Bridgette Lundy-Paine Is Anything But Typical
The rising actress is jumping from the theater to an array of versatile roles on screen, including Netflix's hit show 'Atypical'.
The rising actress is jumping from the theater to an array of versatile roles on screen, including Netflix's hit show 'Atypical'.
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Portland, Oregon native Brigette Lundy-Paine grew up in the theater. “I was two years old when I did my first play,” recalls the 23-year-old artist and daughter of two Bay Area producers and performers. “Instead of sports and all that other stuff, I did plays.” Surrounded by directors, clowns, writers, and a wealth of stories, Lundy-Paine took on a range of nuanced roles—and still does, but on a much larger scale.
Since graduating from NYU with a degree in acting, Lundy-Paine’s films have included The Glass Castle, in which she portrays the youngest daughter in a family of drifters, led by a wildly idealistic, abusive, alcoholic father (Woody Harrelson) who takes the family off the grid, squatting from the American West to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In Netflix’s Atypical, she embodies the take-no-shit, protective older sibling of an autistic high school student. And this spring, she’ll become Four Finger Annie, “a really aggressive stoner who runs the go-kart ride in the theme park,” in Action Point, a raunchy comedy from Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass team. “There were a lot of stunts and a lot of animals,” says the actress. “It was me and five boys and we just played for two months.”
For Lundy-Paine, who is also in a semi-improvisational band, Subtle Pride, in between projects, and originally planned to go into environmental science (“I only got into the two colleges for acting, so the world told me that I had to keep doing it,” she explains), acting can be used to dig deeper than the surface. “I’ve always felt that activism and art go hand in hand,” says Lundy-Paine. “When Atypical came up, I knew it would be something very special and something that hasn’t been done before. [I’m] looking for projects that are inclusive in a way that I think film needs to be and has an option not to be. So, instead of going out for an audition set in Germany in the 1940s, which I know is going to be a project mostly employing white artists, I shy away from that because I don’t believe those stories are the ones we should be highlighting and putting money into now. It’s a tremendous time [to be in film] and so exciting.”
