Christina Hendricks had mere hours to prepare to play Natalia Grace‘s third adoptive mother Cynthia Mans in Good American Family.
“I got cast 30 hours before I was on set. So I had to work very, very quickly,” Hendricks, 49, exclusively revealed in this week’s issues of Us Weekly. ” I had an opportunity to read the scripts and I did watch Investigation Discovery’s The Curious Case of Natalia Grace series that’s out there to try and get as much information as possible. Then I worked with a dialect coach because we wanted Cynthia to stand out in a little bit of a different way from the [Barnetts]. So I did all of the big fittings and everything in 30 hours and then I was on set.”
Hendricks called it a “fast and furious” process. “But I digested as much as I could in that amount of time,”she said. “I actually was unfamiliar with the story. Then when they reached out to me, I turned to my husband [George Bianchini] and I was like, ‘Oh, this is this wild script.’ And he was like, ‘I know all about that.’ So I think there’s a fair amount of people who do know about it.”
Grace, now 21, was originally born in Ukraine before being adopted at age 7 by Kristine and Michael Barnett. She was diagnosed with dwarfism but one year after moving in with the Barnetts in the U.S., they successfully changed Grace’s birth year from 2003 to 1989 after allegedly suspecting she was a woman pretending to be a child. Despite their claims, Grace was later confirmed via DNA test to be eight years old when her adoptive parents abandoned her.
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Following five-year investigation, the Barnetts were charged with multiple counts of neglecting a dependent in 2019. Michael was later found not guilty while the case against Kristine was dismissed.
While awaiting a trial, Grace was taken in by Mans (who Hendricks portrays on the series) and her family, which is explored in the second half of Hulu’s Good American Family limited series.
“I don’t come until the second part of the story. So Imogen Faith Reid [was already playing Natalia] for a while and she had her rhythm and she knew the character. For me, I was the newcomer and I was like, ‘I’m the new kid. What are you guys doing here? Show me the ropes,’” Hendricks recalled. “So even though Imogen was newer to the business, I was newer to the project. So it was really nice to be able to work with her because she was in it and her creative juices were going. I really got to show up and react to her and what she was doing, which was already so fantastic.”
Hendricks was thrilled to allow her scene partner to “lead the way.”
“It was incredibly easy. She was very open and trusting. Her and I hit it off right away,” she noted. “As dark as this material can be and how difficult it can be to play, we did have good laughs in between. We got to let loose and brighten the mood in between. And we stay in contact and we’re excited to see each other soon.”
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Despite not joining the series at the beginning, Hendricks felt welcome as soon as she was cast, adding, “I trusted [the cast and the crew]. I knew they’d been doing their research and it was a well-oiled machine by the time I got there.”
Hendricks also had the opportunity to do something “really different” artistically.
“I’ve never played a character like this and it is a very different kind of story than I played in the past. I’ve been working on very different things this year,” she shared with Us. “I went from a Victorian piece [with The Buccaneers] to a comedy in Ireland [Small Town, Big Story] to this. So it was a fun year to just try on all these different people and all these different experiences. It was just a way to keep my artistic drive going, try something new and show people that I’m open to something new. That was something really lovely and unexpected.”
New episodes of Good American Family premiere Wednesdays on Hulu.
