‘Good American Family’ Stars on the Challenges of Dramatizing Natalia Grace’s Story

The story of Natalia Grace has captivated true-crime enthusiasts for the last few years because it proves that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Now, Hulu’s Good American Family is bringing it to the screen in a star-studded dramatized version.

There is a twist to this new take, though: The first four episodes follow the winding events as alleged by Natalia Grace’s former adoptive mother, Kristine Barnett, showcasing a mother who desperately believes her family has been infiltrated by a dangerous adult masquerading as a child. Then, the back half of the miniseries shifts the tone entirely and envisions everything from the eyes of a cruelly mistreated and abandoned child with physical disabilities. What results is an effective and emotionally evocative recapitulation of the many wild revelations of the case that’s somehow more than just a ripped-from-the-headlines drama.

Presenting those two very different sides of the same coin required the series’ leads to essentially play two characters — particularly Ellen Pompeo as Kristine and newcomer Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia Grace.

“I think I preferred playing the beginning of the series when she’s just an ambitious woman who thinks that adopting a child is going to fix her family… I think that’s something a lot of people can identify with is a broken relationship and thinking a child is going to fix it,” Pompeo told TV Insider of the duality of her performance. “That was much easier to play than what we see in the back half of the show.”

Disney / Hulu

Like Pompeo, Reid was also partial to the portrayal that was more sympathetic to her character: “As Natalia, my version is very manipulative and always one step ahead and things like that. And we move onto my POV where we see her struggle, the abandonment, and I think that was, as an actor, fun to play with both,” Reid said. “I mean, the first four episodes were so much fun, and I just unleashed that image, just ready to come out … my villain era. It was so much fun to play, but I do prefer Natalia’s point of view because it was so heartbreaking, and that’s a nuanced story. It’s hard to get to the truth.”

As Kristine’s (eventually estranged) husband Michael, Mark Duplass also had to tap into a bit of callousness, and he relished the opportunity. “What a joy for me to be able to play someone who seems like a very loving and affable dad but also has his own damage, his own demons to fight, has to confront his own ego,” he said.

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One central cast member who wasn’t based on a specific person was Dulé Hill‘s Detective Brandon Drysdale, an investigator who takes a special interest in bringing the Barnetts to justice, and crafting this persona was a joy for the actor.

“The challenge was creating this person who was an amalgamation of multiple people. So for myself, I really just scoured most of the public record. Thankfully, there’s a lot of information out there in terms of how the different detectives approached the case and the steps that were taken along the way, and that was very informative to me,” Hill said. “[Showrunners] Katie Robbins and Sarah Sutherland also did a great job of adding humanity and his own experience to the equation and the idea of what happened with him personally in terms of his family life. It informed so much to me about why he was so passionate about navigating through the shades of truth that was there in front of him. I loved playing the character. It really was a joy to work with the entire cast, but especially Imogen Faith Reid. She really delivered a phenomenal performance and made doing the scenes so easy because she gave everything that she needed right there.”

Disney / Ser Baffo

Good American Family isn’t the first small-screen take on the true-life tale of Natalia Grace, a girl with a rare form of dwarfism who was adopted by the Barnetts, who later fought to have her legally declared an adult with the help of their family doctor. The recent ID series The Curious Case of Natalia Grace also examined the facts and allegations of the case and brought nationwide attention to the many facets of the story, from Natalia’s journey to having her true age reinstated on government documents to the legal fallout faced by the Barnetts after they were accused of child abandonment for leaving her to live on her own in an apartment and moving to Canada.

Christina Hendricks, who plays Cynthia Mans — the woman who took in Natalia after the Barnetts left, but has faced her own allegations of abuse after the events of the series — said that she hopes audiences will respond to the show’s unique offering. “I think a lot of people have preconceived ideas about this story because they’ve heard tidbits here, a little bit here, maybe they heard a news story, they read something, maybe they saw one episode of the ID series. So I think that if you watch this from beginning to end, you’re gonna have a very, very different feeling about what you think you know about the story,” she said.

Added Duplass, “A lot of audiences are wondering, ‘What is this? What am I watching? Have I seen this before?’ And what I was most proud of in this story was the ability to take eight hours to show something incredibly more complex and give it the time it deserves to show how something like this can spin out like it has, and how there really is no empirical truth. You’re gonna have to watch it all and come up with it on your own.”

Good American Family‘s first two episodes arrive on Wednesday, March 19, with further episodes arriving onto the streamer weekly until the finale on April 30.

Good American Family, series premiere, March 19, Hulu

From TV Guide Magazine

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