Ashley Brooke (‘A Small Light’) discusses portraying Anne Frank’s sister Margot: ‘She had a diary too, but it was never found’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

“Until this project, I didn’t even know that Anne Frank had a sister,” admits Ashley Brooke, who portrays Anne’s older sibling Margot Frank in the Holocaust-themed eight-part limited series “A Small Light” that premiered with a pair of episodes on May 1 on Nat Geo and repeated May 2 on Disney+ and Hulu. “I’ve had Anne’s diary in my room since I was a little girl, and was told the story at a young age. But I must have forgotten a lot because I really had to start at ground zero when I started researching Margot. I fell in love with her little quirks. She’s really the opposite of Anne in terms of personality, more quiet and reserved. She likes to follow the rules.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.

Unfortunately, this was a time where the rules didn’t matter, particularly for the Jews of Europe.

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The story told in “A Small Light” is one the public knows well, and yet perhaps at the same time not at all. It’s the one about Anne Frank (played in the series by Billie Boullet, but it’s told from the perspective of Miep Gies (portrayed in the series by Bel Powley), the courageous young Austrian woman who hid Frank and her extended family (also including her father) in an Amsterdam dwelling that came to be known as the Secret Annex. In “A Small Light,” Gies is a twentysomething secretary whose Jewish boss Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) asks her to shelter him and his family from the Nazis as persecution of the Jews continued to intensify in 1942.

SEE‘A Small Light’ premiere in NYC: Makers of Nat Geo limited series discuss its ‘heartbreaking’ relevance to today’s world [WATCH]

Brooke learned in her research of Gies’ account that Margot Frank had her own diary “that unfortunately was never found” before the Frank girls were murdered in the notorious Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen. “I always go back to what really would have been in Margot’s diary,” she says. “I really would love to have seen it. It would have been a completely different perspective from Anne’s.” She praises the writing of Tony Phelan and Joan Rater for their realism in “portraying the way a 16-year-old girl would behave on a day-to-day basis. as well as what it was like to be a Jew in the Holocaust and the fear of that.

“I think Miep was actually a modern woman living in a non-modern world back then. I find a lot of myself in Miep. She’s falling in love and having problems with her family and friends. She’s the type of person we can all see a bit of ourselves in. What she did for the Frank family was such a courageous act, and our series poses the question, ‘What would you have done?’. Miep was fearless and the kind of person I’d have wanted to be. She chose justice and the right path in the face of fear.”

SEEMiep Gies is poised to become the face of Holocaust resistance with ‘A Small Light’

Brooke was a longtime child actor who actually got her start on Broadway when she was in the original cast of the musical version of “Dr. Zhivago” at the age of 10 in 2015. She also portrayed Louisa Von Trapp in the Broadway National  Tour of “The Sound of Music.” She’s now finishing her freshman year as a film student at USC. Three days after graduating high school, she was on her way to Europe for the multi-month “Small Light” shoot. While there, she was able to take with her an added bit of inspiration: the spirit of her late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor of the Bergen-Belsen camp.

“When I got this project, my family told me there was a testimony and video of my grandma’s story in the USC Shoah Foundation archive,” Brooke recalls. “The reason I hadn’t really heard about her story directly was the family felt I was too young, and then once I wasn’t, she’d developed Alzheimer’s. I was so honored to be able to watch and her discussing all of those moments of fear – but also the moments of light that had helped her to survive. It brought me right back to Miep and helped me step into my character so much. It just hit so close to home.

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