Madelaine Petsch

I'm actually really coming to terms with as an adult because there's so many like ricocheting effects from the way that I was raised that I find in like personal relationships where I really do chameleon to behavior in the room.

So like right now, if all of a sudden your body language changed and you seemed upset with me, I would immediately go into fight or flight.

And I would have to actively work and do the therapy I've done to remove my sense of worry about what I could have done to upset you.

Because that was what I was taught to do as a child.

My father would immediately flip on a dime and, you know, say things that he didn't necessarily mean.

And I immediately as a child, you're like, what did I just do to make him do that?

It was honestly so much less heartbreaking at the beginning of my career because it's just par for the course when you're a new actress in Hollywood.

You don't expect to book anything.

I mean, I always knew that I had the calling to it.

I always knew that this is what I was supposed to be doing, but I never thought it would be easy.

So in the beginning, it was like every rejection was like, okay, let me get the note.

Let me find out why it didn't work.

Let me take notes.

I had a notebook.

I would keep track of, like, the casting director's name, if they told me any personal facts about themselves, any notes they gave me on the character.

And I'd, like, keep all of that in a notebook so I could, like, kind of use that to my advantage moving forward.

It became a lot harder to receive rejection, like, at this point in my career now.

Because there's, you know, when you're going on, there's certain levels of callbacks where, like, I was going on pre-reads, which is, like, before you even get an audition.

So I'm pre-reading with a casting associate.

Sometimes they're not even recording it.