Audrey Corsa is showcasing her range on two very different shows and having a breakout moment. The actress plays Zoe in the Apple TV+ series Dear Edward and will appear in an upcoming episode of Rian Johnson’s critically-acclaimed hit Poker Face. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Audrey about her Dear Edward character, who is dealing with the tragic loss of her father and navigating a complicated relationship with her mother, played by Connie Britton.
Audrey has “admired” Connie for years and has always wanted to work with Dear Edward creator Jason Katims, who also executive-produced Friday Night Lights. The actress said “working with Connie was just truly better” than she ever could have imagined.
“We really wanted to give this mother-daughter relationship the nuance that it deserves because, in a lot of shows, it can be mom reaching out, daughter slapping hand away, and that pretty much ad nauseam, until you’re just like Jesus Christ, you guys. We really wanted to play to the love there,” Audrey said. “There’s a lot of confusion. There’s a lot of grief. There’s so much I think that the show touches on in terms of just the different ways that different people handle loss. Zoe’s young, and she’s in college. She’s had a lot of things handed to her, and this is just like the rug being ripped out from under her and really reality taking in for the first time in a lot of ways that sort of unfold throughout the season. Things start to crumble even more after her father passes.”
Audrey noted that the relationship between Zoe and her mother will be “push and pull” throughout the season as they deal with the loss of Zoe’s father and Dee Dee’s husband who died in a plane crash. “It’s like an ebb and a flow for them because at certain points. It’s like all you want to do is hang on to the person that you have left,” she explained. “At other points, they’re the person who you can throw all of your anger and resentment for the person who died on. You can use them as the replacement for the person you lost. It just gets confusing and tough and there’s no guidebook for this stuff.”
The All Rise alum hadn’t read Ann Napolitano’s novel ahead of her audition. After reading the pilot and playing the music cues, she realized she had to read the book. “What an interesting study on grief, and it’s very different from the show in a lot of ways. There are stories that exist in the show that don’t exist in the book, but the general world and the core story of Edward are the same. I think that’s such a powerful story,” she said.
In addition to Dear Edward, Audrey will also be appearing in the Peacock series Poker Face. She teased that her character is like your “least favorite theater kid,” so she “got to dig into all my history of that. It was very fun.” Audrey admitted that she thought she had initially “f***ed” up her audition for Poker Face.
“Probably like three hours later, I got a call and they were like, ‘They want you.’ At that point, I was still filming Dear Edward in New York, and we were shooting some stuff upstate. It worked out perfectly with the schedules. They were both shooting at the same time. It worked out perfectly that I could just be picked up from one place and taken to the next and that was so cool.”