ANNA CAMP

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Anna Camp may be best known for her roles in True Blood and Pitch Perfect, but her first home will always be the stage. After nearly a decade away from Broadway, she’s making a striking return this fall in Roundabout’s revival of the 1937 British play Time and the Conways, a rarely-seen work that blends philosophical theories on the nature of time with class issues and family drama. “It’s a beautiful and moving play and a play that nobody’s really heard of in the States,” she explains about what brought her back to New York. “It’s a period piece and it’s British, so it’s something that people haven’t seen me quite do, and Rebecca Taichman is such a smart, talented director so I jumped at the chance to work with her again.”

Camp’s emphasis on pushing against expectations marks a new chapter in her career, one which has largely been marked to date by typecasting as what she laughingly calls “uptight bitchy blonde women.” There’s True Blood’s Sarah Newlin, a devoted Christian and ex-wife of a televangelist who oversees a vampire concentration camp and is eventually kidnapped by Alexander Skarsgård’s Eric Northman and held hostage in the basement of his nightclub. There’s Aubrey from Pitch Perfect, the controlling co-leader of the college a cappella group she helps guide to a national championship. And more recently, there’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Deirdre Robespierre, a manipulative and conniving alpha mother whose over-the-top nature serves almost as a caricature of the stereotype Camp finds herself inhabiting all too often. “I’m definitely looking to not do that for a very long time,” she laughs. “I’m done doing that for a while.”

Now thirty-five, Camp says Hollywood was never in her plans. “I never thought I would ever do TV or film,” she explains. “It was all theater, all the time. I never thought I would live in Los Angeles. I always thought I’d be in New York just doing Off Broadway, Broadway, but once I did Equus on Broadway, I got the call to audition for True Blood and then I went out to LA and I fell in love and I never came back.”

Raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Camp started acting classes on the heels of an older sister and quickly became a “total drama nerd” before heading to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts to study acting. “I knew once I got into the high school theater program and I went through college that this was something that I needed to do,” she says. “I feel the most creatively inspired when I’m acting. To be able to make people feel something is what I’ve always wanted to do. Ultimately, as an actor you’re telling stories to make people feel less alone in life and I think that if I’m doing that and getting that response from an audience, then I’m doing the right thing.”

Given Camp’s classical training, she headed to New York soon after graduating intent on pursuing theater, living a life that was in many ways typical of a young creative in the city. “I moved right up to Washington Heights with a group of friends from college and we were paying like $360 a month to live in this apartment and I was going to like four auditions a day,” she recalls. “It’s just so much after you first graduate. Reality just knocks you in the face.”

Camp admits that she was lucky, however, and landed an agent quickly and booked her first regional theater job, The Importance of Being Earnest at the Dallas Theater Center, after about two months. “Ok, I mean it wasn’t that long,” she laughs. She played the lead role in Taichman’s production of Theresa Rebeck’s The Scene the following year, earning a nomination for a Lucille Lortel Award for the play’s Off Broadway run. In 2008, she made her Broadway début in Equus, which also featured Daniel Radcliffe in his first turn on Broadway—at times completely naked. “Everybody was talking about it and a lot of the time people didn’t know that the girl was naked too,” she laughs. “But no, we’re both standing up there for seven minutes fully naked and there’s seating on stage too, so there’s no escape.”

Where many might have been terrified at the prospect of baring all in front of over a thousand people eight times a week, Camp says she was instead invigorated. “I don’t know if I could do it again now,” she laughs. “I was so young and it was so scary, but I just remember thinking, ‘You only live one,’ and how empowering that actually could be if you really embraced your fear of doing that in front of all these people, how much you could accomplish. I went for it and I tell you what, you become numb to it a little bit. You’re just like, ‘I’m naked, he’s naked, whatever,’ and you forget about it.”

Equus led to an invitation to audition for True Blood, and Camp says she made it to the final two in the running for the lead role of Sookie Stackhouse. “I didn’t even know she was auditioning and I passed her in the hallway,” she laughs in reference to Anna Paquin, “and I was like, ‘Oh, well she’s going to get it. She’s really talented and she has an Oscar, so that’s cool.’” Still, Camp impressed creator Alan Ball enough that he kept her in mind when the role of Sarah came around, and the actress says that playing the show’s villain in her breakthrough role was both invigorating and complicated at times. “I got to play a crazy Southern woman, which I know all about, being from the South,” she jokes. “More people were supportive and excited, but we would go to Comic Con and there would definitely be some people who couldn’t separate reality from the character. I would get people who didn’t want to look at me and I’m just like, ‘I’m an actor! Please try to separate it!’”

In the years she her first turn on HBO, Camp has had meaningful runs on a range of television shows, from The Good Wife and The Mindy Project to Mad Men and Amazon’s Good Girls Revolt, but it was Pitch Perfect that brought her to even more widespread attention. “There’s so much heart in it,” she says of the series, for which she will reprise her role in Pitch Perfect 3 this December. “It’s about a group of people coming together and overcoming differences to reach a final goal. It’s about female empowerment and women learning how to work together instead of competing with one another, which is something that I think people need more of.”

Many of Camp’s projects have been characterized by this same sort of strong female ensemble, but she insists that it is not something she has sought out. “It’s just sort of found me, which is very cool,” she says. Time and the Conways, which revolves around a mother and her four daughters and two sons, falls in the same vein, with the added bonus of being directed by a woman as well. The play, with two acts set in 1919 bookending one which takes place in 1937, the year it premiered, contrasts the family’s earlier happy innocence with their sad future reality, with Camp taking a dark turn as a golden girl-turned-abused wife. “Hazel starts out so full of life and everything’s going her way,” she explains. “I always picture myself as this little butterfly that’s soaring around, and then in act two my wings have been clipped. [Back then,] electroshock therapy for women was a big thing if they were difficult so we’ve interpreted that I’ve threatened to leave my husband but if I leave, he’ll have me committed. She’s trapped and chained in this loveless marriage, because if not she’ll get sent to an asylum.”

The role is physically and psychologically exhausting, requiring Camp and her castmates to toggle dramatically between emotional highs and lows, but she says the play still offers a hopeful note, if one that comes with a bit of caution. “I think the play is saying a lot about how what we do in our present affects what happens in the future,” she explains. “There’s so many ways that it can get messed up in the future, so we’re offering a warning to not take your life for granted and to invest in positivity and love, because life is so fleeting. It’s a warning to live your life to the fullest, but positively.”

As for Camp’s own future, do not expect more of the same. With the Uptight Blonde in her past, she’s ready to take on new challenges and seek out the unexpected. “I would like to play somebody whose life is in complete and total disarray and who makes all of the wrong choices,” she says, “somebody that people can relate to who’s just real.”

Time and the Conways runs through November 26. Pitch Perfect 3 is out December 22.