‘Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story’ Boss on Why You’ll Root for the Bad Guys in Lifetime Movie
Preview
We associate Wendi McLendon-Covey with laughs, whether she’s playing Reno 911!’s trashy Deputy Clementine Johnson or The Goldbergs’ over-loving matriarch Beverly. But it was a real-life drama last year that inspired the actress’ latest career step. Like many of us, she was glued to breaking news about Florence, Alabama, corrections officer Vicky White busting her convicted-criminal love interest Casey White (no relation) out of jail and making a run for the Canadian border.
“Wendi saw it unfolding on national television and went, ‘Boy, that woman looks a lot like me,’” recalls Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story director Stan Brooks. A phone call to her manager and then Lifetime led to a green light for this sympathetic take on the stranger-than-fiction saga (premiering Saturday, October 21), with McLendon-Covey on board as executive producer and star.
The movie’s early moments, set in 2020, establish the divorcée’s joylesslife. “Every day is exactly the same,”she laments. Then tall and tattooed Casey (Donald Sutherland’s son Rossif Sutherland, above, with McLendon-Covey) shows up at the Lauderdale County Detention Center. After some initial flirting, which Vicky laughs off, he sincerely tells her, “You’re a good person” — and everything changes.
“I don’t think anyone had ever seen who she was,” explains Brooks of what bonded the unlikely pair. “That was not a come-on line.” Eventually, Vicky is selling her home and buying guns and ammo in her plan to break Casey out and drive them to their happily ever after.
Brooks likens Bad Romance to on-the-lam dramas like Thelma & Louise (1991) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969): “The good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are the good guys.” The fugitives’ feelings for each other are the movie’s beating heart. “Despite the fact that they’re doing something very illegal, you root for them and for this love story,” the director says.
Most viewers will go in knowing the tragic ending to their well-publicized odyssey, when the couple’s vehicle crashed during a police pursuit in Indiana. Still, he asserts, “I do believe those were the best 11 days of Vicky’s life, I do.”
Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story, Movie Premiere Saturday, October 21, 8/7c, Lifetime
