Female ‘revolutionaries’ take over Amazon Prime

 

LOS ANGELES — Anna Camp has played a lot of “Type A” characters in her career. So when the producers of the new Amazon series, “Good Girls Revolt,” contacted her, the first thing Camp wanted to know was whether this role would be different.

She found out quickly just how different it is from anything else she’s done.

“She definitely starts out a woman of the ‘50s and, hopefully, by the end of the series, we will see her burning her bra,” Camp says. “There’s a giant arc there that I’m excited to get to play.”

Her role as Jane Hollander is in the series inspired by Lynn Povich’s book of the same name. It looks at a group of young female researchers at Newsweek in the 1960s who ask to be treated fairly by the magazine. Their revolutionary request impacts marriages, careers, sex lives, love lives and friendships.

The cast also includes Genevieve Angelson, Erin Darke, Chris Diamantopoulos, Hunter Parrish, Jim Belushi, Joy Bryant and Grace Gummer.

One of the pluses of the show is that it is set in the 1960s. Camp loves that period, having gotten to play roles from that era in the feature film “The Help” and the cable series “Mad Men.” She sees “Good Girls Revolt” as picking up where “Mad Men” ended.

“At the end of the last season of ‘Mad Men,’ Joan was starting off her own company and starting to really assert herself as a woman in the industry and business,” Camp says. “I feel like our show does pick up pretty much right on that and what happens to the women who then have to come forward and take a stand and assert their rights, and everything like that.”

One of Camp’s resources for her latest job was her mother, who dropped out of college to get married and start a family. That’s exactly what her character in “Good Girls Revolt” wants to do but, in the course of the series, will discover it is just as satisfying to have a career as part of her life.

That’s what made the role different enough for Camp to sign on to the series. She’s grown a little tired of playing uptight woman who are really just very scared and feel like they have something to prove. Her “Good Girls Revolt” is different because she’s on a journey to find out she has nothing to prove.

The role has created an interesting dynamic for Camp. Her character is going from wanting only a home life to embracing her career while she, personally, is going from a long and fruitful career to wanting to stay home and concentrate on her family life.