Brittany Snow: On ‘Hunting Wives’, Recovery, and Solving the Mystery of Herself

I’ve been alone with Brittany Snow for less than five minutes when she starts to strip. “I’m just going to change right in front of you,” she says, popping the strap of her black slip dress off her shoulder. Silently, I utter a small prayer of thanks that I had the foresight to shave my legs the night before.

No, it’s not like that, though I know what you’re imagining. After all, Snow has had her fair share of tongue-in-cheek, girl-on-girl Hollywood moments: a driver’s seat kiss with Sophia Bush in John Tucker Must Die; a dormitory shower scene with Anna Kendrick in Pitch Perfect; and, overtly, her dalliance with a gun-toting Malin Akerman in The Hunting Wives, Netflix’s breakout hit of the year. (The internet, as I’ve learned, loves a sapphic Brittany Snow subplot.)

This is something else: We’re in a “contrast suite” at Remedy Place in New York City, a downtown respite for the biohacking-curious that bills itself as a “social wellness club.” For the next hour, we’ll alternate between a sauna and a 39-degree cold plunge.

“Who chose these things?” Snow asks no one in particular. “Someone who hates me? Someone who wants me to suffer?”

It’s just the two of us in the sleek gray room. I stand there with a wedgie, in my too-small bathing suit on loan from Remedy, nodding in agreement, terrified to admit the crazy person is me. Of course, I don’t even like this stuff. I just assumed all Los Angeles actors would.

Out of guilt, I volunteer to go first. I slither into the ice bath, summoning the courage to get my breasts below water. When I do, Snow locks eyes with me.

“What were your daughter’s first words?” she asks. She keeps the conversation going, and we discuss her now deceased dog Billie’s diabetes. After a few minutes, I no longer feel the sharp pain of the cold water. I feel numb, calm, safe. And then, somehow, I feel warm.

I climb out, and it’s Snow’s turn. She settles in, wincing. After a few moments of silence I realize that now I am the one who is meant to do the distracting. Instead I’m just standing there agape, watching an actor whose face I’ve seen on movie posters and television for most of my life struggling to grin and bear it. I learn the hard way that I am not one of those people instinctively aware of how to put others at ease, especially strangers. But Brittany Snow is.

She gets out of the tub. She proclaims that she fared better than she thought she would.

“I think the really bad thing about it was not being able to breathe at first,” she says, deadpan.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised to see Snow, now 39, so resilient, so sensitive, and so empathetic. The actor has a complex mental health history, one she went public with long before the proliferation of Notes app confessions on social media and self-produced celebrity documentaries.

Snow landed her first major role at just 12 on the CBS soap opera Guiding Light. From 2002 to 2005, she starred in the television drama American Dreams, then she was onscreen alongside Vin Diesel in the family comedy film The Pacifier. Back in Tampa, where she grew up, she hoarded women’s fitness magazines. “All I wanted was someone to tell me what they were doing so that I could do it too.” Through her childhood and teen years, she “couldn’t even be naked around myself,” she says. “I had so much disdain for my body and I couldn’t see myself as a functional, beautiful being. I only saw the things that were wrong with me.”

By the time she was 21, she had received several different treatments for anorexia, exercise bulimia, depression, and self-harm. Her first stint at an inpatient rehab center was at 19, though she left early to shoot John Tucker Must Die, which came out in 2006. In 2007, Snow penned an essay for People titled “My Nine-Year Struggle With Anorexia” after a video she made for the Jed Foundation about her mental health got picked up by the press. “The People magazine article was me trying to get ahead of the narrative and owning my story,” she says, “but I do feel like I did it too soon.”

The punctuated treatment, the years of trying to make it in the industry—it all caught up with her, and at 23 Snow took time off from acting to focus on her recovery. “My life depended on it,” she tells me after our morning of wellness as we sit in a secluded corner of the garden at the Soho Diner. “I mean, there was no way that I would still be here—and I’m trying not to be hyperbolic.” First, she went back to rehab, though her time there was cut short once again. She pauses before sharing what she says next. “A girl there told everyone in the rehab that she was going to sell my story,” Snow says. “It was really scary, because I had already told her so much stuff and it really felt like a safe place for me to get better. It suddenly wasn’t.” (She adds a quick disclaimer: “And that’s not to say that I was that cool of a person to even sell that story. I’m sure no one would’ve cared. It was just more that I didn’t feel like I could be completely authentic.”) Snow’s parents pulled her out, and with their support she enrolled in an outpatient program, which Snow says saved her life. She committed to it for a year—meetings, classes, individual therapy, 24/7 communication with the program director.

