Katie Stevens goes from ‘Faking It’ to making it
The new Freeform series “The Bold Type” focuses on three close friends living in a major metropolitan area who split their time between working and talking about life over drinks. Most of the time they’re doing this while sitting around in clothes that most young professionals would have to save years to afford.
If “The Bold Type” sounds familiar, you are not alone. It didn’t take series star Katie Stevens long to see how the show would be compared to “Sex and the City.” Along with Stevens, the show’s central trio features Aisha Dee as Kat and Meghann Fahy as Sutton.
“I remember after my show, ‘Faking It,’ got canceled, I was having meetings with different casting departments. I sat down with the people at Freeform just for a kind of get-to-know-you meeting,” Stevens says. “The women at Freeform were telling me about this new show and sold it to me as a modern day ‘Sex and the City.’”
Stevens is excited people are comparing her new drama to a program like “Sex and the City” because it has had a loyal following since its launch in 1998. The 24-year-old Connecticut native has been performing since she was 3, including an eighth-place finish on the ninth season of “American Idol” when she was 16. The four short seasons she spent on “Faking It” have been the longest job in her career.
As soon as Stevens read the script, she connected with the character of Jane, an aspiring writer whose biggest detractor is herself. Jane will have to find her writer’s voice while living in the glamorous world of fashion magazine publishing. The three friends work at Scarlet, a publication that has gone from an extreme focus on beauty to an expanded look at all of the elements that come together to make a well-rounded woman.
The connection to Jane was easy for Stevens because she saw a lot of herself in the character after only reading one script.
“Obviously, we don’t do the same thing careerwise, but I can be a little type-A. I think a lot of people, like I did, will be able to relate to having a vision of how you expect your life to go and where you want to go,” Stevens says. “Then you begin to figure out it’s going to a little more difficult than you anticipated.
“For Jane, her dream all her life was to work at Scarlet and she romanticized how that would turn out and how her first day would turn out. She never anticipated it would be so difficult.”
Having an optimistic view of life is something the singer/actor understands. Stevens laughs as she talks about how when she was young, there was never any doubt in her mind that all she had to do was move to Los Angeles and her career would go into high gear. Her appearance on “American Idol” gave her some notoriety, especially because she was part of the show’s touring company that year.
What followed was a series of small roles including playing Marg Helgenberger’s daughter in the series finale of “CSI.” The MTV comedy series “Faking It” was her biggest break. Those successes were mixed with years of chasing her dream, facing the grind of endless auditions and learning how to deal with the rejection that flows through Hollywood. That never stopped her from chasing both an acting and singing career.