Ashley Benson plays the former-fat girl Hannah on Pretty Little Liars who has already had a run in with the law. I recently sat down with her in Hannah’s kitchen to get the dirt on the hit ABC Family show that airs Tuesdays at 8p! We got to know her as sweet little Abby on Days of our Lives, but on PLL she is anything but and I am liking it but as you will see she is loving it even more. When you watch the above interview you have to let me know if Ashley is more like Abby or Hannah?
When I asked Ashley to tell me about Hannah she said, “Hannah’s really fun. She the new ‘It Girl’ at school. She’s really adventurous and very fashionable. Definitely the most fashionable of all the girls. She’s really sarcastic, they’re making her have great one-liners. She brings a lot of comedy to the show, which I really enjoy because the show is a drama but my character really lightens it up. All the characters do, but they have some great scenes for her. She really cool.” Hannah is the cool one and also the bad one because in her first scene of the show she was using the five finger discount at a store and that was just the beginning of us seeing her do things she shouldn’t!
And now Hannah, as she told me is also having a new beginning, since her friend Allison disappeared a year ago she has assumed the role. The once fat girl who couldn’t dress, is now the skinny fashionista.
Well if you are on a show like Pretty Little Liars, that means there will be flashbacks and in those flashbacks we get to see fat Hannah. So Ashley let me in on a little secret, for the first few episodes they were layering her clothes for the flashback scenes, but in the upcoming Homecoming episode she will be wearing a fat suit for the first time. She added that as soon as she put it on she had to take a picture in it.
Even though putting on a fat suit might not sound a like a lot of fun, Ashley is loving her job. She excitedly told me, “Honestly she is my favorite part to play. She is so funny, like she is just so awkwardly, socially bad. She doesn’t know what to do with herself. I feel so bad for her.” Even though she feels bad for her character, I think her character is the cool one. Even when a boy turns her down, she doesn’t let anyone see that it hurt her.
Something that Ashley wanted us to now about Hannah, “I am playing a ‘mean popular girl’ and they have really transformed her to be the sweet funny girl at times really sarcastic. Still has the aspect of the popular girl with a little bit of bitchiness (she whispers ‘Can I say that?’ to her. They are really making her leveled out which is really cool because I don’t want to portray Hannah as just the mean girl cause she’s so much more than that. She’s really not that at all. I feel like she does that because she is insecure.” She is really portraying her as so much more and it is fun to see her be more than the “mean popular girl”.
This is a different role than she has played in the past and even though this is her first nighttime soap, she really made a name for her self as Abby Deveraux on Days of our Lives, so I had to ask the 20 year old actress how being on that soap prepared her for this show. You have to watch the above interview to see what she said.
We have seen Hannah steal, lie, go through parental and boy issues, so what is coming up for her. She told me, “She is quite the investigator actually. You’ll see she loves to get herself into situations that she really can’t get out of. She thinks she is a spy or an investigator. It’s really awesome.” What will be awesome is when she uses her investigation to learn her mom’s (Laura Leighton’s) secret, that should definitely cause a lot of conflict between the mother and daughter.
Tune in to find out if Hannah will be the first one to find out who is -A and what funny one-liners the writers give her every Tuesday at 8p in ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars.
