Brittany Snow is in the business of subverting expectations. This becomes immensely clear as she sits in a white terry cloth robe surrounded by a squad of makeup artists and hairdressers who are preparing her to walk the night’s red carpet. Her five-pound dog, Charlie, lounges comfortably behind her, oblivious to the bustle of it all. From afar, a snapshot of this tableau might be perceived as “diva-esque,” but as it happens, conversing on the complexity of her recently played characters, considering their dimensionality as women, while having her face snatched by a stylist, is not Brittany Snow’s usual MO.

“I’ve never done this before!” she laughs while being prodded by a brush. “It’s actually really hard. Am I making any sense?” Snow asks, as her glam team chuckles and we all acknowledge the silliness of the situation. And the reality is—it all makes perfect sense. Her thoughtful, easygoing energy and chemistry with her team makes the conversation feel instantly less like an 11th-hour sprint before a Netflix premiere, and more like a comforting FaceTime with a friend. Plus, when considering the number of projects she’s juggling, this speaks volumes.

Since mid-summer, Snow has played pivotal roles in three separate TV series: The Hunting Wives, Murdaugh: Death in the Family, and The Beast in Me—the premiere of which she will attend after our conversation wraps. In all three series, she plays what one might classify as a “complicated” character whose morals are uniquely tested in the face of truth—or at least their perception of truth as it relates to survival in the face of murder.

“I find that the important thing for me—and these characters too—is that there is a lot of ambiguity about their morals,” she explains. “They’re all existing in this sort of gray area. They’re also acting from instinctual places of survival—and trying to better themselves.” This instinct, Snow explains, was one with which she feels personally familiar.

“I relate to all these women being survivors in a lot of ways, and having to stand up for themselves in a society where not many people would find them a threat, and feel very undermined and underestimated,” says Snow. “And I love playing women that prove that’s not what they should be asked to do.”

In The Hunting Wives, Snow plays Sophie, a former PR executive turned stay-at-home mother from Boston, who finds herself at the center of a murder investigation in a particularly gun-toting town in East Texas. As the show progresses, audiences find themselves questioning what Sophie could truly be capable of—could she kill to save herself? To explore this character’s survival instinct, Snow pulled from her own personal experience.

“I really related to [Sophie] in a lot of ways in my teenage years and early 20s…I was afraid to let myself take up much space in a room,” she shares. “I was very anxious and nervous and wanting to fit in, and keeping myself in a box, or, for lack of a better word, safer.”

Meanwhile, in The Beast in Me, a thriller miniseries which premiered in November, Snow plays Nina Jarvis, the second wife of a massive real estate developer suspected of killing his first wife. Snow’s character’s depth and complexity crescendos through the series, coming to a head in the final episodes, toppling expectations of the characters around her, and the viewers themselves.

“On the surface, you might think that she is the voice of reason, and then at the end she’s the mechanism by which things kind of crumble for the main character. But we’re not really sure if she’s doing that in the most altruistic way…I think she’s the most interesting character that I’ve played in a long time,” Snow explains. “At face value, she is ‘doing the right thing,’ but I think a lot of people might want to go back and look at who she was, and where she came from, and the reasons that she did the things that she did, and wonder if she was just as much of a primal predator as her husband was.”

When exploring her most recent roles in relation to each other—Sophie, Nina, and Mandy, a whistle-blowing journalist who sets a multi-murder investigation into motion in Murdaugh: Death in the Family—they speak volumes about the types of characters Snow is not only drawn to, but deeply relates to.

“I like that I get to play these characters that sort of have those dualities within them, because I think at face value, you might see me, or see a girl that looks like me, and think, ‘Oh, I’ve got it all sort of figured out on the surface.’ And I really do like subverting that.”

As it happens, Snow is finding plenty of ways to surprise her audience on and off screen, doing so with commendable vulnerability and honesty—something that is almost certainly complicated for someone who has spent nearly their entire life in the public eye.

In 2023, Snow released Parachute, her feature-length directorial debut. The film, which she co-wrote with Becca Gleason, follows Riley, a woman in her early 20s who gets out of a rehab facility and finds herself trapped in a cycle of combating body dysmorphia, food addiction, and numbing herself with relationships.

Writing the script, Snow pulled from her own experience navigating eating disorder recovery as a teenager and young adult, a struggle she had been open about for years. If nothing else, Parachute’s raw honesty in its depiction of complex forms of addiction—ones that are often overlooked outside of the recovery community—set it apart.

“[Riley] is somebody who doesn’t know how to be in a room without the understanding of who she is in comparison to someone else, whether it’s their body or them being happy, or how she’s supposed to feel,” says Snow. “With eating disorders sometimes you don’t know how isolating it can feel to be so disconnected from your body…She’s comparing and despairing, but she really doesn’t know what she looks like. She doesn’t even know how to be inside of her own skin, or feel safe inside of her own skin.”

This disconnect is something Snow knows all too well and has spent years navigating and unlearning.

“I worked a lot with myself and with therapy and techniques to get inside of my body, and know that I don’t have to dissociate anymore to feel safe.”

While Snow brought her own life experience into her role as a director, she was thrilled to discover how much of that experience carried back into her acting work.

“On the flip side of that, I think that being a director and learning from Courtney Eaton, who played Riley, and Thomas Mann, who played Ethan, made me such a better actor. I learned a lot from watching them and being in the edit and their process, that when I was ready to go back to acting, I felt like I had a new understanding of acting and of being on the other side and not taking things so personally and just seeing how the sausage is made from a different angle.”

When it comes to finding inspiration for future projects, Snow is an avid reader and lover of podcasts. Lately, she’s been delving into the world of grief, reading about others’ experiences, navigating the subject, and exploring her own relationship with letting go.

“I try to control something beforehand so I can be hyper-vigilant enough to where if it hurts later, I know that I’ve done the work and the research before. And I don’t like that about myself, but at least I know it about myself—that I will always try to soften the blow. And I’m learning, and it’s still something that I obviously need to learn, that you can’t always soften the blow.”

But for now, Snow is thrilled to live in the moment. The following morning, after the glitz and glamour of the premiere, she will jet off to North Carolina—Charlie in tow—to begin filming season two of The Hunting Wives.

“I’m really, really excited. That’s my happy place, being on set of a show that I love. There’s nothing better.”

Photographed by Dennis Leupold

Styled by Jyotisha Bridges

Written by Emma Turetsky

Hair: Owen Gould

Makeup: Jen Tioseco

Nails: Jolene Brodeur

1st: Tommy Blanco

Digital: Will Bliss

Flaunt Film Editor: Roberto De Jesus

Lighting Assistant: Sabrina Victoria

Set Design: Ali Gallagher

Art Department: Zoran Radanovich

Production Assistant: Melanie Perez

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