Lauralee Bell Talks Breaking Bad in Lifetime’s VC Andrews Ruby Movies

This weekend, Lifetime will drop not one but two new movies based on books by VC Andrews — the first in a four-part series of TV movies that will conclude next weekend, with one movie each hitting on March 20th, 21st, 27th, and 28th. The Ruby Movie Series Event follows Ruby Landry as she explores the depths of her curious family tree, including her wealthy and mysterious estranged father. The movies feature performances by Raechelle Banno, Karina Banno, Naomi Judd, Gil Bellows, Lauralee Bell and Ty Wood. The series goes from Ruby on Saturday and Pearl in the Mist on Sunday, to next week’s All That Glitters (Saturday) and Hidden Jewel (Sunday).

For Bell, who has played sweet and caring women for most of her TV career, the role of Daphne — a mean-spirited and money-grubbing “evil stepmother” — is a change of pace that is likely to surprise her Young and the Restless fans as much as it delights the VC Andrews crowd.

The movies were shot almost exactly half-before and half-after the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down production for a few months and scattered the cast and crew, with some remaining in Canada while others returned to the US, and the two young stars of the series headed back to their native Australia for lockdown.

“Because we were shooting on Victoria Island we got a couple of extra days,” Bell recalled during a recent conversation with ComicBook. “When we heard that shows in Vancouver were shutting down, we still got an extra few days, just because we were pretty much removed from like the masses of people, and we just felt very safe and kind of disconnected.”

Four months later, she said, they were back at work on Victoria Island, completing the four-movie series that launches tomorrow night.

For Bell, who is best known as a warm and likable character, the experience of going “bad” for the role of this distant, cruel stepmother was a jarring one. Not so much in terms of finding the performance — she actually told us she slipped into it fairly effortlessly — but being sure that the evil was at the right level.

“Of all the other movies I’ve done, I never want there to be a ‘fake’ moment,” Bell said, noting that she approaches most roles with a grounded, natural approach to her performance. “With this, I had to go to the director and just say, ‘It’s so foreign for me to be this over the top. So if this looks silly, like you’ve got to tell me. I will be grateful, not offended in any way.’”

Luckily for them, what they realized is that for Daphne Dumas, the character Bell has taken on in the series, too much is rarely enough. The hard part, then, was recapturing that exact voice, almost a year later, when she had to record some lines in an ADR booth. Without the house and the wardrobe and the co-stars to bounce off of, she admitted with a laugh that she found herself wondering what voice she had used to capture the character.

“We sort of realized that with Daphne, there was no limit,” Bell explained. “She just doesn’t care what other people think. She is all about her, and so there is no real wrong.”

Everything, she said, from the mansion and the wardrobe to the dark, bold lipstick choices helped to isolate Bell from Daphne (“I would morph into someone that was really quite unrecognizable”). Finding a new character and building those new relationships is a very different beast to what she does on The Young and the Restless, where she is more than 1,000 episodes deep into her run and in a comfort zone so complete that the audience can feel it.

Actually, that might not be exclusive to her comfort zone. Soaps have a long history of porting actors over to superhero programming, with the archetypal characters and larger than life situations attracting a very particular kind of performer…but also a very particular type of audience.

“The crazy thing about soap audiences and comic audiences is, the fans will hit you on mistakes,” Bell told us. “They know your characters as well as you do, or at least they have it in their mind how it will be….I say, what’s so unique about The Young and the Restless is that so many of us are the same actors in the same roles for so many years, that two of us get in a room and we do not have to say a word. Our audience would be able to understand what’s going on.”

Essentially, she suggests, the audience knows the characters so well that if you put any given duo together, they can guess with some accuracy how the two would bounce off one another in that situation. Their plan, then, is to be entertaining and surprising without violating that base expectation.

“They could do the whole narrative, because they know what these two people together would be thinking and doing, and it’s fun to have an audience like that,” Bell said. “They’re so invested. I think when you get Hallmark viewers or when you get Lifetime viewers, they’re on that network for a certain kind of entertainment.”

A soap opera job also means that she has done more work since wrapping on the Ruby series than a lot of actors do in five times that long. She puts a funny spin on it, noting that she’s the kind of actor who takes behind-the-scenes photos on her cell phone, but a year later, it takes a lot of scrolling in her phone to find where February 2020 went.

For an actor who is most identified with a squeaky-clean character that even the actress concedes can be a little uptight, playing a deliciously despicable character like Daphne has to be a fun ride. In her most frustrated moments, Bell said, the way Daphne talks to her stepdaughters is how she would like to snap back with her own kids…but that’s not how most real people are wired, and Bell would like to think that her own maternal instincts fall more into line with Christine Williams than Daphne.

V.C. Andrews is a writer whose cache has not diminished much since becoming a household name with Flowers in the Attic. It’s a rarity that a novelist becomes a brand unto themselves, usually reserved for people like Stephen King and Michael Chrichton, who have had numerous other-media adaptations of their best known works. Andrews, on the other hand, has had relatively few, allowing for the distinct possibility that this will be a project fans are still talking about in 20 years.

For Bell, that would be wonderful. She told us that she has a great deal of affection for Andrews, who was a trailblazer in making sure that women could have a voice and be heard, even if she was doing it primarily through fiction.

“My mother had a talk show in Chicago for 30 years and she won multiple local Emmys for broaching the subject of rape. She talked about all these difficult social issues. And so when I would read about V.C. Andrews, it was very similar. There were comments on an issue, and instead of backpedaling, she’d dive into the topic and she wasn’t afraid.”

“I connect so much on that level because my role model, my mother, was very much a part of that standard,” Bell added, paraphrasing the standard as, “I’m a woman and I have a story to tell, and no one’s going to tell me that it shouldn’t be talked about.”

The VC Andrews Ruby Movie Series Event kicks off with Ruby, which premieres Saturday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Lifetime.