Brittany Snow is intimately familiar with the feeling of being underestimated. Since breaking out as a wide-eyed teenager on the CBS daytime soap Guiding Light and the NBC period family drama American Dreams over two decades ago, Snow has made a career out of playing women whose beauty belies the storm of emotions brewing beneath the surface.
“I think there’s a stigma around people who show up with vulnerability and empathy and wide-eyed enthusiasm and curiosity,” says Snow. “That’s sometimes labeled as not having a very high intellect. I like to be underestimated because I want to prove people wrong. I guess that’s why people see that in my characters. I bring that with me when I do anything.”
Trading in her girl-next-door persona, Snow delivered three vastly different performances over the past year, each featuring a whip-smart woman fighting for her own survival. Last summer, she reentered the cultural zeitgeist playing a liberal transplant who falls in with a group of East Texas housewives in Netflix’s sexed-up, soapy satire The Hunting Wives. She then starred in the streamer’s taut thriller The Beast in Me, playing an unassuming art gallerist who orchestrates the downfall of her homicidal husband. Finally, in Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family, she plays the real-life reporter who helped crack open the case against affluent former South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh.
