Connie Britton has spent decades playing women we’d follow anywhere (see: Tami Taylor, the Friday Night Lights coach’s wife everyone wanted as a mom, and country superstar Rayna Jaymes on Nashville). But she’s just as good at playing characters who make us squirm, like Promising Young Woman’s college dean and The White Lotus’ high-powered, deeply stressed Nicole Mossbacher.
In her latest role in Hulu’s Phony, she plays Ellen, a single mom and high school principal whose son (fellow White Lotus alum Sam Nivola) wakes up from a car accident convinced she’s been replaced by an impostor. Pulling it off in real life meant altering her face with prosthetics and visual effects — just enough to make you second guess what you’re seeing.
In our series, Role Call, we ask Britton to revisit a few of the women who solidified her place as a TV icon. Here’s what she had to say about playing…
Tami Taylor in “Friday Night Lights”
That character really came from my youth in Virginia. My mother was actually not Southern, but I was raised by all of these other Southern women around me. There was something so specific and unique about how women in the South get through life and walk through the world.
When I was playing Tami, she sort of felt like an amalgam of the influences in my life and the women who have meant something to me.
Rayna Jaymes in “Nashville”
Nashville was a very ambitious show where we were really trying to do a lot of things at one time. You know, tell these really big stories, create incredible music. What I could say about being an executive producer on that show was really just trying to embody all of those elements and keep the value.
Dean Walker in “Promising Young Woman”
That was a really tough one, to be speaking as the woman who is not standing with other women. It’s a very sort of patriarchal perspective, and there are so many women like this. It pushed me to really try to understand, “what is it that makes them tick? Why do they believe what they believe?”
With every role, I want to make sure that I’m learning something new about myself or about women or how we function or what we’re capable of or where our power comes from.
Nicole Mossbacher in “The White Lotus”
The White Lotus, for me, it’s about Mike White. It’s about the writing. It’s about the direction. It’s about the vision, which is so specific and so clear. You get to really sink your teeth in. I got that script very early on. It was during COVID[-19], and he was like, “Listen, will you help me understand this character better?”
She could easily have just been this stereotypical woman who has accomplished a lot. But it is my rule in life that I am not going to play women who have achieved power as “stereotypical.” I’m not going to do it, [be]cause they’re not. Every single one of them has a unique experience.
The dynamic of trying to achieve as a woman in a world that is not welcoming to women who achieve… that puts a woman in such a challenging position every single day. And then she has her family around her who have these specific expectations of her that also are sort of culturally dictated. She’s not conforming to that either. It creates the dynamic that we got to see in the Mossbachers.
Ellen in “Phony”
There was a lot of conversation about, “What does it mean to just look different [and] not having it just be like, ‘I need to look as beautiful as possible.’” That’s the thing that I think was thrilling about it for me, and exciting, and also a little terrifying. It’s a lot of attention to my face and to every detail of my face, and then [thinking about], “What are the changes that we’re making to every detail of the face?” It ends up being, actually, a very vulnerable process.
It becomes so normalized to just see women change their appearance so that they look better or they conform to a certain set of standards that are supposedly “younger” or “better.” We’re used to that. This is a little less familiar. I think it’ll be something sort of interesting for audiences to comprehend and understand.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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