This is a fictional story,” Betsy Brandt said about Lifetime’s The Bad Orphan, a new film about a couple who adopts a child only to find out she’s not who she claims to be. True-crime fans are used to Lifetime’s “Ripped from the Headlines” adaptations, and while The Bad Orphan has some similarities to the case of Natalia Grace Barnett, it’s not an intentional adaptation. “The script is just good. I'm like, ‘I want to watch that movie, and I want to take that ride.’”
(Lifetime)
Bets Brandt plays Jessia, the adoptive mother of Gabby, an 8-year-old orphan born with personal challenges, played by newcomer Chloe Coco Chapman. “It was my first ever audition,” the teenager revealed about her acting debut. “I don't know what I was expecting when I walked on the set… I felt like it was going to be more strict than it actually was. It was much more fun, which for this movie, I don't know if that's the best thing, but Betsy and everyone on set was so fun. It was just such a positive set. It was just awesome. When I came home, I was like, that was the best thing I've ever done in my whole life. It was insane. I was not expecting that.”
“One of the things that was most thrilling for me was to watch Chloe discover how talented she is and how she loves this,” Betsy Brandt reflected. “She's 17, and this is pretty new for her, and man, were we lucky. People knew this girl's really smart, and really special, and this movie would not have happened without her. They could find another me, they could find another Mark Taylor, but she was so pivotal. Everything [she] brought to the table, I was just like continually blown away. And to watch [her] grow in the weeks that we were doing this together was really inspiring for me, especially as someone who isn’t new. I've been doing this for a while.”
“I had an acting coach on set,” Chloe Coco Chapman shared, who had some anxieties over the film’s more emotionally charged scenes. “He helped me get to the darker places, which was really hard, especially for my first ever thing… After my audition, me and my mom were talking, and she was like, ‘This story is kind of crazy. There's a lot of emotion in this.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I know, I don't know how I'm going to do this.’ … There's a few scenes where it's pretty intense, and you have to really get in the moment and get into that. You have to get into the bad place, which sounds bad, but you kind of do because that's just how you have to play your character. Gabby's a character who doesn't have a lot of happy places, unfortunately. A lot of her places are sad, so I had to think of my sad places and relate to her in that way.”
But for Betsy Brandt, from her earliest interactions with Chloe, she knew she would nail the role. “Both my character and Chloe's character are very strong women and there's a lot of love between them, and that's complicated. And then they're pitting themselves against one another, and they're both survivors. We totally went toe-to-toe, and it was a blast. I will never forget when we did the table read over Zoom. Chloe and I were next to each other on the same camera. We had a blast doing the read, and it went really well. I turned to her, and I said, ‘It's really fun to be bad, isn't it?’ And I knew we were gonna have a great time, and we did. As heavy and crazy as this story could be, we did everything we wanted to do to keep it very real, and very grounded because I think it has more impact that way. And we also had a really good time, whether we were supposed to or not.”
Despite the heavy themes of The Bad Orphan, Betsy and Chloe had a great time making it, and became friends in the process. “Saying goodbye to [Chloe] was one of the toughest days on set for me,” Betsy shared, excited to reunite with her f co-star virtually to promote the film. “There were times where it was so hard because I love [her] so much, and there are scenes where we are just not good to each other on camera, but it was fun to have that. We had a safety net with one another, and we could do it.” As soon as the director would call cut, Betsy and Chloe were back to being good friends again.
The Bad Orphan premieres tonight at 8/7c on Lifetime.