Brittany Snow is having a moment.
The actress — who first gained recognition at age 12 on the soap opera Guiding Light before breaking out on American Dreams and eventually the Pitch Perfect franchise — now has three major Emmy contenders this season: Netflix hits The Hunting Wives and The Beast in Me, plus Hulu’s true-crime saga Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
“When things get really busy for me, I have this mantra that I say in my head: ‘This is what you trained for. This is what you trained for,’” Snow tells Gold Derby. “What I’ve trained for is being so grateful and present in having all of this going on. It can all go away tomorrow.”
Snow’s biggest breakout hit of the season has been The Hunting Wives, based on the bestselling novel by May Cobb. The series stars Snow as Sophie, a Boston woman who relocates to East Texas with her family before becoming dangerously entangled in the orbit of wealthy socialite Margo, played by Malin Åkerman. What begins as fascination quickly spirals into obsession, seduction, and murder.
The show has become one of Netflix’s most talked-about new series thanks to its wild tonal swings between satire, soap, thriller, camp, and suburban noir.
“I’m very used to playing a fish-out-of-water.”
Much of Sophie’s journey in The Hunting Wives revolves around performance — trying to project control, perfection, and belonging while quietly unraveling underneath the surface. Snow says that aspect of the character felt surprisingly familiar.
“To be honest, the performing to perfection came easily to me because I really relate to that from being a child actor and growing up in a world that was sort of bigger than what I could perceive at the time,” Snow says. “I’m very used to playing a fish-out-of-water, naive sort of person.”
The biggest challenge of playing Sophie, Snow says, was serving as the audience’s entry point into a world constantly threatening to spiral into chaos.
“My character had to be the eyes for the audience and the lens in which the viewer saw the world,” she explains. “I had to keep a lot of my heightened reactions down and keep the character really grounded.”
“The first season was really about trying to find that balance and find the tone of existing in a world that’s sort of outlandish, but also having to be very grounded in the things that I did,” she continues. “Sometimes I just wanted to put on a Southern accent and hoot and holler and do a whole bunch of other things with the girls.”
“Comedy is subjective.”
Which is exactly why one of the biggest conversations surrounding The Hunting Wives this Emmy season has become a surprisingly tricky question: Is it actually a comedy?
“I think comedy is subjective when it comes to this show because I think what’s funny about the show is sort of different for everybody,” Snow says. “Is it satire? Are we relating to people? Are we making fun of people? Are we doing both? Are we doing a commentary? I think it’s all of those things.”
“I don’t know if it’s as outwardly comedic as other shows, but I think there’s comedy in there because of how much fun you’re having when you’re watching this show,” she continues. “My character’s pretty much grounded in it, but I get to watch the absurdity before me and that to me was very funny.”
Snow also embraced the show’s willingness to completely shatter genre expectations — including one of Season 1’s most talked-about reveals involving a tampon becoming the key clue in the murder mystery.
“The fact that you’re even talking about tampons is something that you don’t regularly see on mainstream television — and talked about and laughed about,” she says. “And then for that to be sort of the Chekhov’s gun at the end — which is sort of funny that it wasn’t a gun, it was a tampon — I think it’s so indicative of what the show does.”
Snow admits she initially wondered whether the ensemble’s wildly different energies would mesh onscreen. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, is this going to work?’” she recalls. “Because I have to be so singular and in my own world and very small. It was almost like I’m playing a caged bird in a lot of ways. And then all these other women are just like eagles and they are just doing so much.”
“We really up the ante.”
Fortunately for fans, things are only getting bigger — and darker — in Season 2.
“We really up the ante in a lot of ways,” Snow teases. “I am very excited for people to see the sort of breakdown of Sophie in a way that is unexpected.”
“You sort of see her as this exposed nerve to the world and slowly breaking down and becoming sort of this version of herself that maybe you felt all along but it wasn’t seen in Season 1,” she adds. “The show in general just takes what we did in season one and then just pushes it to the edge.”
“I really, really hope Matthew and Claire get nominated for Emmys.”
At the same time, Snow has been earning acclaim for a very different kind of performance in The Beast in Me, where she plays the restrained and quietly calculating Nina Jarvis opposite Matthew Rhys and Claire Danes.
For Snow, part of the appeal of Nina was the ambiguity surrounding whether the character had secretly been orchestrating her rise all along. “I played it like yes, that was true,” Snow says of the finale’s lingering questions surrounding Nina’s intentions. “I really, really love — and I would appreciate if Nina is kind of one step ahead of everybody. She’s always been this person that’s not been taken seriously, and so she’s using that to her advantage a little bit because she’s had a goal in mind from the very beginning.”
Snow says she even developed an internal backstory that never fully appeared onscreen, including the possibility that Nina “was sort of in love with Madison” and “always obsessed with taking Madison’s place in a way.”
“Maybe it wasn’t manipulative, but she is much more of a survivor,” Snow explains. “She’s been planning this — in some sort way — getting what she wants. She wants to get out of that apartment with the string lights so badly.”
Snow also had nothing but praise for Rhys and Danes.
“I really, really hope Matthew and Claire get nominated for Emmys because they so deserve it,” Snow says. “They’re not only incredible actors, as we know, but they are incredible people.”
Despite the show’s heavy subject matter, Snow says the atmosphere on set was surprisingly playful. “We were laughing, we were joking, we’re shouting at each other and I’m slapping him,” she says with a laugh. “In between takes, we’re making jokes and laughing so hard that we can’t breathe.”
“I didn’t want to do an impression.”
Snow also reflected on another major project entering the Emmy conversation this season: Murdaugh: Death in the Family, where she portrays journalist Mandy Matney.
Unlike many real-life roles, Snow had the rare opportunity to spend significant time with Matney herself while preparing for the performance.
“I got to call her, hang out with her, have lunches with her, and ask her about what kind of water bottle she uses — how she holds her pen,” Snow says. “I knew more than anything I had to get the voice right, but also not make a caricature of it. I didn’t want to do an impression. I wanted to capture the essence of her.”
With three major projects all landing in the Emmy conversation at once, Snow admits the moment feels especially meaningful after years of growth — both personally and professionally.
“It has been really interesting and it’s something that I really have been working towards,” she says. “I always knew that I could get back here, but maybe I wasn’t emotionally ready.”
This time, she’s ready for it.
