‘Sleepy Hollow’: Nikki Reed on Betsy Ross’s Past
Although Sleepy Hollow’s dynamic duo of Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills are fictional, the show always surrounds them with real figures from American history. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington have all appeared in previous seasons of Fox’s paranormal procedural, and Season 3 has added another historical luminary: Betsy Ross, played by Nikki Reed.
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Only this isn’t the Betsy Ross you know from our own timeline… largely because we don’t know that much about her, apart from the whole “sewing the first American flag” thing. “There’s not a lot of information on Betsy that’s necessarily a thousand percent accurate,” Reed tells Yahoo TV. The Twilight star adds that the most surprising fact about the real Ross, who is one of Washington’s spies in the Sleepy world, is her number of marriages, which proved unusually high for the time period. And there might be more romance in the offing: as we saw in last week’s season premiere, Ichabod and Betsy have a history together. “There’s obviously something between them, and she was a part of his life and something that he couldn’t let go of,” Reed says.
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When she’s not playing historical figures, Reed tells us that she’s devoted to the production company she recently launched with her husband, Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder. “One of the things that I’ve found is that writing makes me feel better,” says Reed, who initially broke into the business as the co-writer and co-star of the 2003 drama Thirteen. “Being a woman in this business, you have to create your own material. You have to.”
Sleepy Hollow airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on Fox.
