Ryan Michelle Bathe dishes on ‘First Wives Club’ and balancing work, life, and love with Sterling K. Brown
Ryan Michelle Bathe is currently starring in the hilarious First Wives Club series on BET+ and we sat down with the talented beauty to find out everything about the series that also stars Jill Scott and Michelle Buteau.Â
“It’s funny and then it’s not funny and then it’s sad and then it’s funny again,” she says of the series. “It really is taking this big swing at how to capture life.”
Helmed by Tracy Oliver, First Wives Club is based on the 1996 film of the same name. It follows Ari (Bathe), Bree (Buteau) and Hazel (Scott) who band together after their marriages fall apart, and who find strength in their sisterhood- and of course a little revenge.
According to Bathe, the chemistry we see between her and her co-stars was easy to accomplish.
“That is something I think I’m the most proud of. It really is to Jill and Michelle’s credit because they’re just extraordinarily generous human beings. They have enormous hearts,” she explains. “They let me in and to know them is to love them.”
It turns out, accepting the role wasn’t an easy decision for Bathe, who shares two young children with her husband, Sterling K. Brown.
“When I first told Sterling about it and told him it shoots in New York and gave him all the bullet points, he was like ‘So it’s a no,” she reveals. “He was right in the sense that it was definitely a challenge. Our kids were really little…We had the Emmys on a Sunday and I was leaving for New York on a Tuesday.”
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Luckily, the couple knows how to talk through issues and figured out a plan that worked for their family, including spending Christmas with their little ones in NYC.
“It was worth it in the sense that I think it was important for me to do something so ambitious and take that on and play this character and really just kind of show myself that I could do it,” she says.
“Sterling and I are at our core, are both artists. I think there are few and far between examples of artists being able to make it work,” she continues. “I think as artists we were taught at our graduate school, NYU, to live really big lives and to experience as much of life as humanly possible so you could bring all of that to our work.”
Check out the full interview above.
First Wives Club is streaming now on BET+.