The waitress brings our drinks—coffee for me, matcha for Snow. She fishes around her wallet and pulls out a small packet of stevia, something my grandfather used to do. “Because I’m a psychopath,” she concedes. We order. I am ravenous after being repeatedly sweated and frozen, and ask for an omelet. Snow requests the turkey club, ranch on the side for her fries. The waitress glides away, and Snow continues without missing a beat.

“In rehab, I found there was a lot of relying on the fact that you’re in walls, you’re in a place.” She echoes something I’ve heard before from friends who felt failed by the inpatient eating disorder treatment model. “You’re not going out to dinner, you’re not having to order at a restaurant, you’re not having to be with your friends when they’re all having ice cream and drinking.” The outpatient program presented a different challenge: Could she really live without this illness? Yes—eventually, she could. “I think rewiring my brain where I could count on myself and I could trust myself, I could be in a space and feel like I wasn’t going to do something harmful to myself, was the best thing that ever could have happened to my recovery,” she says.

She spent the following year trying to regain her footing as a human, never mind an actor. When Snow returned to Hollywood, her first big role was Pitch Perfect in 2012. It was apt that she played Chloe, an enthusiastic Goody Two-shoes who, like Snow, was just happy to be there. “I was so grateful, staying after hours,” Snow recalls. “Everybody was complaining about the long shoots and I was like, This is amazing…. I just felt so grateful to be a part of that movie because I didn’t think I was ever going to work again. So that movie was really special to me.” I asked her what she thought of herself, the last time she watched the film. “I just didn’t want to mess up,” she says. “I wanted to do a good job.”

A month after our interview, Chloe Fineman is playing Brittany Snow playing Sophie O’Neil in a short blond wig and a field jacket. On this episode of Saturday Night Live, an entire sketch has been dedicated to The Hunting Wives. Snow will begin filming its second season this month.

The Hunting Wives is full of sex and Southern debauchery, with plenty of nude scenes for Snow opposite Akerman, her will-they-or-won’t-they lady friend turned lover. I ask what it’s like to go from avoiding being alone with yourself in the shower to being naked in front of the world. How does one not relapse? How would you not diet and train yourself sick? But Snow says she hasn’t. Her body and how it looks is not what she thinks about, and the mental gymnastics are no longer part of her day to day. She considers this miraculous. “People would talk about that sort of recovery and I would always be like, Oh my God, that just seems so not something that’s going to happen to me.”

Now she focuses on her characters: how they move, what they feel. Now her body is a running joke. A character in and of itself. She acknowledged as much at Remedy Place earlier, grabbing her lace bra from its neat spot atop her folded dress. Stepping behind a curtain to change would be futile. “Everyone’s seen me naked,” she laughs.

The Hunting Wives was not Snow’s first time so exposed on camera—she played a porn star in X (2022)—but it was vulnerable nonetheless. It always is when you’re doing something so personal in front of a crew, she says, which made her all the more appreciative of working with Akerman.

“I’ve found a lot of men in sex scenes are really, really focused on themselves and how they look and if their abs are looking great and not necessarily thinking about your experience,” Snow says. “And with Malin, it was so collaborative in terms of like, ‘Are you okay? Do you want me to do this? Is this okay if I put my hand here?’ Just so much care was taken, which felt really nice.” There were a couple of scenes where Snow didn’t feel like showing her boobs. “Just press up against me and I’ll show my ass,” she recalls Akerman insisting. “She definitely leads with a lot more swag, Swedish confidence. And I’m much more, ‘Hi. Don’t want to take up much space. Everything okay?’”

The show—along with the other two series Snow stars in this fall, Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family and Netflix’s The Beast in Me—is a noticeable pivot from her wide-eyed, bubbly early-career roles that helped define Hollywood in the early 2000s. I rented John Tucker Must Die on VHS to watch at sleepovers, listened to the Hairspray soundtrack on my first iPod. “I think that in those days, I needed to be a part of movies that made me fall in love with life again,” she says.

It’s not unusual for actors to end up doing work that reflects what they’re going through in real life, Snow tells me. Interesting, then, that her three latest projects—and her biggest to date—are “murder shows,” as another SNL sketch, this time from 2021, would dub them: crime (or true crime) plots driven by complicated women. You know, the type beloved by wives and mothers and millennials.

She takes a bite of turkey club, creating a well-timed dramatic pause. Snow pushes the throughline further: It’s not just murder that connects these shows, but “basically, the patriarchy,” she says, very matter-of-fact. “And how men in society have upheld this systemic way of dealing with things.” I feel myself nodding. “Not to make this a men against women thing, but there are these dynasties and ways of doing things that are just so normalized.”

So by her own line of thinking, what do these projects say about Snow? “Energetically what’s being called in is that I love figuring things out—puzzle pieces,” she says, and here is where I have to mention the divorce.

