With a new season of The Wilds now available to stream on Prime Video, it’s time for a brand new episode of Collider Ladies Night with one of the show’s hugely talented cast members. We were lucky enough to have Mia Healey on for Season 1, and now it’s time to put the spotlight on Reign Edwards for Season 2!
Edwards’ Rachel is central to one of Season 1’s biggest cliffhangers. After finally getting to a better place and heading back into the water, Rachel is attacked by a shark in the finale episode. Not only does she lose her hand during the encounter, but she also loses her sister, Nora (Helena Howard).
It’s hard to imagine much bigger character challenges to tackle for an actor, but Edwards was ready for it. During our Collider Ladies Night conversation, we retraced her steps in the industry which revealed a few key influences and production experiences that gave her the tools she needed to tackle such deeply emotional material with great nuance and heart, beginning with her mother who was willing to do whatever it took to help Edwards live her dream. That included driving her cross-country to Los Angeles and also making sure Edwards understood the necessary work ethic required to make it as an actor. Here’s how she put it:
“I’m grateful because my mom was very up front about it. She was like, ‘If you want this, you’re gonna have to work extremely hard for it. There are thousands of other people that are wanting to do the same thing, so you need to make sure you have all these different skills so that you can stand out. You need to really put in the hard work.’ With that, it was just like, okay, either I’m gonna do it or not, and it’s also possibly going to take a long time to get there. A lot of people see me now and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re 25 and you have all these different things.’ I’m like, ‘I’ve been doing this since I was a kid.’ It’s a lot of hard work and perseverance. I remember I would be going to school and then after going to school go straight to performing in theater at this state theater in Baltimore, Maryland, go and do that, then go back to school the next day. So having that understanding that it was going to be hard work from a young age really helped out with that.”
That advice paid off big time because Edwards kicked off her career by working on over 250 episodes of the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful on CBS. There’s nothing quite like the fast-paced production process of a soap opera, so Edwards certainly did walk away from that experience with some highly valuable tools in her acting toolkit, but making the move to shows like MacGyver and Snowfall still came with a bit of a learning curve. She explained:
“Coming out of the soap opera world into the primetime world, I was like, ‘Man, I’m so much more prepared than a lot of people because I can learn my lines like that and then it gives me more time to do character work if I want to,’ all this stuff. But then, something I did learn that was the flip side, the challenge of being in primetime was that because it’s longer shooting, even just for one scene or one arc, you have to sit in those emotions a lot longer than you do when you’re in the soap opera world. Soap opera world, I could get through having a baby, crying all day, breaking up with my boyfriend all in one day and then go home and be like, ‘Did that. Leave it there!’ But in primetime, you do half of the breakup in one day and then you have to finish up the rest tomorrow. I remember when I was filming the movie Hell Fest I did, I went back to my hotel room and I think at this point I had been crying on set for like two days, two/three days, and I went home and I was like, ‘Why do I feel so sad?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t me! This is from my character earlier,’ but because I have to keep going back into it, my body is like, ‘When are we on? When are we off?’ So you really have to find a process for yourself as to easing yourself in and out of those places that I didn’t necessarily have to do in the soap opera world because it was all done in one day.”
Learning about that process on previous projects pays off big time in The Wilds Season 2 because Edwards certainly appears to give every ounce of herself to exploring Rachel’s grief and her tender search for faith and hope. As Edwards explained in a previous interview, tackling the loss of Nora required her to tap into a rather dark and deeply personal headspace; “I have sisters myself, so to kind of somewhat walk a fine line of living in that world of imagining them not being with me is, I think, something anybody can relate to when you have siblings.”
As one might expect, the loss of a loved one consumes Rachel for much of the season, so much so that she never really addresses her other loss, the loss of her hand. No, it may not be something Rachel directly discusses with the other Dawn of Eve characters, but the influence that loss is having on her is extremely apparent. Edwards explained how she looks at it:
“It’s interesting because the focus was more so on Nora, but we didn’t really talk about the hand and what that symbolism is for her, but I kind of found it in the journey because Rachel gets to this place of peace and just letting life happen. That, to me, was kind of how she viewed her hand now. And it was very interesting because Sarah Pidgeon had asked me one day on set, she was like, ‘Hey, do you think that Rachel would consider herself unable to do things or disabled? Would she put that on herself of looking at it in a way where it’s a negative, so to speak?’ Would she look at it negatively? And I was like, ‘I don’t think so.’ I really don’t think that she would anymore. Maybe Season 1 Rachel would. Season 2 Rachel I feel looks at it as, this actually is giving me more power than even having my hand. And she might have to do life a little differently, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not capable of doing amazing things. But with her having both hands, it’s kind of all she saw that she was able to do. She limited herself. It’s this weird irony of having her hand she was actually more limited and unable to do things than not having it.”
Eager to hear more from Edwards? There’s loads more from where this came from! You can catch Edwards’ Collider Ladies Night episode in the video at the top of this article or you can listen to the uncut conversation in podcast form below: