“I just knew it was time for me to take a departure. I really wanted to involve myself in grittier shows and I wanted to challenge myself in a new way and tell different stories,” actress Monica Raymund says in her exclusive interview with Gold Derby about how she came to new drama “Hightown” (watch the video above). With hundreds of episodes on the commercial broadcast networks under her belt after having fulfilled a six-year contract as a “Chicago Fire” series regular, Raymund departed for premium cable. She laughs, “And then ‘Hightown’ fell into my lap. I had no idea if I was going to land anything. I didn’t know if I was ever going to work again to be honest with you. That’s the risk!”
“The audition process was pretty funny actually,” she recounts about landing the headlining role of agent Jackie Quinones. Raymund reveals: “I was walking back to my car with the creator Rebecca Cutter and one of the executive producers over at Jerry Bruckheimer, whose name is KristieAnne Reed and we were walking and I was getting in my car and I turned to them and said, ‘Listen, you can hire whoever you want to play this role, but I’m Jackie.’ Then I was like, ‘Bye!’ I got the call that night or something and they said, ‘When you said that, that’s when we knew you were the one.’ I don’t know what possessed me that day. I was cocky, but it was also honest. I knew that I was this character and I just followed my heart.
The first season is currently airing on Starz and Raymund is looking forward to viewers seeing the last three episodes especially. She teases, “Stuff really starts to go down. It gets intense; it gets hard. We have super big rock bottoms, then super big highs, so the real drama is highlighted around there.” She adds about the Massachusetts setting as she considers additional seasons, “The world of ‘Hightown’ (the TV show that we’re telling right now) — it’s not just just concentrated in Provincetown or Hyannis; it can go the entire area of Cape Cod, all through that area.”
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