Snow and her ex-husband, Tyler Stanaland of Selling the OC, separated in 2022. “I think people forget that when I got married, I got married to a real estate agent. He wasn’t even in my business whatsoever. He was definitely not a reality star,” she says. Snow reiterates that she “did not sign up for that.” She watched the cracks in her marriage play out from her couch, just like the rest of America. She does not explicitly make the connection between the ending of her relationship and the flavor of all three projects she’s in now, but it’s hard for me not to. It seems, well, like it would make a good mystery.

“It felt like it was a running snowball that I couldn’t catch,” she says. “I didn’t know what the heck was going on because it was so public and I couldn’t control it.” But there was a lesson in that for Snow. “I know the truth…. That’s all that matters.”

After the divorce, Snow was in so much pain that she couldn’t eat. So she started talking to herself “like a kid.” “I’d be like, ‘Okay, baby girl, do you want a bagel? Let’s get you a bagel. We’re going to toast it. We’re going to put some cream cheese on it. Is that all you can eat? Okay, that’s okay.’”

She kept at it, and something incredible happened to the woman who spent much of her life battling a voice that said food was the enemy: “I started realizing that I was eating whatever I wanted.” The practice, which she has maintained since, “completely changed my way of thinking about my body,” she says. “I was talking to myself like someone I loved. And then I just never stopped doing that.”

This is, essentially, the ethos of September Letters, a writing community and therapeutic writing experience Snow created with her friend, entrepreneur Jaspre Guest. Anyone can submit a letter, anonymous or not, about any subject of their choosing. “We ask you to focus on hope,” the cofounders write in the brief guidelines provided on the website.

Snow is working on upholding that level of softness: speaking to herself like a child and patiently putting together puzzle pieces, solving the mystery of herself. She wants kids, she says. She is the happiest she’s ever been, “in all areas of my life.” She sees a “holistic therapist,” she says, who does EMDR and a “form of hypnotherapy,” a modality that Snow has used on and off since she was 27. She reminds herself to not self-destruct. “That has always been my problem.”

A week before this cover goes to press, Snow and I have a final phone call. A lot has changed since we saw each other eight weeks ago. Murdaugh reached number one on Hulu. She was the subject of the aforementioned SNL skit, of course. There have been red-carpet events, get-ready-with-me videos, appearances on late night shows and podcasts. She presented at both the Emmys and VMAs. “She is everywhere,” a friend texts me.

Snow is, improbably, having a moment, a shimmering second coming reserved for the few former child actors who manage to survive the undertow of early fame. It is difficult not to root for her. After all, as Snow said herself, she’s lucky to even be alive. “I always knew I was supposed to be doing this and that I could get here,” she tells me with shocking clarity. “I just didn’t know when.”

I asked if people are treating her differently now, in the soft halo of her turn towards dramatic, prestige television. She considers the question and says yes, that it’s bizarre and surreal. “I’m so grateful that I’ve had both sides of this, because I really do know the people that really care about me—the people that were with me and around me when I couldn’t get a job and I didn’t know what I was going to do—and wanted to hang out with me just as much.”

She says that when she was in her early thirties, one of her close friends in the industry took her out to drinks and said that they didn’t think she was going to make it, adding that, as Snow quotes, “I don’t think that this is the job for you.”

“This was a person who was my family, and I remember having a real soul-searching couple months, wondering if she was right, wondering if I should quit, wondering if I would ever work again,” she says.

That person was wrong.

The last of Snow’s big three debuts this year, The Beast in Me, releases November 13. It seems destined to be the buzziest of them all. Snow plays Nina, the wife of a suspicious real estate mogul whose previous wife mysteriously disappeared, starring alongside Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. They began filming the first two episodes before the script was locked for the rest of the series. Snow thought both she and her character had greater potential than what was offered and sought to convince the writers and producers to make Nina a more integral part of the plotline. “I’ve really dealt with that a lot in my life, feeling like I’ve been underestimated or put into a box of being one way,” Snow says. When she read what was written for Nina, she felt the same. “I advocated for myself, and I don’t know if I would’ve done that in my younger years.” It worked: The creative team supported Snow in her aspirations for the character.

I think back to something Snow said to me at Remedy Place. We were lying side by side, having lymphatic compression therapy in a small, dark room, wearing stockings that made us look like characters from Cat in the Hat. She told me about the book she’s reading: Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You.

“It’s basically my biography,” Snow chuckled from her chaise. “I care about everything. All the time. But I think that’s sort of the superpower too.”

Photographer: Pat Martin
Stylist: Kat Typaldos
Hair: Glen Oropeza
Makeup: Samuel Paul
Manicurist: Zola Ganzorigt
Production: Magic Creativeworks
Writer: Hannah Pasternak