don’t really know each other, we’re pretty much strangers, and we’re having to work together every day. It kind of was a meta situation. We became these women that had to be together. It’s been interesting trying to navigate how we get to play off of each other and the relationships that we have, but it’s also been really fun.”
She originally auditioned for another role before booking Julia.
“This was actually a project that I saw from afar for a long time coming. One of my best friends, Jenn Robinson, who directed ‘Someone Great,’ she had been tracking the show because she was in consideration for directing the pilot, and she called and said, ‘There’s this Australian show called “Sisters” and they’re making it into an American version and it’s going to be on Fox. You should just keep your eye on it.’ And so, I had been looking for it, basically. I got the audition [for the Roxy character] when I was shooting a movie in Dallas, and they said that they only wanted to see me for Roxy. I wrote back, ‘I really want to play Julia. I’m much more of a Julia than a Roxy.’ They said, ‘No, we want to see you for Roxy.’ So, I memorized the Roxy sides and the Julia sides—and my lovely fiancé memorized the lines with me till 4 o’clock in the morning—put myself on tape at 8 o’clock for both parts, and sent it off. My agents and managers never sent my Roxy audition because they thought the Julia one was great, but I didn’t know that. I wanted this show really bad, so I tried my best at both.”
Not all professional actors are experts at script memorization.
“I am a terrible memorizer, so this is an interesting question because Anna Camp, other friends that I have, they can look at something, they have a photographic memory, and I am not that person. I have to walk around my room. I have to drink or eat something—something with the left and the right brain; I have to be doing something while I memorize. So usually, my fiancé sits there and we just run it and I just walk around the room, but it takes me a while. With this show specifically, there’s not much time to memorize. It’s also just knowing and being comfortable with the character and realizing that it’s OK to mess up. The more that I know it’s OK to mess up, the better I can memorize. But if I know I can’t mess up at all, then my brain freaks out. It’s being comfortable enough to know I can mess up, and then I know.”
The best way to accept rejection is to learn from it.
“I have to audition all the time, and I would love to tell everyone that I’m so used to rejection now…. But I still am a very sensitive human. I’m extremely sensitive and extremely shy and I wear my heart on my sleeve. It always feels like a little bit of a [personal] rejection, but the tools that I have now and how I deal with it are much different than how I used to deal with them…. I do truly believe that it was either a learning process, not meant to be, or something was getting me ready for something else.” I can look back at so many TV shows that I should’ve gotten in the past years where it was down between me and somebody else and the other person got it, and then they met their husband on that show. They have a baby with that person. They live in Wales now. Things that are so crazy where I’m like, ‘I was not supposed to live in Wales with a baby!’ Things that I now have perspective on, and that makes it easier for the next rejection because I’ve been on the other side of it, too, where I’ve directed and produced, and people can give the best audition ever and they’re so good, but it’s just not the right vibe, tone, look. There’s a whole bunch of things at play, and usually it has much more to do with everything else in the world and not just you.”
Up next: Snow wants to continue getting behind the camera.
“I just directed and wrote and produced my first short film that I did last year. It’s premiering now to a bunch of film festivals that I’m very grateful for, and I would love to write and direct and produce more. I produced a movie that I did while I was doing the audition for this. I produced a movie called ‘Bailey & Darla’ that’s coming out next year that I’m really proud of. I want to do more of that kind of creating my own sort of voice and world, and work with a lot of my friends.”
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 31 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.
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