VC Andrews’ Dawn: Brec Bassinger Breaks Down That ‘Uncomfortable’ Jimmy Reveal — Grade the Premiere
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Lifetime’s new limited series VC Andrews’ Dawn adapts each installment of the bestselling novelist’s Cutler book series — including Dawn, Secrets of the Morning, Twilight’s Child, and Midnight Whispers — into a four-part TV event about the twisted histories of the Cutler, Booth and Longchamp families.
Saturday’s premiere, titled “Dawn” and focused on the series’ first novel, dove right into the drama with Dawn (played by Stargirl’s Brec Bassinger) watching her mother Sally Longchamp (Helena Marie) die, her father Ormand Longchamp (Jesse Metcalfe) getting arrested at the hospital, and her siblings taken into foster care while she was sent to live with the rich classmate who bullied her at school.
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You see, the Longchamps kidnapped Dawn as an infant, and she really belonged to the exuberantly wealthy and influential Cutler family, making her high school tormentor Clara Jean (The Watchful Eye’s Elyse Maloway) and crush Philip (Nancy Drew’s Dane Schioler) her blood relatives.
To make matters worse, her birth family wasn’t exactly welcoming. Her grandmother Lillian (Donna Mills) put her to work as a maid at the Cutlers’ hotel, Clara Jean pinned a theft on her, and her birth parents Randolph (Jason Cermak) and Laura Jean (Miranda Frigon) refused to do anything about Lillian’s cruelty (which included forcing Dawn to go by her birth name Eugenia and subjecting the teen to an invasive strip search) because the Cutler matriarch always got her way. Oh, and her brother Philip disregarded their familial relations and made repeated sexual advances — and an attempted assault — despite her pleas for him to stop.
Dawn eventually reunited with her brother Jimmy Longchamp (Firefly Lane’s Khobe Clarke), who revealed he’d been looking at her differently since finding out they weren’t really related. Their dynamic quickly shifted from brother-sister to romantic interests, a drastic change that Bassinger reveals irked both actors initially.
“We had filmed scenes as brother and sister, so that’s where our relationship and friendship was,” Bassinger tells TVLine. “Filming those scenes [where Jimmy and Dawn declare their romantic love], it was kind of uncomfortable. Khobe has a sister in real life, and I have a brother in real life, and we were like, ‘This just icks me out,’”
But after conversing with her co-star about the circumstances of the situation — the trauma both characters experienced together — Bassinger says they had a better understanding of where Dawn and Jimmy were coming from. “There is this trauma bonding that they’ve experienced,” she explains. “They’re the last people that they feel like they have in this world.”
In exploring that, Bassinger “found a justification of the relationship and why it would transition into that,” and it was “smooth sailing from there.”
The hour ended with Dawn uncovering a deep family secret: Randolph wasn’t Dawn’s birth father, and Lillian orchestrated her kidnapping.
She used that incriminating information to bribe Lillian into freeing Ormand from jail and sending her to New York City in the fall to train as a singer, and to finally start being called Dawn instead of Eugenia.
What did you think of the VC Andrews’ Dawn premiere? Did you anticipate that ending twist? Grade the episode below, and then share your thoughts in the comments.
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