V.C. Andrews’ Dawn Star Brec Bassinger Confesses Childhood Crush on TV Dad Jesse Metcalfe: ‘I Was Obsessed With Him’
Within the first half-hour of the Lifetime limited series V.C. Andrews’ Dawn — premiering Saturday, July 8 at 8/7c — we learn that the titular teen’s parents kidnapped her as a baby, she’s a member of the ruthless and wealthy Cutler family, her high school crush is really her biological brother, and the boy raised as her sibling is her new love interest.
It’s the kind of twisted drama one would expect from the author who also gave us Flowers in the Attic, another salacious tale about an affluent household that won’t let familial relations get in the way of love.
“It will deliver,” Brec Bassinger (Stargirl), who plays Dawn, tells TVLine. “It’s so dramatic. There are twists and turns. I would make jokes on set like, ‘My brother-lover of another…’”
Much like those breakneck plotlines, the process from audition to set for the series was so quick that Bassinger was still reading the first script on the plane headed to Canada to begin filming. Comparing this experience to her work as the lead in the superhero series Stargirl, which ended its three-season run on The CW last December, the actress says both projects were grueling in their own way.
“I think [the first block of Dawn] was emotionally more taxing, and Stargirl might have been more physically taxing,” she explains. “So it was different types of exhaustion, but it was still exhaustion.”
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For Bassinger, one of the highlights of this project was working alongside her childhood crush Jesse Metcalfe, who starred in one of her favorite movies growing up: John Tucker Must Die. In Dawn, Metcalfe plays her on-screen dad Ormand Longchamp, who raises Dawn as his own and is later accused of abducting her.
“I was obsessed with him,” she notes of Metcalfe, sharing that she jokingly contemplated wearing a thong as homage to a scene in John Tucker Must Die. “I was like, ‘What if I just showed up one day… No, Brec. Just stop!”
“That was such a fulfillment for my childhood self to get to work with him,” the Dawn star adds.
