The twin trope is a time-honored soap opera staple, so it’s not surprising that, in the final season of “You” — the campy, heightened Netflix series that stars Penn Badgley as “nice guy” serial killer Joe Goldberg — Anna Camp plays a pair of identical twins. As both Raegan and Maddie Lockwood, half-sisters of Joe’s extraordinarily wealthy and powerful wife Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), Camp turns in a masterful dual performance, especially because the two women couldn’t be more different. Raegan, a cutthroat employee and board member of Lockwood Industries who’s furious that her late father Tom (played last season by Greg Kinnear) made Kate the CEO of the company, will stop at nothing to undermine her half-sister and barely has time for her husband and daughter. Maddie, a socialite whose job Joe describes as “vaguely PR” who’s been married several times and calls Joe “Boo-Boo” in a way that’s not not flirtatious, is bubbly and blithely, blissfully unaware of what’s going on at Lockwood Industries at any given moment. Camp seems to be having tremendous fun in her two roles, and it shows; Raegan and Maddie are a delightful addition to “You” in its final stretch.
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Camp has been working for decades now, between a recurring role on the HBO hit “True Blood,” a stint on “Mad Men,” a brief turn on “The Mindy Project,” and films like “The Help” and “Café Society,” but you probably know her from her canceled-too-soon Amazon original series or, perhaps, a trilogy of films about the art of a capella. Here’s where you’ve seen Camp before her major supporting role on the 5th and final season of “You.”
Pitch Perfect (2012-2017)
Back in 2012, you couldn’t go a few minutes without hearing something about “Pitch Perfect,” director Jason Moore and screenwriter Kay Cannon’s a capella comedy that made Anna Kendrick’s “Cups” song into a viral hit. Probably influenced by the massive success of a capella series “Glee,” “Pitch Perfect” introduces us to Kendrick’s character Beca Mitchell, who enrolls at Barden University and prefers to keep to herself before she finds herself a part of the a capella scene and joins the Barden Bellas. That’s where Anna Camp comes in. After losing the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella the previous year because she projectile vomited all over the stage during the performance — a sight we’re treated to in the movie’s opening sequence — Camp’s Aubrey Posen rules the Barden Bellas with an iron fist, determined to stick to their pre-approved setlist and return to the championship to crush the university’s all-boys group the Treblemakers. (Also, during one rehearsal, she projectile pukes everywhere again, creating a veritable ocean of the stuff, so that’s two puke scenes performed by Camp in this film if you’re keeping score.)
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We meet Aubrey as a senior in the first “Pitch Perfect” movie, and Camp reprises her role in the 2015 sequel “Pitch Perfect 2” when the remaining Bellas, including Beca and Chloe Beale (a very funny Brittany Snow), need to whip themselves into shape for yet another competition and attend a retreat run by Aubrey. Camp also returns for “Pitch Perfect 3” in 2017, which meets up with the Barden Bellas after they all graduate and realize they want to keep performing together. The sequels definitely overstay their welcome, producing pretty diminishing returns, but Camp brings a truly unhinged intensity to Aubrey that’s always fun to watch on-screen throughout the “Pitch Perfect” trilogy.
Good Girls Revolt
I’m going to start with the bad news here. In 2016, Amazon Prime canceled their original series “Good Girls Revolt” after just one season, which is awful; the series was a whole lot of fun and definitely could have gotten even better with a few more seasons. Still, if you want to see Anna Camp in a starring role, you can stream her in this period piece based on Lynn Povich’s nonfiction book of the same name that centers around young female news writers in 1969. Camp plays Jane Hollander, who works alongside other newsmakers Patti Robinson (Genevieve Angelson) and Cindy Reston (Erin Darke) at the fictional “News of the Week” magazine (a take on Newsweek, where Povich worked in real life). Povich’s experience suing Newsweek for discrimination against its female employees is the presumptive endpoint of the series — though it ends before their legal complaint is filed — and we learn, throughout the show, that Patti, Cindy, and Jane are paid less than their male colleagues and denied bylines in favor of the men as well.
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“Good Girls Revolt” is a fun show that never got a chance to truly get off the ground, and it still marks one of Camp’s only lead roles (the versatile and very funny actress is usually relegated to a supporting role). If you really want to do a deep dive of Camp’s work, don’t miss this show; despite being canceled after just one season, it’s worth a watch (and is streaming on Amazon Prime Video). Solana Token Creator
